Eugene Robinson - Where Wright Goes Wrong - washingtonpost.com

Great op-ed about Wright. I hate to say it, but this albatross might be too difficult to remove from around Obama's neck...

Eugene Robinson - Where Wright Goes Wrong - washingtonpost.com

George F. Will - Education Lessons We Left Behind - washingtonpost.com

George F. Will - Education Lessons We Left Behind - washingtonpost.com

My day today...(don't panic, I wasn't at the bank.)

This happened right down the road from where I work, we were on a police ordered lockdown for five hours. I hope the catch this guy, what a coward.

Pregnant bank teller shot during robbery | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star

My Man Mitch!

This is why I love our Gov.  He speaks his mind and doesn't care if people agree or not.  Most of the time he is right and I wish more GOPs would take the party to task on their close mindeness.  Conservative doesn't mean to wallow in the past.

 

http://www.examiner.com/blogs-73-yeas_and_nays~y2008m4d21-Gov-Daniels-People-need-to-get-over-Reagan-already

to Spring.

From Winter...

EARTHQUAKE!!!

Woke up this morning to what I thought at first was someone shaking my bed.  My brain then put together that it was more than that as the entire house was shaking.  I thought, "Huh, we must be having an earthquake, cool."  I then looked at my dog, who was still asleep, figured if it was serious he would have at least woke up and I rolled over and went back to bed.  Looking back, I wish I had been more awake, from what I remember it was a lot of fun!

Garrison Keillor Column

Great advice about dealing with those people who feel as though they more deserving than other or need to be first always.  This happened to us on our way home from FLA, some lady led her family to cut in front of people who were waiting patiently...way to lead by example lady.

 

The urge to compete

No one wants to be a loser, but you don't have to be first in line. There is grace afoot in the world and it will find you.

By Garrison Keillor

Apr. 09, 2008 | For some people, the urge to compete is very, very strong, such as the tall red-haired woman last Sunday morning at LaGuardia who cut in front of me at the boarding gate and did it so smoothly, expertly, no body contact, you have to assume she's been acing people out all her life. She was standing behind me and then alongside and then, although I was moving forward behind the old lady in front of me, Red Riding Hood planted her right foot in front of my left foot and leaned over and handed her ticket to the gate agent and without a murmur of apology or explanation, she slipped into the jetway. Pure competitive urge, for no prize at all, as you see every day on the freeway at rush hour, the salmon leaping, cutting each other off, to get back home three minutes earlier than if they'd gone with the flow.

A few years ago I would have felt like pulling her hair out by the roots and spitting on her shoes and saying a few words about the importance of civility, but I am over that now. I don't care if you step on my blue suede shoes, just don't steal my laptop and don't hurt my baby. I'm not the judge of other people's manners. I come from quiet, mannerly Midwestern people and evidently she was raised in a home in which you had to elbow your way to the feed trough. Not her fault, just as what manners I have are to my mother's credit and not mine.

Back where I'm from, it's considered boorish to thrust yourself forward ahead of those who've been waiting longer. We are brought up to defer, an After You Alphonse reflex, and wave others to go first at the intersection, and sometimes we use deference aggressively, as a way of encouraging fools to walk out on thin ice and fall in, so we can enjoy seeing them flounder and then perhaps rescue them. And so committee meetings in the Midwest can be torturous: The knowledgeable sit back and listen to some clueless gasbag blow for awhile and an eternity passes and the main questions are never addressed and eventually the meeting grinds to a halt and some poor soul is left to do the hard work on her own and the gasbag goes on to his next triumph.

The daughter of a friend is 15 and full of the competitive urge, anxious to start driver's ed and get on with her life, miffed about the twerp who beat her out for class president, horrified by a rash of pimples, worried that she is ugly and that her Wal-Mart clothes are not cool enough and where will she go to college and why doesn't her boyfriend call her. The other night at supper, she asked, "Is fellatio considered a normal sexual practice?" and her poor father almost coughed up a hairball.

It's an agonizing time when you feel your peers edging ahead and the cool people aren't seeking you out and almost every day somebody announces a cool new job, or a big romance, or the receipt of an awesome gift, some fresh kill from the jungle, and it depresses you. You don't want to be a loser. And you sense the fact that, in life, so much -- so very much -- is pure luck, no matter what they want you to think, and an angel may knock at your door in the person of a beggar, and you say No, and that No will resound for the rest of your born days. It is agonizing to think about.

I don't care about the red-haired woman: It's the 15-year-old who matters. Whatever happens, be observant, darling, and First Place is not a good observation point. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. There is grace afoot in the world and it will find you. You don't have to be first in line: It will be diligent in pursuing you and passing on its gifts, which are faith, hope, love and a sense of humor. The harder you strive for a gift, the more it eludes you, so let the lady step ahead of you. Keep your eyes open.

Richard Cohen, Washington Post

Guns, God and Gotchas

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 15, 2008; A15

Long ago I discovered that the word "frankly" often meant a lie was coming. I learned this from an insurance agent, who preceded every attempt to sell me useless coverage with a "frankly." This is why I distrust what Hillary Clinton said about Barack Obama and his admittedly klutzy statement about guns, church, immigrants and bitterness -- "elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing," she said. Frankly, I don't believe her.

And this, frankly or not, is the trouble with Clinton. Obama clearly misspoke. But there are very few moments with him where I feel that he does not believe what he is saying -- even when, as with his lame capitulation of leadership regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I can't respect it. With Clinton, on the other hand, those moments are frequent. She is forever saying things I either don't believe or believe that even she doesn't believe. She is the personification of artifice.

The current fuss is an example. She turned Obama's statement into an affront to gun lovers everywhere, which it just might be. But since when is Hillary Clinton a gun lover, a hunter or even a weekend skeet shooter? She is apparently none of the above -- at least she will not say when she last fired a gun. The truth, if a guess is allowed, is that she does not give a damn about guns and hunting, and when she brings up her "churchgoing family" and "Our Town" values, they are expressions of treacly nostalgia and not the life of incredible affluence and situational morality she now enjoys. To paraphrase Dorothy, Clinton left Kansas a long time ago.

At times, Barack Obama has the air of a maitre d' who shows you to a bad table. It's the impeccable suit. It's the air of consummate confidence. It's the awesome self-assurance that comes from knowing that he has something you want. In the headwaiter's case, it's a good table. In Obama's case, it's himself.

That air of self-confidence can sometimes come off as smugness or indifference. The signal moment for that came in a New Hampshire debate when Obama glanced at Clinton and said, by way of dismissal, "You're likable enough, Hillary" -- a kiss-off as head-snapping as when James Cagney smashed a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's puss in the 1931 classic "The Public Enemy."

It is this quality of Obama's -- this sense that you need him more than he needs you -- that probably explains why Clinton seized upon his remarks about the poor of Pennsylvania and elsewhere who, in Obama's artless telling, have turned to God and guns. It was, as he conceded, a bumbling attempt to express an economic truth, and it gave her a chance to imply that you can judge this particular book by its cover. But the spirit of what Obama said was not condescension but empathy. People were hurting. They were bitter. He understood.

The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a version of that crack about academic politics -- so vicious because the stakes are so small. In the presidential race, the stakes are huge but the differences are small. Both Clinton and Obama are liberal Democrats -- the former less liberal than the latter, but no matter. One is more experienced than the other. One is white, the other black, and one is a woman and the other is not. Still, on mortgages, Iraq, Israel and almost anything you can name, they are in general agreement.

That's why the campaign has increasingly been about what one or the other candidate said or meant to say or should have said. It's even been about what one of their supporters said -- Geraldine Ferraro on race, Merrill A. McPeak on patriotism, Billy Shaheen on cocaine and Bill Clinton on just about everything. Both campaigns have indulged in this silliness, with Obama's supporters yelling "race!" the way a certain boy cried "wolf!" and the Clintons, on occasion, pretending to a kind of political naivete that ill becomes them.

Obama should not have attributed a yearning to hunt or attend church to hard economic times. The remarks will haunt him -- witness how John McCain has also called them "elitist." But Obama was right about the economic roots of bitterness and anti-immigrant sentiment. And he's been right, too, about the patent insincerity of Clinton's criticism. Her attack is hardly based on a touching regard for gun owners or even churchgoers, but on the desperate hope that the smoothly aloof Obama can be painted as arrogant and elitist. It's old, tiresome politics -- the politics of politics -- and, paradoxically, more patronizing than anything Obama himself said.

Frankly.

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

This is the first of two great op-eds that really cristalize why Billary is a phony...   

 

Shot and a Chablis

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, April 15, 2008; A15

Hillary "Shot-and-a-Beer" Clinton has given us the perfect illustration of what's so insane about American politics: the philosophical dictum that could be summed up (with apologies to Descartes) as "I seem, therefore I am."

Clinton spent the weekend bashing Barack Obama for not seeming to be enough of a regular guy -- not for any actual deficit of regular-guyness, mind you, but for giving the impression that such a deficit might exist.

The former first lady, whose family has made $109 million since her husband left the White House, then made a show of demonstrating that she's actually just a regular gal. The point wasn't really to convince anyone that she, Bill and Chelsea commute between their two lavish mansions in a five-year-old Ford F-150 pickup with a gun rack and a "Jesus Rocks!" bumper sticker. Her aim was to prove to the nation -- or at least to Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania and Indiana -- that she's better at feigning regularness than Obama.

This is how we pick a president?

This whole sideshow began when Obama committed what she portrayed as the apparently unforgivable sin of trying to describe the resentment felt by some working-class Americans, venturing that "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This seemed "elitist . . . and, frankly, patronizing," Clinton charged. Never mind whether it actually was elitist, patronizing or, for that matter, inaccurate. No, the eagle-eyed Clinton took dead aim at a different target: the impression Obama might have given.

As if to show her opponent how it ought to be done, Clinton -- a longtime advocate of gun control laws -- spoke of her lifelong reverence for the Second Amendment. "You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl," she said. "Some people have continued to teach their children and their grandchildren. It's part of culture, it's part of a way of life."

Clinton also made a point of telling audiences about her deep religious faith. The topper -- or the chaser -- came at Bronko's Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., where Clinton threw back a shot of Crown Royal whiskey and followed it with a beer.

Clinton bristled, though, when a reporter had the temerity to ask at a news conference when she last attended church or fired a gun. "That is not a relevant question for this debate," she said. "We can answer that some other time. This is about what people feel is being said about them. I went to church on Easter. I mean, so?"

Um, so the issue isn't whether you regularly sit in a church pew or even occasionally go hunting, but whether you can manage to seem like the sort of person who does? I think I need a shot and a beer, too. Just give me whatever the lady's drinking.

Obama has apologized for using the word "bitter" to describe some frustrated voters, but managed to have a bit of fun with Clinton's new persona. "She's talking like she's Annie Oakley," he said, adding that she gives the impression of spending every Sunday in a duck blind.

But I think Clinton is serious at some level. She argued Sunday night that Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry lost because they seemed elitist -- not because they actually were, but because they seemed to be. In reality, she said, they were "good men, and men of faith." So is Obama, she allowed. But they didn't measure up in the seeming department.

As you've guessed, I have a couple of problems with Clinton's seeming-is-being theory of campaigning for the nation's highest elective office. First, given the urgency and complexity of the problems the next president will face, who's going to think it's a good idea to elect Joe or Josephine Sixpack? I realize that Gore was deemed inferior to George W. Bush on the "Who would you rather have a near beer with?" question, but the 2000 election took place at a time of peace and prosperity. Oh, and Gore did win the popular vote.

Here's my other problem: Clinton's argument assumes that "regular" is a synonym for "unsophisticated" -- that to communicate with voters who have not attained a certain income or education level, a candidate has to put on an elaborate disguise and speak in words of one syllable.

So tell me: Who's being patronizing?

Uhh....Seriously? This picture could only be worse if she was toting around a shotgun...Billary you aren't the salt of the earth...

Summer....Summer....Summertime...

Well, even though it was bitterly cold this past weekend, I can't help but think to the coming summer.  I've made two summer resolutions, to play more golf and go on a long bike ride.  I know, my life is tough.  My usual path with golf is to play a fair amount in the beginning and play fairly well at that, then I play a couple of lackluster rounds, get bored and quit.  I want to push throught that this summer and actually try and break 80 on a consistant basis. 

 

The bike ride is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time.  There is a trail up near Muncie that is long.  I want to pack light and see how far I can make it.  Should be a really good time. 

 

Several trips planned as well, Vegas and NYC.  Although NYC is in May, that is technically summer, right?  Now if we could just have 7 straight days above 50 degrees.... 

A Review of Amazon's Kindle

First off, I love watching golf on TV because you can accomplish a lot of other things while it is on. Very relaxing white noise that is interrupted by moments of excitement. Doesn't look like Tiger is playing well enough to win, but you never know...

A trait that started with my grandfather on my Dad's side and has been passed through my Dad to me, is a love of gadgets. The newer the better, the cleverer the better. My Dad loves innovations and is the usually one of the firsts to try things out. I think it is funny and great that my father is an early adopter. He will never be one of those people is afraid and unwilling to use new technology. My grandfather was one of the first people to buy a VCR. I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons anytime I wanted because he would tape them for me.

The other great thing about my Dad is that once he finds something he thinks is pretty cool, he wants everyone close to him to have one. This brings me to my birthday present in January, an Amazon Kindle. I envied my Dad's as soon as he got one and hoped that I would be able to have one someday. I had to wait a little while as my present was actually a printed invoice from Amazon because my Kindle was back ordered. In fact, if you were to try to buy an Amazon today, you would have to wait awhile as they are still back ordered, Amazon can't make these things fast enough. When I finally got mine, all my hopes were fulfilled. The Kindle is great, but I can see that it isn't for everyone.

Another trait that was passed down from my father was reading. Saying that he is an avid reader isn't doing him justice. The man has a stack of books by his reading chair and a stack at his bedside. He is reading all of them. He reads probably 10 or so books at a time and his library has a immense amount of books. I am not as close to the reader he is, but I do read at least four books at a time and really love to read. I wish I could read more. So, this little invention is perfect for him and me because we read so much. Here's why...

1) The digital book is cheaper than the physical book. The average price of a Kindle download is $9.99. (Some classics are as cheap as a couple of bucks.) Compare this with a $25 hardcover and you can see that you save some money, especially if you buy a lot of books.
2) It is wireless. The great thing about the Kindle is that you can connect wirelessly to the Kindle store, find the book you are looking for and wham bam, it is instantly downloaded. You never need to connect your Kindle to your computer.
3) It can hold a lot of books. I've got about 10 or so books on mine and haven't come close to filling it. Even if I did, it has room for a memory card and you can upload books to Amazon, where they will stay forever.
4) The main goal of the Kindle is that it is less obtrusive than a book as far as letting your imagination go. I don't know how you prove this actually works, but I can say that reading on Kindle does engross you in your reading, at least for me. And if you are worried about the headache that comes from reading a screen, don't be, there isn't the glare that is associated with most electronic devices.
5) What I really love about the Kindle is reading newspapers and blogs. You can subscribe to the New York Times or Newsweek and have it delivered to your Kindle automatically. When you get rid of all the other crap, you actually read the paper.

There are some cons. The library of titles isn't very extensive, but that will get better with time. The Kindle isn't cheap, but that will change with time as well. And others will tell you that it doesn't have the charm that a book as, the cover of a book, opening it up, the smell, your collection on a bookshelf, etc. I don't put too much weight in those things because the same was said with records, tapes and CDs and now all my music is digital. If you love to read, I would at least say you check one out and see what you think. I don't know if Kindle will revolutionize books, but it has a chance and as an avid reader and gadget nerd, it certainly impressed me.

Part Two of Anything is Possible

Then....read this second...

Music Snobbery: How the 3rd Anniv. Show with Moby Came About

Part One of Anything is Possible

Watch this first...

Music Snobbery: A Video Message to Moby, Ben Gibbard, Win Butler & Kate Nash

Directing...

A picture of the crazed director hard at work...

Bob Kravitz: Kravitz: Crean's address hit home with Hoosiers | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star

I REALLY like Crean. He has got a major job in front of him, I hope he can turn it around. Be patient Hoosier Nation, next year ain't gonna be pretty.

Bob Kravitz: Kravitz: Crean's address hit home with Hoosiers | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star