Thirteen+ months later…

So it’s been a long time… and I need to get back in the swing of blogging. Since I’ve last blogged, I’ve seen (among other things):

• The birth of my second child
• a 13-3 record for my Dallas Cowboys, only to get nipped by the juggernaut that was the eventual Super Bowl Champ Giants in the playoffs
• My Cal Bears being about 90 minutes away from the #1 ranking in the land, only to see that slip away in the final seconds of a loss to Oregon State, followed by one of the all-time implosions (impressive even by Cal standards)
• Those same bears firing the men’s basketball coach and replacing him with a fantastic coach whose most recent college job was the head coach at Cal’s arch-rival, Stanfurd… and strangely enough, the firing came the day immediately after I sent a long, passionate letter to the athletic director indicating my displeasure with the direction of the basketball team (not that there was any cause-and-effect, but it was still a strange coincidence)
• My Angels losing twice in the postseason, both times to the Red Sox, and “blessed” with management that doesn’t seem to understand much about how to identify quality offensive players (outside of the trade for Mark Teixeira, who many people think will spurn the Angels for greener pastures)
• A very intense Democratic primary, with 3 high-quality candidates, in which my first choice dropped out the day after I decided to donate money to him, and then later was found to have been hiding an affair which would have crushed his presidential hopes had he won the nomination (and has effectively scuttled a future in politics for him… John Edwards, I think that you showed an unforgivable level of arrogance in hiding that affair)
• A mixed-race candidate win the presidential nomination of a major party
• A supposedly democratic congress caving to a president with record-high levels of unpopularity and granting him powers (and granting telecoms retroactive immunity) that a republican congress was unable to give him
• The banking deregulation chickens coming home to roost in the recent economic crisis, in which the current administration’s initial response was to give away, with no strings attached, $700 billion of taxpayer money to the very people who created the mess(!)

I’ve left out many things, of course, but those were some of the first things I thought when i thought about what I would have blogged about. My impetus for blogging again today was a quote I saw from David Sedaris in the New Yorker (h/t Balloon Juice):

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I don’t know if anyone could have put it better (although I will admit that after reading the full article, I don’t know if it was intended with the same implications that I read into it)… However, I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide .

One final link…. A great post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Six Years Later…

A year ago, I wrote a blog entry about the satyagraha movement, which also had 9/11 as its inception date. This year, I wanted to link to two blog entries written by the amazing MetroDad, a blogger who I stumbled across when he wrote a compelling letter to the students of Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the shooting tragedy there. I think I first took a liking to MetroDad because he went to Cal (as did I); unfortunately, he was a hostage in one of the tragedies that occurred while I was there (a gunman took patrons in a popular bar hostage for several hours), and that definitely shook me a little. I hate to admit it, but until I read MetroDad’s letter, that incident had totally slipped my mind. It was early in my undergrad career at Cal (I was just starting my sophomore year), and so it was more than 16 years ago. There were a few other terrible incidents that year (if I recall correctly, a student died when he fell off a balcony at a fraternity house, and a female student was abducted and killed), and I don’t know if I just blocked them all out, or they just faded with time. I know that they were all extremely disturbing to me and my friends at the time (in fact, I think 2 if not all 3 of the students who died in those tragedies all went to the same high school as a friend of mine, so it hit home even harder for him), so it surprised that I had to be reminded of the hostage situation by Metrodad’s letter.

In any case, the point of the above rambling is to say that while the Cal connection might have been the inital reason that I started reading MetroDad, I keep reading his blog because he is a fantastic/humorous/thoughtful writer with some amazing things to say and spectacular ways of putting them. I am even more able to relate to his writing because I too have a young daughter, and I often readily identify with his joys and frustrations. Which brings me to today. Nowhere is his gift for writing more clear than in his entry today, titled Dear Andy. I was so floored by it I went back and read his letter from last year as well. I am so sorry for your loss, MetroDad.

Wow… Almost a full year later…

So it’s almost been a full year since I posted to my blog. Unbelievable . I’d like to think that it was the growing demands of parenthood as well as work and other commitments, but I can’t say that. It’s probably just scandal fatigue, and the capitulation of the Democrats to a president with a sub-30% approval rating. Politics just makes me so depressed sometimes.

Having said that, I am going to try to resolve to post more often, and at least get all the things I’ve wanted to write about off my chest a bit more frequently.

Amazing quote from Sidney Blumenthal

TPMCafe has a recurring feature, their Book Club, where they invite the authors of selected books to come post for a week and invite their regular writers to offer their thoughts as well. It’s a great idea, and it’s implemented well, as the authors and regular writers respond to each other and expand upon topics in the book as well as topics that each individual brings up. This weeks book is Sidney Blumenthal’s How Bush rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime. In one of the posts Mr. Blumenthal has made this week, he offers the following quote to describe our fearful leader:

But Bush’s temperament is an essential part of the dynamics. His stubbornness, lack of curiosity, shallow reservoir of knowledge, Manichean division of the world, and contempt for “nuance” are parts of a personality that key members of his administration play upon to get their ways. They carefully restrict the flow of information to him and flatter him as a great historical figure misunderstood by the mere mortals of his age. Their constant manipulation of Bush is an important part of the decision-making within the White House…

Just an amazing, dead-on description of Dubya.

Why can’t more elected Democrats say things like this?

From Senator Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana (h/t atrios):

“In light of the rantings that went on for 30 minutes by two colleagues from the other side, I’d like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism; America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican party that has sent six and a half billion a month to Iraq while the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein, when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and let loose a man that did. Americans are tired of boneheaded Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that despite documenting mistake after mistake after mistake, even of their own party admitting mistakes, never admit they do anything wrong. That’s the kind of leadership Americans are tired of.”

She concluded,

“I’m not going to sit here as a Democrat and let the Republican leadership come to the floor and talk about Democrats not making us safe. They’re the ones in charge and Osama bin Laden is still at loose.”

Sen. Landrieu isn’t perfect, but this statement was about as perfect an encapsulation of reality as you can get.

The importance of voting and getting out the vote (GOTV)

The San Francisco Chronicle’s website has just published an article which demonstrates how important it is to get everyone registered and voting (h/t this article at Sepia Mutiny). Basically, a new study shows that California’s growing diversity is not showing up at the ballot box; those doing the voting are predominantly more likely to be white and more well off than those who are not voting.

Why is this important?

A different 9/11 anniversary

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of one of the darkest days in US history; the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon, as well as the presumed aborted attempt that caused the downing of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. As someone geographically removed from the events of 9/11/2001, I don’t know what I can add to all the words that have been written. Some great diaries can be seen at Sepia Mutiny, DailyKos, Firedoglake, and others (some that painted a different picture that I particularly liked were this one at dailykos; this one by Steve Gilliard at firedoglake, which points out how different 9/11 was for a native New Yorker than someone like me, also an American but far removed from New York; and a short but great one by Nathan Newman at TPMCafe).

However, taz at Sepia Mutiny reminds us that yesterday was the anniversary of a different event as well. September 11, 1906 was the inception of the satyagraha (literally “obtaining truth”) movement, given birth in thought by Mohandas K. Gandhi, also known as Mahatma (literally “great soul”). Taz also points to a great article by Nelson Mandela which details some of what Gandhi went through in South Africa and how it was similar to what Mandela himself experienced. There is also a dailykos diary on the subject.

When the pain of the terrorist attacks is so near, maybe it might help to remember that there was a 9/11 in history that produced something positive, one that helped bring independence to a nation unjustly ruled by a foreign power, and also was an inspiration to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., so influential in the Civil Rights movement here in the US.

Save the… tigers!

Via Sepia Mutiny comes the sobering reminder that we as humans have an enormous impact (often negative) on the world we live in. Just a little over a century ago, there were 100,000 tigers in the wild; today, that number is less than 5000. SM points to an article in Time Asia which details the plight of the tiger in India. What’s most unfortunate is the point mentioned in the artcile and explained further in one of the comments to the article here: namely, that the tiger population is reaching a point (if it hasn’t blown past it already) where the population is too small to support long term health and proper evolution of the species… *sigh*. If you have ideas on ways that bloggers can make a difference, I’d recommend posting in the comments to the diary at Sepia Mutiny.

An unintended break from blogging

When I started with this blog, I don’t think I realized how many things I’d want to add to it, and how time consuming that could be… and what has started to happen is that there is so much to add, that I don’t seem to find the time to make a long blog entry. So I keep putting off adding new entries, and then the next post seems to require more and more time, and before you know it, it’s been over a month since the last post!

Furthermore, there are always things that come up in life that force us to take breaks or focus on something else. We had a bit of a health scare with my daughter recently (a minor one, decidedly, but still, nothing seems minor when it affects your own children), and that distracted my focus from posting new topics to the blog.

With these realizations, though, comes the fact that I’d like to post more to the blog, which I’ll start doing again ASAP!

What Republicans consider an EMERGENCY

Would it be a debate on the war in Iraq? Maybe a little congressional oversight into our fearful leader’s numerous violations of the law and of the constitution? Or maybe trying to protect the little guy by increasing the minimum wage, or providing health care to all? Of course not… Those aren’t emergencies. The emergency that had the House Republican leadership all a-twitter was…. (drum-roll please) estate-tax reduction. Please read the linked diary… it explains some of the lies that are spouted by those in favor of the estate-tax reduction.