Sarah 'Connor' Palin

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Senator McCain's choice for Vice-President, appears to have high quotients of political smarts and personal integrity. She counters the youth and good looks of Senator Obama campaign with the same for the Republican side.

But I disagree diametrically with many of her views.

And her elevation to vice-presidential candidate removes the foreign affairs experience —or lack thereof— debate from the table, for both sides.

PS. The Sarah 'Connor' allusion is to the gun-toting heroine who saves humanity in the sci-fi movie Terminator.

A right-er gets it right

Here's President Clinton last night at the Democratic Convention:

[In 1992] We prevailed in a campaign in which the Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander in chief. <...> Sound familiar? It didn't work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history. And it won't work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.

Sometimes the political right can get it right. Here's Peggy Noonan, President Reagan's speechwriter, writing this morning in the Wall Street Journal:

This was Deft Political Pro Bill doing what no one had been able to do up to this point at the convention, and that is make the case for Barack Obama. He lambasted the foe, asserted Obama's growth on the trail, argued that he was the right man for the job and did that as a man who once held that job and is remembered, at least in terms of domestic policy and at least by half the country, as having done it pretty darn well.

Here's an excerpt from Senator Hillary Clinton on Tuesday evening:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? <...Or> Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible? <...>

My mother was born before women could vote. But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for president.

Here are Noonan's comments on that Tuesday speech, and on Hillary's stunningly gracious suspension of the roll call vote yesterday:

The Hillary speech was the best of her career. Toward Obama she was exactly as gracious as she is capable of being. <...> she proved herself the most gifted pol on the prompter in current political history.

The decision to put Obama over the top and ask for acclamation? Masterly. Mrs. Clinton's actions this week have been pivotal not only for Obama, but for her.

She showed herself capable of appearing to put party first. <...> And that, for her, is a brilliant move. Really: brilliant. Here's one reason: Teddy [Kennedy] is, throughout his party, beloved. Beloved would be something very new for Hillary.

And, Noonan on Senator Kennedy, ill with cancer, showing grit and grace on Tuesday:

[Ted Kennedy's speech] was a small masterpiece of generosity. Not only that he showed up, not only that he spoke, but that with every right to speak of himself and his career, with every right to speak about his family and his memories and the lessons he's learned and the great things he's seen, with all the right to dwell on those things he produced: a speech about Barack Obama. Telling America to vote for him. How classy was that? Very.

In his speech last evening, President Clinton delivered a powerful rhetorical construction (worthy of Noonan, by the way). It may have been a denunciation of Bush/Cheney's go-it-alone international calamity of the last 8 years, and, ironically, it may have been a personal excoriation. But it offered a sense of hope and, yes, change, for the next 4, if not 8 years.

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of power.

I'll finish with the finish from HRC's speech:

Even in the darkest of moments, ordinary Americans have found the faith to keep going. This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.<...>

That is our duty, to build that bright future, and to teach our children that in America there is no chasm too deep, no barrier too great — and no ceiling too high — for all who work hard, never back down, always keep going, have faith in God, in our country, and in each other.

Wake Up, America

It's Election Day 2008. We Democrats are giving America a wake-up call. <..>

If there was an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating, this administration would take the gold. World records for violations of national and international laws. They want another four-year term to continue to alienate our allies, spend our children's inheritance and hollow out our economy. <...>

We can't afford another Republican administration. Wake up, America. Wake up, America. Wake up, America.

The rest of the speech delivered by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio at the Democratic National Convention, Tuesday 26 August.

The hope still lives

And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now:

"I am a part of all that I have met
To [Tho] much is taken, much abides
That which we are, we are --
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Ted Kennedy, at the Democratic Convention 1980.

And here, his peroration as delivered last night at the 2008 Convention in Denver in advocacy of Barack Obama, and ever resonant for the better angels of America:

The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on.

Ahh, Teddy.

Obama/Biden

Congratulations to Senator Barack Obama on his selection of Senator Joe Biden as his Vice-Presidential running mate.

Senator Biden's passion, smarts (foreign affairs), and experience bode well for electoral victory, and for crucial benefit to the nation come 20 January 2009.

With the feral Rove/McCain smear hounds unleashed, Obama needed a pit bull to cover his flank.

If only "clean" Joe Biden can think first and speak later, it may prove to be a great choice for Obama ... second only to having selected Senator Hillary Clinton.

Fast times with hydrogen car

A local official in northern Virginia recently employed a unique method to demonstrate proof of concept for 'green driving'.

Falls Church City Council Member Dan Sze became the first local official in the country to drive the Honda Clarity - the world's first series production hydrogen fuel cell automobile <...> he was promptly stopped by a Park Police officer after being clocked going three times the posted speed limit. <..>"people are not about to take a hydrogen car seriously until it gets treated like a real car."

The rest of the story at Blueweeds.

An award; activists fight sprawl in Nevada

Carol Cizauskas and I have the same last name. In fact, we are sister and brother.

Ms. Cizauskas is a freelance journalist. A story she wrote last year for the Reno News & Review has just been awarded the Nevada Press Association first place award for best business news story in the 2007-2008 year.

Growing out
Activists fight sprawl into areas remote from the Truckee Meadows

By Carol Cizauskas

Reno News and Review

Originally published 31 May 2007

A small but persistent group is leading the fight against proposed development of 5,700 acres west of Pyramid Lake. It would create up to 12,000 upscale homes in an area called Winnemucca Ranch, a process that would be eased by enactment of Assembly Bill 513.

A couple of hours before a May 25 Senate vote, about 20 members of Voters for Sensible Growth held signs and called their state representatives from cell phones in front of Reno City Hall. A.B. 513 passed the Senate 15-5 a few minutes later, but protestors say they’ll fight on as the bill makes its way back to the Assembly for approval of Senate amendments to the measure.

One of the leaders of the group is Erik Holland, who moved to Reno from Alaska seven years ago and last year ran unsuccessfully for Reno mayor, in part on this issue. The biggest reason the group opposes the Winnemucca Ranch development, he said, is because it’s leapfrog sprawl, instead of building close to the city.

[ More here... ]

Way to go, sis!

It was a dark and stormy night

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

That, written by Garrison Spik, is this year's winning entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

The contest, sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University in California, began in 1982. It

honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Appropriately enough, Mr. Spik (pronounced Speak) is the communications director for a Washington, D.C. firm.

Runner ups here.

Here's the original, inspirational, sentence of Lord Bulwer-Lytton:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Olympic Fright

lucky flowers on 8.8.08
Originally uploaded by cizauskas

I found the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics to be simultaneously tedious and discomfiting.

For me, just one drummer in a jazz quartet can transcend a moment more so than thousands of drummers with what appeared to be blood stains on their foreheads.

For me, the scene had ramifications of totalitarian might. Or as Tom Boswell of the Washington Post put it:

No democracy can or should invest the money and manpower that went into this city-wide fireworks-spewing deification of national pride, athletic aspiration and Communist Party self-congratulation.

Let the athletes compete -- except of course those refused visas by the Communist Chinese.

On this Chinese lucky day of 8/8/08, I submitted the above photo as part of the 24 Hours of Flickr – Flickr 888.

Have laptop? You're under suspicion!

Innocent until proven guilty has been one of the assumed rights of our Constitution, affirmed repeatedly by the Supreme Court, and popularly enshrined as a pillar of our national liberty.

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government's border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin

This policy may seem merely an inconvenience but it brings a real danger to privacy, a real threat of identity theft, and a potential source of self-incrimination (inconveniently proscribed by the Fifth Amendment). It's a slippery slope we're on.