Centerfield

My New Year's resolution is to spend more quality time with the kids.

Reid Prepares to lead the Minority and a New Party

With the 109th congress about to begin, NPR profiled Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid this morning. Cast in Trumanesque even Lincolnesque imagery, the piece highlighted the Nevada Senator's humble beginnings in a bleak mining town shanty. The stuff of legends indeed. But the real story here is that while we armchair pundits pontificate, Harry Reid, the centrist pro-life, pro-mining, pro-gun Mormon from Red America is about to put it on the line for the Democratic party and it's ideals. Methinks we are in good hands.

Now before ye Dems from the D wing proceed to curse my poor mother's name for bearing a scurly conservative in Dem clothing, know this. I'm strongly pro-choice and anti-mining industry. And I will network and organize with my fellows to resist any champions of the opposing viewpoints including the good Senator. But this merely serves to highlight the beauty and joy of the centrist stance. We can embrace a variety of practical positions across the political spectrum based on what works for America and yet fits with our personal values; this as opposed to a doggedly unexamined adherence to the rigid doctrine of ideologues left and right. And we Joyous many also just happen to be the majority of Americans.

It's this majority that has largely been abandoned by BOTH parties of late. Yes, abandoned by a process whose ideologically skewed primaries tend to anoint candidates to the left and right of the nation's comfort zone. Given this dismal selection, the good middle held it's nose and broke slighty for Bush. As a centrist that broke the other way, I think that they made a grave error and were essentially hood-winked, but I can appreciate their dilemma having held my nose as well. The center right to center left majority coalition that Clinton and the DLC forged seems like only a dream now as the liberals have played into the hands of the right and thereby pushed the world into the arms of bush and his oil stained cronies. A catastrophe of tragic proportion that we and ours will pay the price of for generations to come.

Enter Harry Reid. Center right warts and all, Reid gives me comfort that the tide is turning, or more accurately returning as water will find it's own level. And in a functional democracy that level is inevitably the political and philosophical center. Perhaps most telling though was Reid's rather easy election by his peers, as well as the election of Bill Richardson as Chair of the DGA by his, and the now rising star of an anti-hillary like Evan Bayh for 08. These things give me great comfort indeed and restore my confidence in the wisdom and ability of my party to govern.

Now, if only the party apparatchiks can elect a Rosenberg or a Fowler as DNC chair, I can actually get some sleep again.

PEACE

Thanks, Todd. I forgot all about it.

Happy New Year to you all, and I hope 2005 is more peaceful than the year we've just been through.

Happy New Year to all. I took my daughter skiing on Wednesday, went down a hill for the second time in my life and it is great!! Wish I had done this in my younger days. People living in ski country out west are really lucky!

We're having a heck of a time with comment spam over at PK.

I know you all have battled it here. I saw where Rick was closing out comments for old posts...but is there anything else you've been able to do to manage it effectively?

Rick's done the heavy anti-spam sysadmin lifting here. The few that still manage to creep through in my own threads I delete manually, but they have been very few. I think I caught one yesterday, the first in weeks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

RIP, Jerry Orbach.

Happy new year!

Yay, Horns!

(they just won the Rose Bowl)

I found an interesting article about Iraq,“Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004”.
Turns out that Halliburton is only #7.
My faith in government is finally restored ;-)

The source website is radical left, but I think I'll start monitoring them for accuracy and see how they score. Its always fun to find a news source were a story appears days, weeks or months before the “real news sources” report it.

If anyones interested, here are some less than main stream sources (Turn Java script and Java Off, set your firewall and virus software to “kill” and use Firefox instead of Explorer as your browser. Some of these places have links that send you out into the badlands of the Internet. So let the buyer beware.):

Fark.com = Drunken college kids mine the web for weirdness.

ATSNN.COM = Tin foil hat types on the look out for government conspiracies and aliens.

Scotsman.com = Scotland based news service. Tends to just report the facts without all the bias adjectives you get from Fox and CNN.

Metafilter.com = Left leaning site that supplies the “best of the web”, occasionally has an interesting tidbit.

The Christian Science Monitor = A mainstream American news source, but it seem to have more integrity than the others (IMHO).

What is a "war profiteer"? Someone who sells military stuff to the government? Why is that war profiteering? You might as well say that anyone that benefits in any way from war is a profiteer. Did they start the war? This is the kind of stuff you saw after WW I ,where the "munitions" manufacturers were accused of fomenting the war. IMO, it's silly. Regardless of how much these companies benefited from the war, they didn't start it, so what's the point? Haliburton might have a lot of things to answer for, but responsibility for the war is not one of them.

My, didn't we get up in a cranky mood.

I believe they are being accused of lack of accountability, defrauding the government, unfair advantage in the contract award process......
The usual stuff government contractors do.

So reach for that second cup of coffee then read the article.

prof·it·eer (prf-tîr) One who makes excessive profits on goods in short supply.

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Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.