12/11/2008

Headed for Trouble

Shortly after he was nominated as Barack Obama’s running mate, reporters overheard Joe Biden speaking with a National Guardsman. “If I had your hair, I’d be president, you know what I mean?” Mr. Biden said. “I wouldn’t be screwing around with this job.”

Mr. Biden, long known for working the border between candor and too much candor, must be scratching his hair-plugged forehead over this week’s events involving Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois. Mr. Blagojevich has enough hair for himself, Mr. Biden and Sam Zell, the skin-pated publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who Mr. Blagojevich attempted to extort into more lenient editorial coverage by threatening to withhold political favors. Perhaps he’d have done better to offer a few locks hair.

Joe Biden’s a pretty bright guy, really bright when it comes to politics. If he says the only things that’s kept him from the nation’s highest office are a few hundred follicles, then that’s where I’m looking to understand this whole Blagojevich scandal.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
12/04/2008

Does Not a Tibetan Bleed?

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has accomplished a difficult task since taking office 18 months ago: he’s made me miss Tony Blair.

Mr. Blair was George W. Bush’s lapdog on foreign policy and when he left office, I thought anyone had to be better. Mr. Brown had a promising start, putting some distance between the US and UK positions on Iraq.

Then in October, Mr. Brown’s government reversed a long-held British position on Tibet. The UK had held that Tibet was a nation separate from the People’s Republic of China, although it acknowledged China had a “position in Tibet.” Few nations, and fewer still among industrialized nations, granted such recognition to Tibet. Mr. Brown took it away.

Although China meddled in Tibet for centuries, Tibet was free of Chinese influence between 1913 and 1950. Then the Chinese invaded again. The Tibetans initially sought some sort of accommodation, but it was not to be and in 1959, the Dalai Lama and his government fled into exile in India, where it remains.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Economy, Iraq Invasion | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (2)
11/27/2008

What We are About to Receive

Happy Thanksgiving. Today is the day for which gratitude was made.

I don’t mean that in a traditional sense, in that the last Thursday of November has rolled around. I mean that in the sense that this day, the 27th of November 2008, is a day for which gratitude was made.

There are several reasons for this. First, we have finally entered a season of political hope, after years of despair. Second, those years of despair, as they come to a close have pitched us off the economic cliff so long predicted and that, in its own strange way, is cause for gratitude.

Not that anyone is grateful for hard times and layoffs and home foreclosures. Any catastrophe, anything that reduces the number of items on the list when the time comes to count our blessings, makes us more keenly grateful for those items that remain.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy | Comments (0)
11/20/2008

Where Things Used to Be

I’ve been driving around southern Louisiana this week. It’s my first visit in three years, since I was here in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Life has changed here. I’m not sure if Louisianans live in the future while the rest of us live in the present or if they live in the present while we live in the past, but one way or another, I feel as if I pass through a metaphysical barrier when I come here.

Around New Orleans, some places (tourist areas) are remarkably patched up. Other places (where the working poor lived) are remarkably not patched up. But it’s not just about New Orleans and it’s not just about Katrina.

Hurricanes are the unofficial calendars of Louisiana. “I haven’t seen Jim since… it must have been right before Gustav,” someone will say, or “We got that fridge after Ike, because the water got into the motor of the old one.”

In southwest Louisiana, the swamps are thinning out. Folks there pointed out to me where cypress trees have been brought down by storms, making the swamps more vulnerable to future storms. Wildlife is moving north out of the wetlands, I was told. They seek shelter as the water gets deeper and the brush thins out to the south. Foxes are coming out of the swamps and kill cats in suburban neighborhoods.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
11/06/2008

The Fightin’ Fifth!

I spent 13 hours at my local polling place Tuesday. No, it didn’t take that long to vote. I volunteered to help out for a few hours, but the crowd was so big that I stayed for a few more and then a few more after that.

Since I was the newbie on the poll team, I was given the low-level jobs, like directing voters toward empty booths, helping point citizens to the right check-in table and assisting as they fed their ballots into the optical scanning device.

“If your last name begins with the letters A through K, please come here; L through Z, over here.” Try saying that 200 times an hour. After a while, strange things began to pop from my mouth. “If your name is L through K, over here; A through Z, this table, please.”

I arrived at the polling station at 6:20 a.m., 40 minutes before voting commenced. There were 12 voters lined up in the lobby, ready to commit an act of democracy. By the time the poll actually opened, the line was out the door and around the corner of the building.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , | Comments (0)
10/30/2008

Return to Normal

It’s cold again. The furnace kicked on again this week, although we still wear sweaters in the house. The storm windows are up and the first snow storm of the year just missed us. The Adirondack Mountains to the west and the Green Mountains to the east both got hit Tuesday, but here the valley; it was just incessant rain and lashing wind.

Summer in Vermont is a short, beautiful dream from which one wakes and returns to normal. This may sound depressing to some, but here in the north country, there’s a certain comfort in long nights and cold days.

Or maybe I just welcome a return to normal – any kind of normal. A tragedy of the Internet age is that it feeds certain kinds of obsessive-compulsive behavior. I can (and do) check the status of the stock market six or eight times a day. I follow all the political polls and developments.

As with any compulsion, these activities are not particularly gratifying. If the stock market would stop careening up and down, I wouldn’t feel the need to check it so often. (Right now, it’s up 111 points for the day. But the headlines say the economy shrank in the third quarter. And ExxonMobil posted yet another record profit.) You get the picture.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
10/23/2008

Close Enough To Steal?

I feel like I’m in uncharted electoral waters. I remember Bill Clinton’s decisive victory over Bob Dole in 1996 and indications point to a larger margin of victory this time.

I remember Nixon’s 1972 landslide over George McGovern, but I was 11, I don’t remember the details and I certainly don’t remember what the last few weeks felt like. I was only three when Lyndon Johnson swamped Barry Goldwater in 1964. It took 44 years to coax another Arizonan to run for president after Sen. Goldwater’s drubbing. What Arizonan will want to step up after this?

Two weeks ago, supporters of Barack Obama were walking a gloat/jinx tightrope. The jinx fears seem to have dissipated since. Sen. Orrin Hatch was on MSNBC yesterday bringing up Harry Truman’s 1948 come-from-behind win over Thomas Dewey. When your surrogates start comparing you to Harry Truman of 1948: worry. Later on the same network, Brian Williams and Chuck Todd more or less told Chris Matthews that the election is over and John McCain lost.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)