Progress

Unbelievable

You've probably seen this but just in case...

Rebuilding Begins

We will sign a contract tomorrow to have the patio, etc. rebuilt. The insurance appears to be taking care of everything except the lost trees. We went to Baker Nursery today and bought 5 trees. The spot near the house where the big pine tree was will have a Sissoo tree, which Mike recommended. The back of the yard will have two She Oaks, an Australian tree that looks sort of like a drooping pine tree. A Japanese Privet will be on the side of the house by the neighbors' driveway. A Mastic tree will go by the pool where the Cork Oak was.

Catastrophe!

Maybe I shouldn't go out in public

I am not a smiley person, as is often pointed out to me. I get things like "are you having a bad day?" from perfect strangers when I feel just fine. Usually it comes from the lady at the cash register in the Safeway. This time it came from a Beatle. We went to see Ringo Starr at the Dodge Theatre tonight. We had really good seats, in the front row of the fixed seats (there were 4 rows of folding chairs in front of us). After the first or second song he started talking with the crowd. "Is everybody having a good time?" and the like. I am sitting there leaning my head on my hand listening to him when looks straight at me and says "how about you, are YOU having a good time?" Then he points at me and says, "yes, I mean you, sir" and then imitates my head resting on my hand. I did my best to smile and he moved on. Unbelievable.

Music ID from Shazam

Music ID is one of the most amazing little applications that I have seen in a while. It came installed on my new phone. You hold up your phone when music is playing, it samples about 15 seconds, goes into an analyis, then tells you what the song is, even offers a download purchase in some cases. I tried not only some obvious songs but some more obscure items (Fred Astaire, Magic Sam's Blues Band) and the only thing it missed on was from a live album by Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. Unfortunately what I have is a trial, and they want $3.98 a month for the service. Very cool, but not worth spending money on.

New Phone

I got a new Motorola Q 9H Global. It is a GSM phone, which will work in other countries (as opposed to the CDMA Verizon version I had before). It comes with two batteries, a standard one along with a larger one. I think it will be more stable than the old one. It has Windows Mobile 6 and Good Messaging. The camera is 2 megapixels.

Home Again

We got home about 5:30 on Thursday from a trip that spanned 13 states over the course of 2 weeks.

Thursday, June 26. Susan flew to San Francisco. The plane was late. She and John had dinner reservations at Foreign Cinema. She ended up having to take an expensive cab from the airport to make it in time for dinner. Apparently the meal was very good.

Friday, June 27. Susan and John pack up his stuff, pick up a rental van at SFO, and with help from a friend of John's (Nightcarl?) they load up and leave. Traffic is bad getting out of the Bay area and I-5 is full of smoke from forest fires. They spend the night in a Best Western in Pasadena, where Susan and I have stayed before.

Saturday, June 28. They arrive here about 3:30. Mike, Lori and Kaelyn come at 6:00. We have dinner on the back patio, Kaelyn uses the inflatable pool. After Mike and his family leave we swim in the big pool for a while.

Sunday, June 29. I help John repack the van, adding some things from here along with my suitcase, camera bag, etc. We leave about 8:30. I-17 to Flagstaff, then east on I-40. Lunch at Subway in Gallup, NM. It was raining heavily when we went through Albuquerque, although the view of it was impressive. Stopped for the night at an Econolodge in Tucumcari, NM. Dinner at Denny's.

Monday, June 30. We continue on I-40 thru Amarillo, TX. Lunch at a McDonalds somewhere.

Just west of Oklahoma City, we nearly had a bad accident. There were signs indicating that the left lane was going away so I got in the right lane and slowed down to 55 as the signs indicated. We were following a medium sized truck at a safe distance. We could not see around or over the truck. Suddenly he jumps onto the shoulder, revealing a line of cars at a dead stop straight ahead of us. I hopped into the left lane, which had not gone away yet, but fortunately had no cars right there. If I had reacted 2 seconds later we would have smashed into the line of cars at 55 MPH.

An exit or two later we got on a bypass toll road that took us around to I-44. From there though Tulsa (more impressive skyline than Phoenix, or so it seemed) and finally into Missouri, where we stayed in an Econolodge in Springfield. We settled our still-shaken nerves in a country and western type bar and then grabbed dinner at a Subway.

Tuesday, July 1. On through St. Louis, lunch at a Quizno's in Illinois, to Indianapolis where we got on I-70. Continuing the spirit of the Simpsons tour we stayed at a Super 8 in Springfield, OH. We ordered pizza from Domino's and watched I'm Not There on John's laptop. This was the dumpiest of the road motels.

Wednesday, July 2. Through Columbus, then Wheeling, WV, then south of Pittsburgh picking up the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Lunch at a turnpike service plaza. These places used to have Howard Johnsons restaurants but now they have food courts. We ate at Roy Rogers. Continued on the turnpike into the Philadelphia area, where we got off on US-1. That took us into Trenton, NJ and on into Princeton. John had a CD of music from the Sopranos that we played a lot while driving in NJ.

Route 1 is an odd beast in that part of New Jersey. Some of it looks like a freeway with exit ramps, etc. Then some of it is a regular old road with driveways and stop lights and the oddest part is there is no turning left and no u-turns and major intersections have elaborate ramps or even traffic circles. This combined with Google Maps' total lack of understanding of the area separated our arrival in Princeton from our arrival in the hotel by about an hour. The hotel was a Homewood Suites on Route 1, somewhat isolated from the town. The room had a separate bedroom with a convertible couch in the living room, where John stayed. By the time we got situated we decided to eat at the Ruby Tuesday's next to the hotel. We went to the indoor pool for a bit, and you could see fireworks from the town while we soaked.

Thursday, July 3. First task was to take the van to Tom's apartment to unload. Tom will be John's faculty advisor and had kindly volunteered space in his garage for John's stuff. He was very helpful, took charge of the task and we were soon sitting in his kitchen drinking espresso. Then we spent a few hours checking out the town and the campus. We saw John's apartment complex as well. The campus is beautiful and the town is quite nice too. Had lunch in an interesting design-your-own-burrito place. We got a call from Susan. She was on the plane at DFW. Her flight to Newark was delayed because of congestion at Newark. But we had run out of things to do and went back to the hotel and watched some TV and eventually a Simpsons episode.

Then we were off to the Newark airport. Conceptually it was simple, take Route 1 north to the NJ Turnpike and the turnpike to the airport. This was a situation where a map would have helped though. We were not sure just where we would get on the turnpike. Eventually we saw a sign that said that the turnpike was the next right. But the exit sign just referenced NJ-18. John said "I'm not buying it" and I agreed. Sadly we soon figured out that it must have been right because there were no more references to the turnpike. We stopped at two gas stations and gained little knowledge of what to do, the proprietors not being well versed in either directions nor English. Finally we saw another road leading to the turnpike and grabbed it. The van, while costly, did not exceed the original estimate. We took the skytrain to the terminal from Budget and then sat for about an hour watching the Yankees losing to the Red Sox on the TV in TGIFridays. Susan finally arrived, and then after a fashion her luggage as well. Skytrain back to Hertz where we piled into the rented Prius. The only hitch on the way back was that John managed to lose the toll ticket that I handed him. I had to pull over in the area just prior to the toll gate and turn on the lights in the car. Fortunately he found it. It was so late that Ruby Tuesday's had our business for a second night.

Friday, July 4. We went into town, essentially repeating yesterday's campus and town tour. We found the house that Albert Einstein had lived in as well as the Institute for Advanced Study, where he had worked. We drove to the battlefield park where the Meg Ryan/Tim Robbins film I.Q. had its climax. When we got there we found 4th of July festivities with people firing cannons, dressed up in revolutionary costumes, etc. After walking around there for a while we got back in the car and drove to the Washington Crossing State Park, where George Washington crossed the Delaware, about a half hour away. Then back to the hotel, and out to dinner at Blue Point Grill, a trendy fish and vegetables restaurant on Nassau Street (Princeton's main drag) where you bring your own wine. Then we walked around in the rain and looked at shops, restaurants etc.

Saturday, July 5. Drove around Princeton a little more, particularly interested in finding a grocery store. John will live a distance from the nearest stores, and lacking a car, things like bus schedules, whether a store delivers, etc. are important. Back to the airport to drop off the car and then a taxi into Manhattan. The taxi was a hoot. We had 3 large and one small suitcases plus a guitar and a camera bag. As it did not all fit in the trunk, John had to sit in the front seat. The driver handed John some things from the front seat to hold which included his odiferous lunch. The windshield wiper blades were falling apart and it was raining heavily. He had a bunch of random stuff stored above the visor that kept falling down. When he uncovered his EZ Pass gizmo for the toll booth the bracket that held it to the dashboard fell apart. We got to the hotel just about the time the rain subsided.

We stayed at the Hotel Giraffe, on Park Avenue South at 26th St. In the maps in the taxis, we were in an unnamed district south of Murray Hill and north of Grammercy Park. In at least one book this was called the Flatiron District but the NY Cabs considered it nameless, the only region south of Harlem without a name. The hotel was very nice, a "boutique" hotel, 73 rooms, in a quiet (for Manhattan) area. We had a small balcony facing 26th St. John stayed in a friend's apartment in Harlem, 20-30 minutes away by subway.

We got sandwiches at a coffee shop nearby. Then we set out with John to take his luggage and guitar to Scott's apartment. We were a little more nicely/heavily dressed than normal as we planned to end up at Patsy's, a restaurant that Susan had heard many things about, for dinner. Our first introduction to the subway was not good. It was hot and muggy on the platform and seemed to take forever for the train to come. Then we had to change trains and go through it again. At least the subway cars themselves were well air conditioned. Then we got out and were on the main drag in Harlem. We only had to walk one long block but passed many colorful scenes, people selling various things, music playing on boom boxes, a rasta-looking guy selling CDs, a produce market, etc. Then we got to Scott's door and John couldn't open it. Another tenant was leaving and she showed him how to do it. Scott was back in California and had given John the keys. After dropping off the stuff, we figured out how to lock it back up and were on the street again. Past the subway station we could see the Apollo Theatre, but I was not wanting to walk that far.

We wanted to stop short of Time Square and walk to Rockefeller Center, but John misjudged the stops and we were south of Time Square with little choice but to pass through. Susan did not like the crowds and did not want to come back. We went over to 5th Avenue and saw St. Patrick's Cathedral and then Rockefeller Center. Susan was getting tired of walking so we found an (amazingly quiet) bar and sat for a while. I wasn't sure of the precise location of Patsy's, I had been there once before, so John got the address and phone number. I suggested he call to see if we needed a reservation. He got a recording that said that they were closed, for precisely the days that we were in Manhattan, and would reopen the night we would arrive back in Phoenix. We were devastated. So we walked over there anyway, just to look at it. We passed the Ed Sullivan Theatre along the way. Then we took a cab to a restaurant that we had heard of near Greenwich Village that was coincidentally also called Patsy's, although very different, where we had dinner. It was very loud, mostly an NYU crowd in there with thumpathumpathumpa music. We walked back to our hotel from there, one of the longer walks of the trip.

Sunday, July 6. Susan had enjoyed Little Italy in Boston and had similar hopes for New York's. We took the subway there and at first glance it was very cool but on further analysis it was just a tourist trap. We did not see a grocery and there were tons of souvenir shops. We stopped for coffee and a cannoli. The filling got an A but the shell a C. I had an Italian rum cake that was very good. The waitress was Puerto Rican or Dominican we thought. Then we headed for the subway which was on the line between Little Italy and Chinatown. We had little interest in Chinatown as we were vary familiar with San Francisco's, but if the crowds near the subway were any indication, we do not want to go there. This was the most intense crowding we had seen other than Time Square.

We went to Ground Zero. Today it is just a big construction fence around the spot where the towers were. We walked from there to Wall Street. There is intense security around the New York Stock Exchange. We saw the spot where George Washington was first inaugurated. Then cab to subway, subway all the way uptown to Central Park West and a look at the Dakota, the site of John Lennon's murder, where Yoko Ono still lives. Then over to the park and then a cab back to near our hotel and pizza for lunch. We then found a place called Organique that had design-your-own-salad and -sandwich items. We had them put together some salads to have for dinner later (dressing on the side). Bought wine, pops, chips, etc. at a couple more nearby shops and walked back to the hotel.

We had tickets to The Lion King, which was celebrating its 10th anniversary on Broadway. Everyone had told me how wonderful it was but I was not particularly excited. I am not a big fan of musicals and on my first trip to Broadway I was passing up some big names in some more serious endeavors. I was somewhat familiar with the story, having watched the videotape of the movie with the kids years ago. The taxi could not get all the way to the theatre, so we got to once again fight through the crowd at Time Square. Once inside, it was relatively calm. When the doors opened we found out that we had great seats, 13th row center. I have to tell you that I was amazed at just how good this show was. The costumes and the production were unbelievable. You would have to see it to appreciate it.

After the show, Susan was the hero, managing to flag us a cab in the midst of the mob that emitted from the theatre. Before we knew it we were back at the hotel.

Monday, July 7. One goal of the trip was to avoid long lines. The Statue of Liberty is a problem in that regard, from what I have heard. An alternative is the Staten Island Ferry, which is free. It takes you past the statue and there are no lines involved. So we got a cab to the ferry terminal. Along the way we saw the waterfalls. They are a temporary public art installation in the East River this summer. Water is pumped from the river and then cascaded down, resembling waterfalls. There are four of them. The ferry was loading as we arrived, so there was no wait. We sat on the side of the boat that faced away from New Jersey and the statue, looking instead at Brooklyn. The ferry terminals were clean and modern. On the Staten Island end we looked outside for a minute, there is a minor league baseball stadium (Staten Island Yankees) and just waited or the next ferry back. This time we sat on the side facing the statue. This was not as good a view as you would have if you paid for the the tour, waited in line, etc., but it was quite pleasant.

Then a cab to a subway station in Brooklyn. The area that we got left in was quite UNpleasant, looked downright dangerous. The subway took us to Greenpoint, a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn where John wanted to go. We found a Polish restaurant. The food was pretty good, I liked the kielbasa.

Then subway to the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge. We walked across the bridge back to Manhattan, which was way cool. There is a pedestrian walkway that is above the traffic. Subway back from the Manhattan side of the bridge to the hotel. Wine and cheese reception in the lobby of the hotel. John left to go back to Brooklyn to see Caitlin and Daniel. We walked around our nameless district, primarily on Lexington Avenue, then had dinner at a Ray's Pizza outlet and went back to our room.

Tuesday, July 8. I got tickets online for the Empire State Building tour. This enables you to skip the first line, which is the ticket line. There is still a bunch of waiting in line, which apparently can be bypassed if you buy a more expensive package. We spent most of the morning standing in line for the tour and ultimately taking it. Then we walked over to Macy's. After Macy's, John and Susan bought some souvenirs at some shops on 34th Street. From there we took a cab up to north of the Theatre district and had lunch at the Carnegie Deli, a famous place with celebrity pictures on the wall. A sandwich could feed three people easily. Then walked north past Carnegie Hall and into Central Park. Walked around, exited at southeast end and walked past some of the high end shops in that area. Then we found a Yankees team shop, where John bought a hat (and one for his future father-in-law) and I bought a shirt. Then subway back to the hotel.

John had warned against how awful the subway would be getting back from the Yankees game -- add rowdy drunks to an already hot crowded place -- so I bought us tickets on the Yankee Clipper, a boat that would take us from fairly close to our hotel to right next to Yankee Stadium. We took a short cab ride to the 34th Street pier and waited for the ship. It was a 20-30 minute ride up the river, passing the UN building and Harlem on the left and Brooklyn, Queens and eventually the Bronx on the right. The entrance to the Stadium was about a 10 minute walk. We went up several escalators and found our seats. We were in the upper deck and the angle was so steep that the backs of the seats in the row in front was level with the floor in our row. The floor in front of the seats was so narrow that I was almost afraid to go -- stepping in front of already seated people -- to our seats. Susan was more scared even than I was. We sat through the first inning or so afraid that we would never have nerve to move to get food or use the bathroom. Then in the second inning somebody came and told us that we were in their seats. We had been confused about location. Our seats were actually much lower down. The people next to us had made the same mistake. We all got up and went down. Not only were our seats much closer to the field, there was a railing in front of our row. It was smooth sailing from there. The game was great. The Yankees were (are) in third place and they were playing Tampa Bay who were (are) in first. The Yankees played like the Yankees of old, Derek Jeter got key hits and they won impressively. The Stadium was nearly full, the crowd was into it, it was a great experience. You could see the new stadium over the left field wall. The ride back was fun. The boat was a good plan.

Wednesday, July 9. Last full day in Manhattan. Walked to the Farmers' Market at Union Square. It was great. With the possible exception of Paris this was the best one we have seen. You would not want for fresh produce if you lived near there. Walked on to Greenwich Village, had bruschetta and coffee/tea in a coffee shop at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal. Walked on to Soho, saw a bunch of trendy shops, etc. Decided we had had enough and took cab back to near hotel. Got sandwiches and went back to hotel. Maid was cleaning room so ate in the lobby. I really liked the lobby of the hotel. Windows to the street on two sides. Espresso/Capuccino machine available at all hours as were cookies and coffee. Wine/cheese 5-7. Jazz piano in the early evening. This is also where the continental breakfast was served. After eating, John and I went to the NBC Studio tour and Susan hung out in the room and then walked out and scouted a restaurant for us. The tour was OK, not outstanding. It was not as good as its counterpart in Burbank. We did get to see the Saturday Night Live studio. Back to the hotel for wine/cheese. Susan had found us a great Italian restaurant on Lexington Ave. where we had a wonderful last dinner. Back to the hotel and then said our goodbyes to John.

Thursay, July 10. Cab to Newark airport, plane left on time, plenty of time for connection in Dallas. Plane left Dallas about 10 minutes late but got into Phoenix about when planned. House was still standing. The neighbors' cat who has adopted us was at the door within minutes of our arrival. John sent text message that night after boarding his flight for Warsaw.

Overall, this was a great trip/adventure/vacation. We took tons of pictures, some of which can be seen on here.

Good Seats

We had a bad experience at a game a few weeks ago and complained to the management about it. They called us several times to apologize and finally told me they had some upgraded seats for us to the Nationals game on June 1st. They sounded like they were in the section right behind the plate where you often see people waving from. I didn't get my hopes up though because I thought I would jinx it. So I didn't take a camera, didn't, set up the DVR, and didn't tell anybody about it in advance. Sure enough, right in the section you see on TV. I tried calling Mike and Lori but no luck. I used my Q to set up a recording of the game via the Slingbox but for reasons too lengthy to explain here, I had to set it to the SD broadcast on Cox 34 rather than the HD one on 734. There were monitors in our section so I could see that we were on TV with every pitch. Imagine my disappointment when I got home and turned on the recording only to find out that we were in the part that gets cropped out of the picture if you watch in SD. I got first picture above by taking a picture of our TV screen playing the mlb.tv feed. Took me a while to figure that out. We are on the right hand side of the picture. The tickets were $400 a piece! I doubt we'll ever get anything like that again... The second two were taken with my phone.

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Friedman is Right Again

Truth or Consequences

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Imagine for a minute, just a minute, that someone running for president was able to actually tell the truth, the real truth, to the American people about what would be the best — I mean really the best — energy policy for the long-term economic health and security of our country. I realize this is a fantasy, but play along with me for a minute. What would this mythical, totally imaginary, truth-telling candidate say?

For starters, he or she would explain that there is no short-term fix for gasoline prices. Prices are what they are as a result of rising global oil demand from India, China and a rapidly growing Middle East on top of our own increasing consumption, a shortage of “sweet” crude that is used for the diesel fuel that Europe is highly dependent upon and our own neglect of effective energy policy for 30 years.

Cynical ideas, like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday, would only make the problem worse, and reckless initiatives like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas guzzlers are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers.

I can’t say it better than my friend Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics, did in a Memorial Day essay in The Washington Post: “So Dodge wants to sell you a car you don’t really want to buy, that is not fuel-efficient, will further damage our environment, and will further subsidize oil states, some of which are on the other side of the wars we’re currently fighting. ... The planet be damned, the troops be forgotten, the economy be ignored: buy a Dodge.”

No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: guarantee people a high price of gasoline — forever.

This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving behavior and buying behavior in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today.

We must not make that mistake again. Therefore, what our mythical candidate would be proposing, argues the energy economist Philip Verleger Jr., is a “price floor” for gasoline: $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today. Washington would declare that it would never let the price fall below that level. If it does, it would increase the federal gasoline tax on a monthly basis to make up the difference between the pump price and the market price.

To ease the burden on the less well-off, “anyone earning under $80,000 a year would be compensated with a reduction in the payroll taxes,” said Verleger. Or, he suggested, the government could use the gasoline tax to buy back gas guzzlers from the public and “crush them.”

But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down. Therefore, if you buy a big gas guzzler today, you are locking yourself into perpetually high gasoline bills. You are buying a pig that will eat you out of house and home. At the same time, if you, a manufacturer, continue building fleets of nonhybrid gas guzzlers, you are condemning yourself, your employees and shareholders to oblivion.

What a cruel thing for a candidate to say? I disagree. Every decade we look back and say: “If only we had done the right thing then, we would be in a different position today.”

But no politician dared to do so. When gasoline was $2 a gallon, the government never would have imposed a $2 tax. Now that it is $4 a gallon, the government should at least keep it there, since it is really having the right effect.

I was visiting my local Toyota dealer in Bethesda, Md., last week to trade in one hybrid car for another. There is now a two-month wait to buy a Prius, which gets close to 50 miles per gallon. The dealer told me I was lucky. My hybrid was going up in value every day, so I didn’t have to worry about waiting a while for my new car. But if it were not a hybrid, he said, he would deduct each day $200 from the trade-in price for every $1-a-barrel increase in the OPEC price of crude oil. When I saw the rows and rows of unsold S.U.V.’s parked in his lot, I understood why.

We need to make a structural shift in our energy economy. Ultimately, we need to move our entire fleet to plug-in electric cars. The only way to get from here to there is to start now with a price signal that will force the change.

Barack Obama had the courage to tell voters that the McCain-Clinton summer gas-giveaway plan was a fraud. Wouldn’t it be amazing if he took the next step and put the right plan before the American people? Wouldn’t that just be amazing?

That Was Me...

McCain wraps up weekend with baseball game

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona Sen. John McCain completed a weekend break from campaigning by attending Sunday's baseball game between the New York Mets and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee watched from the owners' seats near the Diamondbacks' dugout, sitting between team owners Jeff Moorad and Ken Kendrick. McCain's wife, Cindy, also attended.

McCain waved when he was shown on the giant Chase Field video screen. He was greeted with subdued cheers, and a smattering of boos, from the crowd.

McCain sat for a while in the announcers' booth and spoke on the radio about baseball and campaigning.

"We've been traveling, giving speeches, raising money, doing the campaign — it's a great time," he told KTAR. "We've got a tough campaign, but you've got to love it and like it, otherwise it's too hard."

McCain spent Friday and Saturday at his home in Sedona. He heads to North Carolina on Monday.

With apologies to Dr. Seuss

And help from Maureen Dowd and Art Buchwald

Hillary Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don't care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Clinton
I don't care how.
Hillary Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion's tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Clinton
Don't you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Hillary!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don't care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Clinton!
I don't care how.
Hillary Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT.

Speaking of Tom Hayden...

Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream

by Tom Hayden, The Nation

April 22, 2008

My wife Barbara has begun yelling at the television set every time she hears Hillary Clinton. This is abnormal behavior, since Barbara is a meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic, and is inspired by Barack Obama's transformational appeal.

For Barbara, Hillary has become the screech on the blackboard. From First Lady to Lady Macbeth.

It's getting to me as well. Last year, I was somewhat reconciled to the prospect of supporting and pressuring Hillary as the nominee amidst the rising tide of my friends who already hated her, irrationally I thought. I was one of those people Barack accuses of being willing to settle. I even had framed a flattering autographed message from Hillary. But as the campaign has gone on and on, her signed portrait still leans against the wall in my study. I don't know where she belongs anymore.

At least Hillary was a known quantity in my life. I knew of the danger of her becoming more and more hawkish as she tried to break the ultimate glass ceiling. I also knew that she could be forced to change course if public opinion was fiercely opposed to the war. And I knew she was familiar with radical social causes from her own life experience in the sixties. So my progressive task seemed clear: help build an antiwar force powerful enough to make it politically necessary to end the war. Been there, done that. And in the process, finally put a woman in the White House. A soothing bonus.

But as the Obama campaign gained momentum, Hillary began morphing into the persona that has my pacifist wife screaming at the television set.

Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News and manipulating old Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos, are trying, at least unconsciously, to so damage Barack Obama that he will be perceived as "unelectable" to Democratic superdelegates. It is also clear that the campaign of defamation against Obama has resulted in higher negative ratings for Hillary Clinton. She therefore is threatening the Democratic Party's chances for the White House, whether or not she is the nominee.

Since no one in the party leadership seems able or willing to intervene against this self-destructive downward spiral, perhaps progressives need to consider responding in the only way politicians sometimes understand. If they can't hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama. And follow it up with another message: if Clinton doesn't immediately cease her path of destruction, millions of young voters and black voters may not send checks, may not knock on doors, and may not even vote for her if she becomes the nominee. That's not a threat, that's the reality she is creating.

Obama's Neighbor

I am not a Bill Ayers fan. My opinion is not based on his politics, heck we were on the same side until he decided that violence was OK. Nor is it based on his alleged illegal activities. I am not happy about the bad press that this University of Illinois-Chicago professor is bringing to Barack Obama at the moment, but that is not really the reason either. Bill Ayers, at least when I knew him in Ann Arbor in 1969, was an arrogant jerk. I was part of a group of people that went from Ann Arbor to DC in January of '69 to attend the "counter-inauguration" protest during the first inauguration of Richard M. Nixon. I am not sure how I got hooked up with it, I really didn't have any friends that were all that political, but somehow I found myself in a car heading to DC. I don't think Ayers was in our car but he was the leader, more of less, of the Ann Arbor contingent. He tended to boss people around and there was a clear split between Ayers and the rest of us lowly nobodies. I saw some interesting things on that trip. I saw The Fugs playing in a tent. I saw some folks identified as Yippies who seemed to be specializing in making woo-woo-woo Indian style noises to unnerve the horses that the (huge number of) mounted police were on. I attended a "teach-in" where the point being made was that Sirhan Sirhan (who had killed Bobby Kennedy less than a year earlier) was some sort of hero. I saw folks who would throw rocks at the cops from behind the lines and then run away while the police attacked the nonviolent kids up front.

And I mostly remember a night when I couldn't sleep. The Ann Arbor group was sleeping in a hall that belonged to a church. I vaguely remember eating uncooked Spam that night. Anyway, as I tried to sleep I found that a heated argument, one that went on for what seemed like hours, prevented me from resting. It seems that a commitment had been made that the church would be cleaned up in the morning and that somehow the task had fallen to our future Weatherman. He was not about to help clean the f-ing church. And so he stated far into the night.

Fun fact: neither Ayers nor The Dude (Jeffrey Lebowski) actually contributed to the Port Huron Statement, but Tom Hayden did.

In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC

ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos seemed to be playing a game of gotcha at last night's candidates' debate.

By Tom Shales, Washington Post

Thursday, April 17, 2008

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates' debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.

The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings, after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement. Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being competent.

Gibson sat there peering down at the candidates over glasses perched on the end of his nose, looking prosecutorial and at times portraying himself as a spokesman for the working class. Blunderingly he addressed an early question, about whether each would be willing to serve as the other's running mate, "to both of you," which is simple ineptitude or bad manners. It was his job to indicate which candidate should answer first. When, understandably, both waited politely for the other to talk, Gibson said snidely, "Don't all speak at once."

For that matter, the running-mate question that Gibson made such a big deal over was decidedly not a big deal -- especially since Wolf Blitzer asked it during a previous debate televised and produced by CNN.

The boyish Stephanopoulos, who has done wonders with the network's Sunday morning hour, "This Week" (as, indeed, has Gibson with the nightly "World News"), looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy. He came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist. That was "40 years ago, when I was 8 years old," Obama said with exasperation.

Obama was right on the money when he complained about the campaign being bogged down in media-driven inanities and obsessiveness over any misstatement a candidate might make along the way, whether in a speech or while being eavesdropped upon by the opposition. The tactic has been to "take one statement and beat it to death," he said.

No sooner was that said than Gibson brought up, yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama. "Charlie, I've discussed this," he said, and indeed he has, ad infinitum. If he tried to avoid repeating himself when clarifying his position, the networks would accuse him of changing his story, or changing his tune, or some other baloney.

This is precisely what has happened with widely reported comments that Obama made about working-class people "clinging" to religion and guns during these times of cynicism about their federal government.

"It's not the first time I made a misstatement that was mangled up, and it won't be the last," said Obama, with refreshing candor. But candor is dangerous in a national campaign, what with network newsniks waiting for mistakes or foul-ups like dogs panting for treats after performing a trick. The networks' trick is covering an election with as little emphasis on issues as possible, then blaming everyone else for failing to focus on "the issues."

Some news may have come out of the debate (ABC News will pretend it did a great job on today's edition of its soppy, soap-operatic "Good Morning America"). Asked point-blank if she thought Obama could defeat presumptive Republican contender John McCain in the general election, Clinton said, "Yes, yes, yes," in apparent contrast to previous remarks in which she reportedly told other Democrats that Obama could never win. And in turn, Obama said that Clinton could "absolutely" win against McCain.

To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. The director cut several times to reaction shots of such Clinton supporters as her daughter, Chelsea, who sat in the audience at the Kimmel Theater in Philly's National Constitution Center. Obama supporters did not get equal screen time, giving the impression that there weren't any in the hall. The director also clumsily chose to pan the audience at the very start of the debate, when the candidates made their opening statements, so Obama and Clinton were barely seen before the first commercial break.

At the end, Gibson pompously thanked the candidates -- or was he really patting himself on the back? -- for "what I think has been a fascinating debate." He's entitled to his opinion, but the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low he and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer.

Shales joined The Washington Post as a writer in the Style section in 1972, was named chief television critic in July 1977, and was appointed TV Editor in June 1979. The Washington Post Writers Group has syndicated his column since 1979.

Amazon price protection

When I was adding the link for the new mower in the previous post I saw that the manufacturer's website had the same mower for $50 less. To verify what I had paid for it on Amazon, I checked there, and yes I had paid $50 more, but now Amazon had it for the same lower price. I could not find anything by navigating the Amazon web site but I googled "Amazon price protection" and found that indeed Amazon will refund the difference if the price goes down within 30 days. A simple phone call got me a $50 refund.

Mowers and craigslist

I got tired of struggling with my old mower, which is not really designed for the grass I have, and decided to buy an electric, finally picked a cordless. I ordered it from Amazon last Friday, opting for free shipping. Supposedly it would ship on 4/16 and take 5-6 business days to arrive. Then I saw that it had shipped yesterday and would arrive tomorrow. Where would it go? Had to unload the old one in a hurry.

9:45 am Post ad for mower on craigslist
10:00 am Notice that it is there
10:21 am Receive call from prospective buyer
1:30 pm Receive call from a second prospective buyer who says he will be here in early evening
5:42 pm Second caller says he is on his way (coming from Maricopa)
6:20 pm Buyer arrives from Maricopa, inspects, buys (full price less $5)
7:00 pm Cancel craigslist ad
10:15 pm While googling for a picture of the old mower for this post, find link to my (now-cancelled) craigslist ad

This is not an April Fool's joke

According to today's Arizona Republic, McDonald's has lost their franchise at Chase Field and will be replaced by Fatburger. While I rarely bought McDonald's food at the ballpark and would not mind trying Fatburger, which I never been to, I did enjoy the occasional McFlurry, a sundae of soft serve ice cream and M&Ms. Fatburger shows no equivalent item on the menu on their website, although they do have what look like pretty good milk shakes.

Not Wanted

What do Royce Clayton, Mike Myers, Reggie Sanders, Jeff Cirillo, Bob Wickman, Damian Miller, Shawn Green, Kelly Stinnett and Russ Ortiz all have in common?

They are all former Diamondbacks who are "unsigned" free agents. Nobody wants Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Kenny Lofton and a host of others either, although some of these folks will end up somewhere eventually.