Bark Bark Woof Woof: December 2007

Showing newest 37 of 118 posts from December 2007. Show older posts

Showing newest 37 of 118 posts from December 2007. Show older posts

Monday, December 31, 2007

Same Auld Lang Syne

I'm going out tonight -- as the designated driver -- so I probably won't be here when the ball drops in Times Square. So from all of us here at Bark Bark Woof Woof (that would be me) to all of you, Happy New Year. Be safe, drive carefully, and call a cab if you get farshickered.

I'll leave you tonight with this recollection of the music of Dan Fogelberg and wish you all good memories of auld lang syne.

Looking Back / Looking Forward

This has become an annual tradition here; looking back at the predictions I made a year ago:

- George W. Bush will still be president. He'll still be staying the bloody course, and he'll be defensive, antagonistic, and petulant towards Congress. There will be a flurry of investigations, court fights over subpoenas, hearings on TV, expressions of outrage and high dudgeon from both sides as accusations of "partisanship" and "non-cooperation" are traded back and forth. The Democrats will try hard to make their mark as the Do-Something 110th Congress and will have their fair share of grandstanding and stupid mistakes from their own members.

Wow, nailed that one, although I have to say it was pretty easy; the past fortells the future.

- The Democrats will be down to three serious contenders for the upcoming Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Second tiers will be Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Joe Biden, and someone we've never thought of who will catch fire briefly over the summer and get some face time on TV. Dennis Kucinich becomes this year's Gary Bauer; no one at the national level will take him seriously, but he has a dedicated core of supporters who will keep chanting his name.

- The Republicans will still be scrambling to find someone who is both right wing enough to satisfy the Talibangelistas, moderate enough to get votes in places where the Democrats have now got a foothold, and not be a holdover from the current administration. I haven't a clue as to who that will be...and neither do they.

Got that one right, too, except for Wes Clark, and "catch fire" candidates seemed to come from the GOP this time around; e.g. Fred Thompson. As for the candidate with the "dedicated core of supporters," that honor goes to Ron Paul, who can raise money and take over blog threads like nobody's business but can't get over 3% in the national polls.

- Iraq: same shit, different year. As far as the administration is concerned, the ISG will go the way of the 9/11 commission; thanks for everything, now please go away. There will be more deaths, more outrages, and yet no one can offer anything more than just more of the same, and it's looking more and more like 1969 all over again in terms of the anti-war movement: it's not just for peaceniks anymore.

More's the pity that I got this one right, too. The surge may be working, and I'm in favor of anything that could bring stability back to the country that we fucked over, but still 2007 was the bloodiest year in American losses since the war began and that makes whatever political advantage a presidential candidate of either party may take away seem craven. And the American electorate has made it very clear that they want the war to end; their disgust with Congress has more to do with their worrying about nasty campaigning than not getting the troops home.

- I have no idea what trendy new things and buzzwords will pop up and who will gain their immortality for fifteen minutes. As someone once said, "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." Prepare to be amazed.

Paris Hilton (still), Sanjaya, "w00t," iPhone, "bacon" (as opposed to spam), "wide stance," dead Anna Nichole, etc. etc. I wasn't really amazed unless you count thinking that some things really don't change, including our obsession with the trivial, and that never ceases to amaze.

- At least one anniversary of note is coming up in 2007: the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles. There are very few cultural icons that came along in my lifetime that actually changed the way we look at music. That's one of them.

Tom Brokaw is already all over celebrating the 40th anniversary of 1968, which I will remember for a lot of different reasons, and which I will be sure to cover in the coming year.

- I do predict I'll make it through another year without getting a BlackBerry. I hope.

Yep, made it. Whew.

- Personal predictions: I'll keep writing, both as a blogger and as a novelist and playwright. That's all I can promise on that score. My job will continue to be a source of satisfaction on both a personal and professional level because I have really good people to work with. We'll have our moments of Bob-level rants, but that's what makes it interesting. The Pontiac will slowly be restored and by this time next year it might even have a new paint job. The Inge Festival in April will be great, so will the shows at Stratford in August, and there might even be a production of something I wrote by the time December 31, 2007 rolls around.

The blogging abides, including joining several other blogs as a contributor; The Reaction, Pax Americana, and Shakesville. I'm grateful for the opportunity to write for these august bodies and regretful that I don't get over to them as often as I would like. As for my job, there have been some changes there, with people I deeply care about moving on to new positions (but still within a phone call or a pop-in to say hi), and new friends at the office who have made working with them a pleasure, especially since they appreciate my sense of humor. The Pontiac still runs and is well-tended to, but nothing new done except a good cleaning and a battery-monitor added to keep it charged. The William Inge Festival was great, and this year will be even better when we honor Christopher Durang. I've already got my tickets for Stratford in August, including Christopher Plummer in Caesar and Cleopatra. As for my hope that there will be a full-stage production of one of my plays, I missed that by a little more than three weeks.

Okay, let's move on to my predictions for 2008:

- A Democrat will be elected president and the Democrats will increase their numbers in the House and Senate. Yeah, that's an easy one; the trick is, which Democrat and by how many seats? If Hillary Clinton is the nominee (and the Iowa caucuses are three days away), then it will be a close race against whomever the GOP finally lands on and the shitstorm of negative, childish and outrageous campaigning from them will make everyone reel in disgust. If it's not Hillary Clinton, the shitstorm of negative, childish and outrageous campaigning from them will make everyone reel in disgust. Which means that the GOP will go ballistic on anyone, even if they choose to nominate someone who isn't a cross-dressing thrice-married adulterer, a sluggish and thuggish good ole boy from Tennessee by way of Law & Order and Curly Sue, a flip-flopping automaton with magic underwear and a rather odd way of packing a station wagon, a war hero who thinks being a maverick is sucking up to the current administration, or a folksy former governor from Arkansas who sells himself as a "Christian leader" and lumps gays in with pedophiles as "aberrant."

So it's time to go out on a limb here and predict that it will be President-elect Hillary Clinton when I write this piece a year from today, with a strong majority in the House, ten more Democratic senators, and a whole new cottage industry of right-wing nutsery in full bloom. George W. Bush will retire to Crawford to watch someone else clear his brush. He will grant interviews to fawning sycophants from Newsweek and Time and portray himself as the next LBJ without the charm.

- We won't be any closer to getting out of Iraq, and at 12:01 on January 21, 2009, it will become the Democrats' war.

- We will continue our obsession with the trivial. Several more white women will disappear and get coverage on Larry King Live, while no one will notice when it happens to countless other people who aren't beautiful or packing diapers in the back seat. More and more politicians will be caught with their pants down, literally and figuratively because they are human; the fun stuff is when it happens to people who have made a living demonizing those whose practice they are emulating.

- A lot of famous people will die and there will be nostalgic memorials to them, and a lot of not-so-famous people will also leave us and touch us personally. The trick is to appreciate them while they're still here. I'm happy to report that my immediate family is well and healthy, but I know that my close friends have lost those near to them. They will never be remembered in the New York Times, but that doesn't lessen the grief or diminish their worth and the joy they brought to us.

- Personal predictions: I'll finish Small Town Boys, and I'll actually get to work on the restoration of my Pontiac station wagon. These are repeats from two years ago, but I'm really determined to get both done this year. Small Town Boys is on Chapter 49, and I might have enough saved up to actually get to work on the Pontiac, which will celebrate its 20th birthday in February.

- One year from now I'll write a post just like this one, look back at this one, and think, "Gee, that was dumb." Or not.

The Grand Canyon

If anyone says there's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, take a look at this chart and see for yourself the cavernous difference between the candidates on every issue, from health care to abortion to immigration to Iraq.

As Paul Krugman notes,

On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment. That’s understandable: the public hates the war, and public opinion seems to be running in a progressive direction.

What seems harder to understand is what’s happening on the other side — the degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I’m not just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The G.O.P. candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies.

Why would politicians support Bushonomics? After all, the public is very unhappy with the state of the economy, for good reason. The “Bush boom,” such as it was, bypassed most Americans — median family income, adjusted for inflation, has stagnated in the Bush years, and so have the real earnings of the typical worker. Meanwhile, insecurity has increased, with a declining fraction of Americans receiving health insurance from their employers.

And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches. For a few years, the economy was at least creating jobs at a respectable pace — but as the housing slump and the associated credit crunch accelerate and spill over to the rest of the economy, most analysts expect employment to weaken, too.

All in all, it’s an economic and political environment in which you’d expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration’s economic policies and record — say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net.

In other words, the Republicans are basically saying, "I'm not George W. Bush, but I stand by everything he's done and stands for." If that isn't an invitation to a massive slaughter at the polls next November, I can't imagine one worse, unless, of course, Mitt Romney gets caught with a live boy in his bed. (Heck, given his flip-flopping on every issue, that wouldn't be a surprise. It would gross me out, yes, but not surprise me.) On every issue that the Bush administration has espoused -- tax cuts increase revenue, private health care is better than the alternative (we'll always have emergency rooms), invading a country spreads freedom, a women's uterus belongs to the state, education is all about standardized tests, and the Constitution means exactly what the vice president and the unitary executive say it means -- they have not only gotten it exactly wrong, but they have done it so spectacularly wrong at every move that one hundred years from know, historians will look back on this decade and wonder what exactly led us down this path.

The Republican field, to a man, acts as if the past seven years has not happened. They are all running as if they have all gone through some temporal distortion and it is December 1999 (I'm surprised that Fred Thompson hasn't put out position paper on how to deal with Y2K). They're gearing up to run against the Clinton administration, and proposing the exact same shit that George W. Bush came up with. To be fair, they are hoping to run against the Clinton administration in the person of Hillary Clinton, but compared to the Bush administration, those eight years of towering economic growth, budget surpluses, a responsive infrastructure (vide FEMA under James Lee Witt vs. Brownie), and a cogent foreign policy where our allies could be counted on more than just one digit were pretty damn good. If the cost of that was Bill Clinton getting a blow job in the Oval Office and watching the Republicans make complete fools of themselves with their pompous outrage and hypocrisy, I say it was worth it.

What is perhaps the most perplexing element is that the Republicans are seemingly unaware of the fact that the majority of the country has moved to the left of not just them but even some in the Democratic Party. Many of the people who say they won't vote for Hillary Clinton are doing it based on her record of supporting moderate stances and her votes in favor of the war with Iraq. The majority of Americans are more in line with the views of those candidates like Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich who want the troops out of Iraq immediately, and many are more in favor of the universal health care plan as espoused by John Edwards than the compromise private/public smörgåsbord proposed by Hillary Clinton. As for issues such as abortion, gay rights, and immigration, the majority of Americans in both parties are far more aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans. Yet the GOP tromps on, alienating as many people as possible -- including women, gays, and Hispanics -- all so that they can somehow "rescue" America from the morass that their party cheerfully led us into under the delusion of "compassionate conservatism" and neocon wet dreams of world domination.

It would be nice to imagine that there would be a candidate or a platform that could somehow unite the two parties...assuming that they share the common goal of doing what's best for the nation and not for their party. Mr. Krugman does not hold out much hope.

There’s a fantasy, widely held inside the Beltway, that men and women of good will from both parties can be brought together to hammer out bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems.

If such a thing were possible, Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani — a self-proclaimed maverick, the former governor of a liberal state and the former mayor of an equally liberal city — would seem like the kind of men Democrats could deal with. (O.K., maybe not Mr. Giuliani.) In fact, however, it’s not possible, not given the nature of today’s Republican Party, which has turned men like Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney into hard-line ideologues. On economics, and on much else, there is no common ground between the parties.

And when one of the parties refuses to even acknowledge that they might be a tad responsible for the great divide, I don't hold out much hope, either.

Obsessed

Gov. Mike Huckabee made a substantial donation to the cultural stereotype that being gay is all about sex and nothing else. Watch his explanation of the difference between being born gay and choosing to "behave" gay -- that is, have sex.

Notice that he made a fervent effort to differentiate between gay sex and the kinky stuff like S & M and necrophilia, but he still made the distinction between gay sex and the "traditional" sex life of a straight couple.

This would be the point where I would insert the comment that I know a lot of straight couples who engage in what Mr. Huckabee might consider to be "aberrant" sexual behavior, but the truth is that I don't. I have no idea about the sex life of my married straight friends, and the instrument has yet to be invented that could measure my indifference in finding out what it is like. Unlike a lot of people in the Religious Reich and groups like Focus on the Family, I look at two people in a relationship and see two people and I don't let some fervent imagining of what they do in the privacy of their bedroom (or wherever) overwhelm me.

He closes with the comment that "how we behave and how we carry out that behavior" is more important. I couldn't agree more, and him behaving like an ignorant tight-ass obsessed with the sex lives of other people tells us a great deal about him.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Sunday Reading

- Fits and Starts in the Arts in Miami: How the new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts is doing so far.

In the decades it took to conceive and build the new performing arts center here, one term became something of a mantra among the project’s boosters: world-class.

If Miami ever hoped to elevate itself into the ranks of the world’s great cities, they would say, it had to have a world-class complex for the performing arts.

Now beginning its second year, the $461 million complex, known as the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, is in administrative upheaval and struggling financially. Its supporters are grappling with the cold truth that if it is going to become a cornerstone of a world-class Miami, both the city and the center have a long way to go.

For the legions of doubters and detractors in Miami, Carnival’s early stumbles confirmed their long-held view that the project was built too big and too soon, and without enough certainty that the city could even support such an ambitious venture. They say the center is yet another case of Miami’s overreaching in a desperate bid to be taken seriously.

“Miami is a land of speculation,” said Mary Luft, founder and executive director of Tigertail Productions, a performing arts production company. “They want it big, they want it fast, they want it now. And they got it!”

Alan Farago, a prominent civic activist, calls the center, owned by Dade County, “a total misappropriation of money,” given the pressing social demands of the city, which has one of the highest poverty rates of any major city in the country.

“It’s a building inappropriate to the scale and need of the place,” said Mr. Farago, who in his blog, Eye on Miami (eyeonmiami.blogspot.com), has called the building the “Carnivorous Center for the Performing Arts.”

“It reflects this patina that the city fathers hope will catapult the city into some kind of glorious future,” he said.

The center’s supporters and executives acknowledge the enormous task before them. Ricky Arriola, recently named chairman of the board that oversees the county-owned center, suggested in an interview this month that nothing less than the integrity and reputation of the city was riding on the center’s performance.

“People have been very hard on the Carnival Center, and for good reason,” he said. “This county has a reputation for lots of fumbles, scandal, projects gone awry.”

“Everybody is holding their breath and saying, ‘Is this going to be another screw-up?’” he added. “The answer is no.”

The last several weeks have been particularly tumultuous for the center. It ended its first year, in October, with a $2.5 million operating deficit, in large part because of lackluster ticket sales.

In a five-day period from late October to early November, the board fired the center’s president and chief executive, Michael C. Hardy, and forced the resignation of the programming director, Justin Macdonnell. It brought in an interim chief, Lawrence J. Wilker, a former president of the Kennedy Center in Washington, to right the ship.

The center was designed by Cesar Pelli and financed mostly with public funds supplemented by private donations. (It is named for Carnival Cruise Lines, which donated $20 million to the project.) It consists of two buildings in downtown Miami that straddle Biscayne Boulevard near Biscayne Bay; they accommodate a 2,400-seat opera house, a 2,200-seat concert hall and a 200-seat black-box theater. At its inception, the center was promoted as a way to help revitalize the city’s core, an area so decrepit that few people would venture there unless they were driving through it at high speed.

But when the center opened in October 2006, it was already in something of a public relations and financial hole.

It opened years behind schedule and about $100 million over its budget at groundbreaking in 2001. The center was also built with no parking, forcing audiences to park in grim city lots, sometimes several blocks away, and walk to the center.

Some artists and cultural groups complained that money for the center could have been channeled into existing organizations and performing arts companies in desperate need. During construction, the Florida Philharmonic, which was to become the center’s resident orchestra, declared bankruptcy and folded.

The project also began to tax the patience of the Miami-Dade County Commission, which was asked time and again to approve new budget allocations to sustain it. In August, during a commission debate regarding a possible raise for Mr. Hardy, Commissioner Javier D. Souto said, “I would raise the salary 50 cents so they can drink some coffee and wake up to how people feel about” the performing arts center. He added: “If there’s a vote today in Miami-Dade County, this thing wouldn’t pass.”

I work in the neighborhood where the Carnival Center was built, and the area is undergoing rapid gentrification; the little cafes and shops are opening, but it really is like everyone is holding their breath to see what happens with the arts center. The towering condos going up around it were all built on spec and now there are lawsuits being filed by the people who bought units and now want to back out. Big talk of big stores and chi-chi restaurants have yet to turn into real estate, and a lot of people who work in the area are wondering if they may soon be witness to the creation of a very fancy architectural monument to instant urban blight. I hope they're wrong.

- The Queen Abides: The Toledo Blade pays tribute to the monarch who has endured and made it to the YouTube generation.

In Britain on Christmas Day, after the last of the plum pudding has been consumed and the guests have pulled their crackers to find paper crowns (crackers are tubes of cardboard and colored paper that come apart with a bang to reveal hats, trinkets, and jokes within), dinner ends on a traditional note that has no equal in the American republic.

Family and friends gather around a TV to watch Queen Elizabeth II deliver her traditional Christmas message to Britain and the commonwealth of nations. She rarely says anything controversial. Back in 1992, she did admit to having had a bad year, an "annus horribilis," but most years hers are simply reassuring words spoken in a refined accent that most of her subjects do not themselves share (well, it is the Queen's English; she can speak it however she wants).

This sense of comforting permanence, another visible proof that "there'll always be an England," in the words of a beloved English song, owes much to the enduring presence and character of the queen herself, who is now 81. Her longevity is remarkable. Just a few days before, she had become Britain's oldest monarch, surpassing the mark set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

This was the 50th year of her televised broadcast, but 25 years before that King George V began the tradition of a Christmas address with a radio message to his subjects. As much as the monarchy is the epitome of tradition, the same queen who in 1957 embraced television this year gave the Internet generation a chance to hear her address on YouTube as well as on TV.

You don't have to be British to say "God save the queen." Through good years and bad, she has been a much-loved figure with a special gift for staying relevant in changing times.

- The Lives They Lived: The New York Times magazine's annual tribute to those we lost this year, including a fellow blogger and one-time member of the Liberal Coalition, Steve Gilliard.

Welcome to the 14th annual Lives They Lived issue. On the last Sunday of each year, we fill these pages with stories of all kinds of people who have died during the last 12 months. It is a daunting task: this newspaper alone published more than 1,000 obituaries, and those only touch on the vast number of notable deaths. In putting together this issue, we shy away from any attempt at being definitive; instead we embrace idiosyncrasy, storytelling and the interests and passions of our editors and writers. This year brought the deaths of many giants of politics and culture, from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to Luciano Pavarotti, from Brooke Astor to Ike Turner, from Lady Bird Johnson to Jack Valenti. But we present some of the lesser-known lives: Harry Dent, who quietly consolidated the South for the Republican Party; Andrée de Jongh, who, at 24, courageously escorted more than 100 soldiers and civilians out of Nazi-occupied Belgium to safety; Gloria Connors, who taught her son Jimmy how to be an unrelenting champion; Ernest Withers, who, as a black photographer, was able to document the civil rights movement from inside. Their stories and those of the two dozen others presented here create a collage of lives well lived.

- Short Takes:

- The New York Times explains its hiring of William Kristol.

- Fred Thompson really doesn't care if he's elected president.

- The latest McClatchy poll has John Edwards surging and Mike Huckabee fading in Iowa.

- Is Ron Paul the new Willie Stark?

- The New England Patriots may be 16-0, but they haven't won the playoffs and the Super Bowl, so the 1972 Miami Dolphins still rule.

- Doonesbury: Christmas in Berzerkistan.

- Opus: Reading By the Light.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

A Little Request

Jon Swift asked for, and received, what I thought was, in my humble opinion (and that of some others), my best post of 2007. However, there have been suggestions by some others that I did some other good writing this year and suggested that I list those as well.

But before I do that, I'd like to ask you, dear reader, to take a little time and browse through the archives of 2007 and make your own nominations. I'm not asking for an ego-boost; I have my own idea of what was some of my best work, but I'd like to see what you think was worth mentioning. I'm pretty sure it will be eye-opening both for you and me to see what you think.

The archives are at the very bottom of the sidebar on the left under the Disclaimer and Copyright Notice, listed in chronological order. And please don't feel you have to read every post; I wrote them and even I don't do that. If there's one that sticks out in your mind but you can't place it in time, give me as full a recollection as you can and I'll try to find it either by label or date.

I'm hoping to come up with a sort of BBWW list of the good stuff by New Year's, but if it takes a little longer, I don't mind.

Thanks, and have fun strolling down Memory Lane.

Cracked Kristol

According to the Huffington Post, Billy Kristol will become a New York Times op-ed columnist in 2008. That's great; I really loved him in City Slickers, and he should be a good source of insight into the film and stand-up comic life in New York.

Oh, wait. Wrong Billy Kristol. This is the warmongering neocon who never saw a country we couldn't liberate with graft, corruption, corporate greed, and the 82nd Airborne, and who does weekend duty as the Serious Analyst for Fox News Sunday.

I'm guessing that the Times editorial board decided that David Brooks and Thomas Friedman weren't holding their own against the onslaught of Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, and probably as a sop to the whiny righties who proclaim that the Grey Lady hasn't been truly objective about the Bush administration since they fired Judith Miller.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Only From The New Yorker

The year in Newsbreaks, the little stories that fill in the bottom of the page and make reading the magazine that much more enjoyable.

Clay turds for toddlers, gardening and debauchery, and more discoveries in newspapers large and small.

Here's one of my favorites:

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT

From the Key West Citizen.

A busy store at 425 Front Street is seeking honest, responsible, reliable & ambitious employees for part-time & full time positions. Good salary with advancement opportunities for the right person. Job duties include retail sales, stocking & cleaning. Previous sales experience, with register responsibilities, preferred. Spanish as a 2nd language is a plus. References will be verified. If you get drunk, do drugs, call in sick or just plain don’t show up for work don’t bother applying; you probably have already worked here.

Peggy Noonan Is An Idiot

Wow, there's a news flash. Glenn Greenwald has the details.

In her Wall St. Journal column today, Peggy Noonan offers up a Santa-like checklist of which presidential candidates are "reasonable" and which ones aren't. In describing the attributes that Americans want in a President, she says: "I claim here to speak for thousands, millions." On behalf of the throngs for whom she fantasizes she speaks, Noonan proclaims: "We are grown-ups ... We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it."

This grown-up then proceeds to pronounce that Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson and Duncan Hunter are all "reasonable" -- as are Biden, Dodd, Richardson and Obama (though too young and inexperienced to be President) -- but this is what she says about John Edwards:
John Edwards is not reasonable.....[W]e can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't.
[...]

John Edwards, however, is disqualified, because four years ago, he was caught red-handed brushing his hair before a television appearance -- "poofing," in Noonan's words, which isn't really a word at all, but rather, a British epithet for a male homosexual -- "Slang: Disparaging and Offensive" -- a synonym for "faggot." Noonan is making the same point Ann Coulter made: Edwards can't possibly be President because he's a faggot. And to make her "grown-up" case for this, she cites one of our national media's most talked-about political stories of both 2004 and again in 2007: Edwards' brushing of his hair.

What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them -- endlessly impressed by her own sophistication, maturity and insight while drooling out platitudes one never hears except in seventh-grade cafeterias and on our political talk shows. As always, this isn't worth noting because the adolescent stupidity on display here is unique to Noonan, but precisely because it isn't. This is how our national elections are decided: by people like her, spewing things like this.

What gets me is that after seven years of the Bush administration, Ms. Noonan can seriously complain about a lack of "grown-ups" in the political spectrum. Is she truly incapable of seeing the irony in that kind of statement? And we're not just talking about appearances and shallow surface details here; we're talking about an administration that raised adolescent petulance and schoolyard bullying to a global dimension. She begs for mature leadership and she's calling John Edwards a faggot. Zoinks.

Friday Blogaround

The last Liberal Coalition blogaround of the year.

- A Blog Around The Clock: victory for open access!
- archy defends his post on science and conservatism.
- Bark Bark Woof Woof on Mitt Romney and tyranny.
- Bloggg mourns Oscar Peterson.
- Collective Sigh on some true giving.
- Dohiyi Mir: the Pack expands.
- Echidne Of The Snakes on Benazir Bhutto.
- Iddybud Journal: It's still the Christmas season.
- Left Is Right: among other things, some interesting stuff buried in computer code.
- Lefty Side of the Dial: the countdown continues.
- Liberty Street: getting screwed on health care.
- Musing's musings recounts the holiday with a friend and a spectre of the past.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web: find out what a matroyshka is.
- Rook's Rant borrows from a friend.
- rubber hose: got a map of Egypt?
- Scrutiny Hooligans has boots on the ground in New Hampshire for John Edwards
- SoonerThought on fair taxation.
- Speedkill with parting thoughts before vacation.
- Steve Bates, The Yellow Doggerel Democrat with pictures.
- Stupid Enough Unexplanation on who started the war on Christmas.
- T. Rex's Guide to Life continues the series on the nutsery of Ron Paul.
- The Invisible Library follows T. Rex with the blimp.
- WTF Is It Now?? on the Bush legacy.
- ...You Are A Tree: seasoned greetings.

Fear not: the blogaround will be back next year.

Friday Catblogging Classic

Trying to clean up after the holidays...

Boxing Day was Wednesday, Snowball.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Oh Shut Up

Benazir Bhutto hasn't been dead twelve hours and we're already getting this crap:

Obama Adviser: Bhutto Assassination Reminds Us That Hillary Made Wrong Call On Iraq War

REPORTER: But looking ahead, does the assassination put on the front burner foreign policy credentials in the closing days?

AXELROD: Well, it puts on the table foreign policy judgment, and that's a discussion we welcome. Barack Obama had the judgment to oppose the war in Iraq, and he warned at the time it would divert us from Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and now we see the effect of that. Al Qaeda's resurgent, they're a powerful force now in Pakistan, they may have been involved -- we've been here, so I don't know whether the news has been updated, but there's a suspicion they may have been involved in this.

I think his judgment was good. Senator Clinton made a different judgment, so let's have that discussion.

Honestly, sometimes people just don't know when to STFU.

A Good Swift Read

Jon Swift has compiled the best list of best postings chosen by the best bloggers of every stripe; liberal, conservative, and in-between. (Did I mention that Bark Bark Woof Woof is included?)

Kudos to Jon for this yeoman effort. It was truly an honor to asked to be included with this list.

A Day at the Beach

When I write my plays or novels, I often write about places I’ve never actually seen, but I have this knack for imagining a place and then finding it. It's happened in several other instances. I chalk that up to subliminal suggestion...or just writer's luck.

Marathon Key, half-way between Key Largo and Key West, is where I imagined the action of Can't Live Without You takes place (with some modifications for the purposes of dramatization), and I've been to Marathon any number of times (including one rather memorable snorkeling/camping trip when I was in college, but that's another story) but I had actually never seen parts of the island. So I went to Sombrero Beach, and wouldn't you know, it looks exactly like the beach that I visualized for the play, and I even found a house that looks exactly like the place where Donny and Anna live. As promised, here are some pictures of the beach. For those of you who are in the northern climes and shivering in the cold, take this as an elixir against the chill, and don't hate me that I can drive there in two hours...with the top down.

Benazir Bhutto, Sarajevo, and Bobby Kennedy

I was driving back from the Keys just before noon when I heard the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Two thoughts immediately came to mind: Sarajevo and Bobby Kennedy.

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated as he and his wife rode through the city of Sarajevo. Long-simmering intransigence and tension between crumbling monarchies bubbled to the surface. The death of the archduke and his wife became the excuse for ultimatums between nations, and less than two months later, to the beginning of World War I.

And Bobby Kennedy came to mind because Benazir Bhutto represented a chance for change and a new direction in Pakistan, and in the eyes of many in that tortured nation, she could not be allowed to continue.

What I am afraid of most with the death of Ms. Bhutto, aside from the devastating loss this is to her family, her country and the hopes for a new direction, is that too many people will see it as an excuse for the re-imposition of martial law against the wrong people -- after all, it isn't the people who backed Ms. Bhutto who know where Al-Qaida is -- and it will be seen by some people in this country as an excuse to exert more of our neocon will on a nation and a region that most assuredly does not need our interference. There are any number of Ms. Bhutto's supporters in Pakistan and elsewhere who will blame this on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and, by proxy, the Bush administration.

For the sake of that nation, and ours, I sure hope that they are wrong.

Research

Since Can't Live Without You takes place in the Florida Keys, I'm sure the director and the actors in the upcoming production will have some questions as to what life it really like down there. Well, someone's gotta take a hit for the team, so I am bravely volunteering to go down there and take a look.

I've packed up the bug spray, the sunscreen, the shades, and my camera to do some hard-core research on the life and times of a loafer in Key Largo and beyond.

Don't worry; I'll bring back pictures.

Hitting on Hillary

Has the media been toughest on Hillary Clinton, as her husband has claimed? Well, yeah, pretty much. Per The Horses Mouth:

The Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., took a look at 481 news stories on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX from October 1 through December 15, 2007. It concluded that the media hits Hillary the hardest:
TV election news has been hardest on Hillary Clinton this fall, while Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have been the biggest media favorites, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University...

On-air evaluations of Hillary Clinton were nearly 3 to 2 negative (42% positive vs. 58% negative comments), while evaluations of her closest competitor Barack Obama was better than 3 to 2 positive (61% positive vs. 39% negative). John Edwards attracted much less coverage, but his evaluations were 2 to 1 positive (67% positive vs. 33% negative). Sen. Clinton was evaluated more often than all her Democratic opponents combined.
[...]

Obviously one needs to be cautious about reaching overall conclusions based on this sort of stuff. The pool of news orgs and the time period selected here both feel somewhat arbitrary and are of course tiny compared to the overall roar of campaign coverage. The designation of stories as "positive" or "negative" doesn't feel all that scientific, either. What's more, Bill obviously has his own political reasons for making these criticisms at this particular moment.

Still, there's at least a bit of statistical evidence here that Bill's claims aren't all that wild-eyed after all and just may have at least some basis in reality.

What's interesting is that in spite of these stories, Sen. Clinton is still strong in the polls in both Iowa and nationally (depending, of course, on which poll you read). Either the electorate has already got the media's number on the hit jobs, or they're not paying that much attention. I suspect it's a bit of both.

Good Reading

The reviews are coming in on Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism, or Projectile Vomiting from a Right-Wing Hack. The bulk of them, even from some on the right, are derisive. (The notable exception is from Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve who claims that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to whites. What a shock.)

But perhaps the best review comes from the inimitable James Wolcott, who proclaims,

...Liberal Fascism is such a transparently sloppy, shifty, intellectually rinky-dink endeavor that a show of anger would be a larger expenditure of emotion than a book this second-rate deserves.

Who says true wit is dead?

Of course, there's a blog about the book.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Quiet Day

If you have to go back to work today, my guess is that it will be a quiet day...unless you work in retail, where predictions are that it will be a fairly busy time with returns (when you say, "Oh, you shouldn't have!" and you really mean it) or exchanges ("Sorry, I'm not sure mauve is on my color wheel") or getting all those things you didn't get for Christmas or cashing in the gift cards. If you're in Canada, Great Britain, or certain parts of the Commonwealth, it's Boxing Day, so, uh, happy boxing.

I can report that I spent a lovely Christmas dinner with friends and had good times trying new things, including an aptly-named English cheese called "The Stinking Bishop." One whiff and you know why it was called that, but it actually tasted very good. Bob made a magnificent standing rib roast and mashed potatoes, and some of the other guests, who were Jewish and were participating in their first Christmas dinner, brought green beans and a sweet kugel, which must now be considered as an integral part of any Christmas dinner. I brought a homemade cheesecake that had been made by a friend of mine and a bottle of excellent Spanish wine.

We shared gifts, stories, jokes, bad puns, and family traditions. It was a real Christmas dinner and a quiet celebration of the things that bring friends and families together. Mr. Dickens would have been proud.

This will be a quiet day here. I'm baking the biscuits from the mix my sister sent me (yum!) served with bacon that came with it, and then I'll be tidying up and doing some work on Small Town Boys. Oh, and writing thank-you notes. Mom taught me well.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Merry Christmas

From my house to yours.

Let there be peace on earth,
And let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth,
The peace that was meant to be.

Christmas Fun and Games

From the Chicago Tribune:

- So you think you know Christmas carols? Take this quiz.

I got 21 out of 25.

---

- I'm a big fan of Inside the Actor's Studio, so here are the questions James Lipton asks of his guests on the show, inspired by the French interviewer Bernard Pivot.

1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on?
4. What turns you off?
5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

My answers are in the comments.

Monday, December 24, 2007

On This Date

December 24, 2001: I was spending Christmas Eve with my parents at the Flamingo Lodge in Everglades National Park. I was on Christmas break from my teaching job and we were spending a few days in the park doing some birding and exploration before heading to Naples and the western shore of Florida to see some relatives. On the drive down from Miami, which took about two hours, I was thinking about an idea I'd been turning over in my head for a play about a writer who lived in the Keys and was suffering from writer's block. By the time we got settled into our rooms I had figured out the story, and between the time we arrived and we went to dinner I had written most of the first scene, and I even had the title. Over the next few days, between the boat rides through the Everglades, the tour of Shark Valley, and the weekend in Naples, I had the first act finished. After New Years and returning to teaching and directing, I spent weekends on it, and by spring break in March, I finished it.

And next month it opens off Broadway at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.

Happy Birthday, Can't Live Without You.

Hot Holiday Snack

It may come as a surprise to some people, but I actually can cook, and I have been known to do so. And while I'm no Paul Prudhomme or Wolfgang Puck, the state has not required that I register my stove as a lethal weapon, either. When my ex and I were together we loved to come up with things for Christmas, especially things that you wouldn't necessarily think are Christmas-y. Since he was a professionally-trained cook, AJP would make the complicated stuff while I would do the simple things. I especially like hot stuff, like New Mexico posolé and chiles rellenos with "Christmas" chile sauce, so named because it's an even mix of red and green. ("Red or green?" is the official State Question of New Mexico. I'm not kidding.)

Here's a recipe for something I loved to make at Christmas, but it's good any time of the year. It's called "The Devil's Own Peanuts" from the Fancy Pantry.

- 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
- 2 cloves garlic (peeled & sliced)
- 1 tsp salt (more for sprinkling if desired)
- 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1/4 tsp ground cumin
- 1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
- 2 dashes Tabasco sauce (optional & depending on taste)
- 2 egg whites
- 1 jar (16.5 ounces, about 3 cups) dry-roasted UNSALTED peanuts (or substitute unsalted nuts of your choice)

Combine first 8 ingredients (all but egg whites & nuts) in blender and blend until garlic is pureed. Add egg whites and run just until the ingredients are blended. Place nuts in a bowl and pour mixture over them. Let the nuts stand for 30 to 60 minutes stirring several times. Preheat oven to 250F and put nuts into colander set over a bowl to drain and reserve the liquid. Divide the nuts onto 2 baking sheets that have been lightly oiled or sprayed with non-stick cooking spray (Pam). Bake nuts on 2 shelves until they have dried slightly (about 10 minutes). Stir the nuts to break up any clumps and drizzle reserved liquid over them. Stir well and spread evenly again. Return nuts to oven, exchanging shelf positions, and bake until glaze is dry (about 15 minutes). Turn off oven and leave the nuts in it with the door ajar until nuts have cooled.

Baking times may need to be extended slightly to compensate for humidity and altitude.

I always end up making a much larger batch because I cannot stop eating them.

In Full Bloom

Last week I showed you my Vanda orchid as it was starting to bloom. Well, it's in full bloom now. Enjoy.

It looks like my Phalaenopsis is getting ready to bloom. When it does, I'll have pictures.

Mitt Romney and Tyranny

Mitt Romney does not believe that a president is subject to any serious legal constraints on his executive powers to do whatever the hell he wants.

That's the conclusion of Glenn Greenwald and a host of other legal scholars based on a questionnaire submitted to all the presidential candidates.

Significantly, if not surprisingly, all of the candidates who did respond, with the exception of Romney, repudiated most of the key doctrines of the Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo theories of executive omnipotence, at least for purposes of this questionnaire.

[...]

But by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.

Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or (b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the same thing.

Just go and read what he wrote. It's extraordinary. Other than his cursory and quite creepy concession that U.S. citizens detained by the President are entitled to "at least some type of habeas corpus relief" -- whatever "some type" might mean (Question 5) -- Romney does not recognize a single limit on presidential power. Not one.

I'm not sure which I find more disturbing; the fact that Gov. Romney actually believes in this sort of legalistic gandydancing around both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution, especially after the last seven years, or that there are voters out there that find this acceptable. Given his propensity for being able to jump from left to right whenever its politically expedient or remember things that didn't actually happen, it's even more frightening to imagine what he could come up with if he became president.

I realize that there is a powerful temptation to become, as Pink Floyd puts it, comfortably numb in the face of the problems we see in the reality-based community: terrorism, global warming, poverty, crumbling schools, and 50 million people -- many of the children -- without health insurance -- and that many, many Americans would just rather not think about them. It's so easy just to let things happen, let other people worry about it, trust someone else to keep the riff-raff off the streets, chase out the illegal immigrants, and make the trains run on time. We have heard the siren songs of tyranny in this country before, be it from the witch hunts of Salem and HUAC, the populist dictatorship of Huey Long, or the xenophobia of Father Coughlin, and there have been times when the numbness seems to gain the upper hand and the clamorings of the demagogues and the religious zealots or the stumbling syntaxes of a Decider in Chief have tried to lure us into their trap.

But we have always managed to overcome them. We have seen all too often in the history of the world what happens with that mindset, and while we have flirted with the temptations of tyranny, even when it came wrapped in the gauze of national security and patriotism, we have ultimately rejected them. We need to make damn sure that it doesn't happen again... any more than it already has.

Kissing a Toad

The Huckabee campaign reached out to Rush Limbaugh to give obeisance to the one person who, in his own mind, thinks he has the power to make or break the Huckabee campaign.

"I saw his comments and accept them as honest, sincere and genuine," Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail.

Still, the conservative talk show host indicated his continued displeasure at the anonymous remarks Thursday from a Huckabee backer suggesting he takes his cues from the "D.C./Manhattan chattering class" that sparked this conflagration.

"What was somewhat stunning about all this is that NO ONE in the GOP field, including advisers and staff, could possibly misread my 19-plus-year career the way Gov. Huckabee's D.C. supporter did," Limbaugh said. "Whoever said those things was essentially repeating the Democrat mantra of all these years: that I am just an entertainer, not an independent thinker, part of the Wall Street/D.C. axis. If it was someone on Gov. Huckabee's staff or support team, it was just silly, uninformed and thus curious."

Limbaugh, the most listened-to talk show host in America and an influential voice in the conservative constellation, devoted part of his show Friday to defending himself against the charges.

"I'm part of the Cape Girardeau-Middle America axis," Limbaugh said on the program, alluding to his Missouri hometown.

Ironically, Rush was probably sending out the message from his palatial estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

I love the bit where Rush gets all huffy that a lot of people think of him as "just an entertainer, not an independent thinker, part of the Wall Street/D.C. axis." The two are not the same thing, but neither are they mutually exclusive; he's entertaining in the same way it's fun to play with a cat by making it chase a piece of string, and so far his "independent thinking" has been to make fun of the disabled and get his facts so wrong that there are websites out there that actually make a living out of pointing out what he gets wrong. Both can provide hours of fun and enjoyment at his expense.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit if this whole kerfuffle between Rush and the Huckabee campaign was a bit of playacting because Rush is feeling left out; his nemesis, Hillary Clinton, is still strong in the polls, and no matter how much he rails on, nothing is more of a kick in the ego than the realization that you're not as important as you think you are and that people don't take you as seriously as you think they should.

A Weird State

Every state I've lived in has its quirks and oddities, but I think that for its size and weight, Florida is the one that seems to generate the most news in just plain weirdness.

Like Tigger, who is becoming the "Teflon Don" of costumed characters. A few years after beating the rap on a groping charge, Tigger was accused of hitting a boy at Walt Disney World, and the 14-year-old's father turned over video to prove it. Still, investigators decided not to pursue charges.

He wasn't the only celebrity that had a run in with the law. According to a police report, two-time NASCAR Busch Series champion Martin Truex Jr. was urinating on a car when a Volusia County officer asked if the relief was worth a $100 fine. Truex responded, "It is worth 100 bucks" and held out a $100 bill. He was charged with disorderly intoxication.

That's just one of many incidents preceded by drinking.

A doctor carrying a burrito and dressed as Captain America was arrested in Melbourne after grabbing a woman at a bar and fighting with her boyfriend. The mug shot of a 41-year-old woman arrested in Tampa on DUI charges displayed her T-shirt, which read, "I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings."

A 30-year-old Collier County woman was taking driving lessons when she ran over her instructor, who had to be airlifted to a hospital. Her blood-alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.

Largo police responded to a call about a bar disturbance, and when they arrived, a drunk man called 911 and asked a dispatcher for help because he was surrounded by police. "Our officers were standing there scratching their heads," one sergeant said.

It's one of the reasons I really like living here; never a dull moment.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Sunday Reading

- J. Edgar and Habeas Corpus: When he wasn't trying on the latest Christian Dior, the late director of the FBI was planning to round up the usual suspects.

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

- Giving of Themselves: Somewhere it is written that it is better to give than to receive, and a Miami couple takes it to heart.

Early Christmas morning, Marielys Blanco will don her red and white Santa hat, Danis Hernandez will grab the list of addresses, and the couple will take a virtual sleighload of clothes, shoes, toys and meals to two dozen migrant children and their families near Florida City.

Friday, they gave clothing and toys to more than a dozen children in an after-school program in South Miami.

''I'm not a churchgoer,'' Hernandez said. ``I believe in God and prayer, but I believe you should give. My wife shares the same values. We're not materialistic.''

For Hernandez, 38, and Blanco, 33, becoming South Florida Santas has brought great joy to a holiday that once brought only stress.

Each year, they extend their influence, adding more children to their list and enlisting family members, friends -- even their bosses -- to share the joy of giving with them.

''We're just normal people. By no means are we rich,'' Hernandez said. He works in a furniture-company warehouse, spending his days in shorts and a T-shirt, lifting heavy objects. She is a legal secretary. A few years ago, after living in a small South Miami studio, they bought a modest one-floor, single-family home, where they stash the gifts for their volunteer effort in their computer and storage rooms.

It all started six years ago.

''I got home from shopping, and I was really stressed out because I didn't know what to get her and I was mad at what Christmas had become,'' Hernandez said. ``I just threw out an idea: Let's just give money to someone who needs it.''

Instead of buying each other the usual gifts -- a new pair of sneakers or workout clothing (both love to exercise) they gave the money to Toys for Tots.

Two years later, Hernandez saw an Urban Ministries advertisement for volunteers to help deliver Thanksgiving dinners. The two signed up.

''I stumbled on a couple of single moms with kids,'' he said. ``They were needy families living in motel rooms with three kids each.''

He couldn't get the sad images out of his mind.

'So I went to my wife and said, `Let's make this more personal.' I called the women and got shirt and shoe sizes for the kids and we went shopping. We also got some toys.''

Blanco put on her Santa hat, and the couple drove their gifts to the motel. Each family received $150 worth of presents.

''We had more fun that Christmas,'' Hernandez said.

Each year since, the number of children on their gift list has grown.

Last year, they persuaded their families to pitch in. 'We started telling them, `Here, get something for a 7-year-old instead of us,' '' Hernandez said.

This year, the couple's gift rooms began to fill up in July when a buddy gave Hernandez a half-dozen used bicycles.

''I fixed them up, and for $40, they're like new,'' he said.

Blanco and Hernandez took their gift list for 53 children to a Ross Dress for Less store and spent four hours shopping for clothes so each child could receive two to three gifts, including a toy, plus family food baskets.

''You wouldn't believe it, but $400 goes a long way at Ross,'' he said.

Friday afternoon, Hernandez and Blanco watched quietly from the corner as the children in South Miami opened their gifts. ''It was just fun to sit back and watch them,'' Hernandez said. ``They didn't need to thank us or anything.''

Fourteen-year-old Joshue Rodriguez was ecstatic to receive a Nike T-shirt and cargo pants.

''The shirt's extra large -- my perfect size,'' he said, smiling.

Rodriguez came to South Florida in 2000 from the Dominican Republic with his mother, who works as a waitress at two Denny's restaurants. His father lives in Maryland with his brother.

''I don't want too much,'' he said. ``I hear kids who want an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3. I don't need that.''

Lars Gilberts of South Florida Urban Ministries says Danis (pronounced Danny) ``goes above and beyond. We sent him at Thanksgiving with 58 meals to Florida City, way out at about 312th Street. He met families and found houses in bad shape, with no curtains, and the kids with clothes that didn't fit. So he's developing food baskets for moms and gifts for kids.''

Stan Schokley, Hernandez's boss at Blue Leaf, a manufacturer of furniture for hotels, has helped, as well. Schokley calls Hernandez, who manages the warehouse, ``absolutely sincere, completely.''

Schokley and his wife, Stephanie Tyler, worked through their church last year, but this year Hernandez persuaded them to join forces. Tyler's International Design Concepts and Blue Leaf helped with the food baskets as well as individual gifts for children.

''With very little, we can do things that make a big difference,'' Schokley said.

- Frank Rich: No Experience Required?

We can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain’s head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can’t be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.

“I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy,” Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, “but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

But if Mr. McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month the former president criticized the press for not sufficiently covering the candidates’ “record in public life” and thereby making “people think experience is irrelevant.” His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose’s show on Dec. 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether “no experience matters.” He insinuated that Mr. Obama was tantamount to “a gifted television commentator” and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice.

Attention Bill Clinton: If that’s what this election is about, it’s already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, Mr. McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it’s not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.

For many, Mr. McCain’s long record of experience may be a liability even greater than his party-bucking moderation on immigration and his bear hug of President Bush on Iraq. What his résumé mainly does is remind a youth-obsessed culture of his age. When Gallup asked voters in August to rate traits as desirable or not in the next president, the “undesirable” percentages for being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group (13), a woman (14), a Mormon (22) or having “strained relationships” with one’s children (45) all paled next to being age 70 or older (52). It’s not morning in America for Reaganesque elders in the political arena anymore.

For Mrs. Clinton, the failure of “experience” as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. Last week’s ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Mr. Obama on the question of who has the most experience — 49 percent to 8 percent. But to little end. That same survey had Mr. Obama ahead by 4 points over all because, as this year’s pervasive polling matchup has it, the electorate values change over experience.

The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a C.E.O. presidency, overstocked with “tested” Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn’t push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Mr. Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Mr. Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq.

But for Mrs. Clinton, the problem isn’t just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been. Ted Sorensen, the J.F.K. speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Mrs. Clinton had mocked Mr. Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.

“Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people’s experience,” Mr. Sorensen said. “It’s not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity.”

Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It’s what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That’s why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.

This was the moment when Mr. Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on “so many Clinton advisers.” Mrs. Clinton jokingly called out, “I want to hear that,” prompting Mr. Obama to one-up her by responding, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me, as well.”

Well, touché. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which ’08 candidate is instructive.

[...]

What Mrs. Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics. Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics’ methods as well. Attacks on Mr. Obama’s record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks — the invocations of “cocaine” and “Hussein” and “madrassa” by surrogates — smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been “authorized” sound like Karl Rove’s denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000.

If Mrs. Clinton is to win, she won’t do so by running on that kind of experience but by rising above it. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have shifted gears to refer to his wife constantly as a “change agent,” however implausibly, if his acute political sensors didn’t tell him that Americans are not just willing but eager to roll the dice.

- Doonesbury: Repeated application may have undesired side effects.

- Opus: The jig is up.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Annals of Sports

Mitt Romney, speaking of sports:

Mitt Romney has been forced to get into some serious verbal gymnastics over his previous declaration about seeing his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, marching with Martin Luther King. A close examination of the historical records shows that the elder Romney, while he was a strong support of civil rights, never actually appeared with King.

"I've tried to be as accurate as I can be," Romney told reporters. "If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of — in the sense I've described."

"I'm an English literature major," he added, after the questions didn't stop. "When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn't necessarily mean you were there."

What the hell is he talking about? I was a theatre major and I really did see the Detroit Tigers win the 1968 Stanley Cup.

(HT to Melissa.)

Freakage

It's fun watching the Republicans chew up on each other, and then when they have a moment to take a breath, they waste no time in pointing out the tiffs between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

What it tells me is that the mainstream GOP is absolutely freaked out by the possibility that Mike Huckabee might win the nomination and they don't know what to do about it. He's not the "chosen one," and therefore they have to unleash all the negative energy they were saving up for a general election campaign against Hillary Clinton on this usurper from Arkansas. (It's remarkably similar to the early responses that Bill Clinton got when he leaped ahead against the rest of the Democratic field in 1992.)

Trust me, I have no interest whatsoever in seeing Mike Huckabee in the White House, but it's fun watching the likes of Rush Limbaugh freak out over him.

Holiday Schedule

One of the nice things about working where I do is that the entire school district basically shuts down and I get the next two weeks off. The best part is that I haven't decided what to do with the time off other than enjoy them and do a lot of writing, both here and catching up on Small Town Boys.

I might throw in a Marathon run one of these days. No, I'm not a long-distance runner; I'm talking about a top-down trip to the Keys. I'll be sure to take along the camera so I can share.

Other than that, I'm open to suggestions.

Welcome Winter

It is now officially winter in the northern hemisphere.

First sunrise of winter.

And just a reminder that a winter sunrise isn't always on new-fallen snow...

The queen palm in the front yard.

What it means here is warm days (80's F), cool evenings (60's) and lots of tourists on the roads and in the restaurants.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Friday Blogaround

It's the last-minute-before-Christmas Liberal Coalition blogaround.

- A Blog Around The Clock has a pick from Science Daily that demonstrates that monkeys can do math in their head. So many jokes, so little time....
- archy: does science have a liberal bias?
- Bark Bark Woof Woof wishes Tucker Carlson would just go away.
- Bloggg on how not to advocate for a cause.
- Collective Sigh: A Christmas pageant where they had to call the cops.
- Dohiyi Mir: NTodd wraps up his day at the Capitol.
- Echidne Of The Snakes on the UNICEF picture of the year.
- Iddybud Journal on what doesn't matter.
- Left Is Right: Friday fun, including amazing sidewalk art.
- Lefty Side of the Dial: three questions.
- Liberty Street: the statute of limitations on compassion.
- Musing's musings: holiday plans.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web: does the best blogarounds...and hugs, too.
- Rook's Rant on corporate arrogance.
- rubber hose joins the piling-on on Jonah Goldberg.
- Scrutiny Hooligans: guess who else wants the "immigrants" to leave?
- SoonerThought: Bloomberg/Hagel in '08?
- Speedkill on Ron Paul's candidacy.
- Steve Bates, The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on beating back cloture.
- Stupid Enough Unexplanation (aka Make Me a Commentator!): Ron Paul's environment.
- T. Rex's Guide to Life handicaps the GOP (let the jokes begin...)
- The Invisible Library shares a Christmas story.
- WTF Is It Now?? Did George Romney have a dream?
- ...You Are A Tree joins me in saying farewell to Dan Fogelberg:

Friday Catblogging Classic

Snowball gets into the spirit of the season.

The wreath? It's a laurel...and hardy, too.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Tuckered Out

I'm guessing that since Tucker Carlson probably didn't get a part in the annual Christmas Festival at his prep school, he's taking his Grinch act on the road and beating up on John Edwards for having the nerve to remind us that not everyone has a merry Christmas.

Here's the ad by Senator Edwards.

I think we can all agree that Tucker is a major-league twit, and thankfully, rumor has it that he is on his way out at MSNBC to be replaced by Rachel Maddow.

Now Tucker can go back to beating up on clerks at Blockbuster.

In the Pink

Bravo to NTodd and his friends who are speaking truth to power and taking Code Pink to the House and Senate.

Follow the adventures here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Blogging Casualty

A spat between two bloggers resulted in the death of a blog here in South Florida.

Stuck on the Palmetto has slammed to a halt, disabling its archives and covering the keyboard after some 5,800 posts in its two-year existence. South Florida's blogosphere, as varied and lively as the real world here, lost one of its most popular sites.

Why? Its author worried he'd be outed by a fellow blogger who knows his full name and job.

Those details are still shrouded, but "Rick" says the damage is done and he's not going back to his weblog, where readers could expect to find multiple posts a day opining on news and life in South Florida.

"The blog is done and I'm moving on," Rick wrote in an e-mail to The Miami Herald.

Bob Norman, a Broward-Palm Beach New Times journalist who writes The Daily Pulp blog for the paper's website, had taken umbrage at a post on Stuck on the Palmetto Dec. 6 about gay inmates at the Broward County jail.

Rick fired back in Norman's comments section and on his own blog, and this went back and forth until Dec. 9, when Norman wrote something that spooked the other blogger out of cyberspace:

"By the way, Rick, who pays your salary to blog all day?"

Others chimed in, speculating Rick could be a government employee, possibly a police officer, who was spending hours blogging during workdays, on the taxpayers' dime.

Rick wrote that he needed to take a hiatus. A few days later, he signed off for good.

"I've been the reader of blogs that have closed down suddenly for any number of reasons and it's never a good feeling," he posted Sunday.

I'm sorry to see him go, especially for that reason.

For the record, I use a "blogonym" out of habit. I got into blogging the way a lot of other people do -- by commenting on other blogs. When I started this blog, I kept the nickname I'd chosen so people would connect my dry humor and wit with the comments, and it stuck. I have no problem telling people my real name if they ask; I've just never done it on the blog, and I have no problem standing behind what I say whether it's as Mustang Bobby or my real name. (And as I've said many times before, I do occasionally blog from the office when I'm not on the clock. My boss knows about it, and my former boss has been a frequent commenter.)

Whatever the reason, I'm always sad when a good writer leaves the scene. Take care, Rick, and I hope to see you again on line.

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