The Process May Still Work
Democracy has been under vigorous attack from the highest levels of the Administration for seven years, for whatever reason. Even if they felt they were doing the right thing, the rest of us know that you can’t save the country by turning it into Communist Poland. Lech fixed that mess, and I hope we can fix this one. The way that the political process appears to be working right now gives me hope.
The Republicans have made the best choice they could have. Romney’s best quality is his hair. Although he is a personable whack-job, Huckabee is still a whack-job. McCain has a few issues, no pun intended, but I honestly feel like he has thought about all of the problems that we face and is campaigning on what he truly feels are the best answers for the country. That is all you can ask of a candidate, and puts him an infinite number of steps above the actions of Bush and Cheney. As I said to someone today, if Obama and Hillary get run over by a truck, I could at least vote for McCain.
On the Democratic side, I will probably vote for whoever gets the nomination at this point. Hillary would be a marked improvement over what we have now, but I think that she is working her own insider agenda, and I can’t see where it has much to do with us. As I have said before, where George wants to be King, Hillary want to be Queen. So I would prefer Obama, the only candidate with any chance to move things back to where our citizens are important again, and our freedoms have a chance to survive and even flourish. Obama is my man.
And there is more good news. The Democratic campaign has been a fairly clean one. I have yet to see an attack ad on the Democratic side. Both candidates have been talking about the issues that confront us, in the main. If Hillary could just get Bill to shut up, this campaign would be almost genteel. That makes me happy. We need to talk about the issues. We need leaders that believe in us and themselves, and don’t make all of their decision based on polls. The democratic process, with a small ‘d’, seems to be resurfacing after an absence of many years. That makes me very happy.
Post-Super-Tuesday Wednesday
So, how do I feel about things now that Super Tuesday is over? Naturally, I’ve thought about it and have an opinion or two. First, the Republicans. McCain is likely, now to be the winner. He is almost certainly the best they have. Romney is to be commended for having the best hair, of course. The odd man out that won’t go away is still Huckabee, a fellow who has an invisible man in the sky as a campaign manager. He apparently has captured the conservative whacko vote. I know, I shouldn’t beat around the bush so much. Sorry.
On the Democratic side, nothing changed, really. I’d have been happier if Obama had won big-time. but that was not to be, especially in places like New York and California. Hillary is just where she was, a tiny bit ahead of her only competition. I can hope that Barack Obama can get most of the remaining delegates, but that is just a hope. I believe that they are going to go into the convention very close to tied, with no candidate selected.
If that happens, I believe that back-room deals, dirty politics, and money (especially money) will get Hillary the nomination. Look at where her money comes from and you can tell she’s on sale. That’s sad, but it is the current state of American politics. The movers and shakers (the corporate rich) will move and shake, and Obama will be left out in the cold. I don’t believe that he is for sale, at least not yet.
Maybe, as one of the CNN wags said last night, Barack Obama is a movement and movements are hard to stop. I don’t know that that is true. The folks in charge have done a very good job of stopping the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the Black rights movement, the Gay rights movement, and any other movement that has any chance of loosening their iron control on the reins and whip that control this country.
I will still campaign for and stand behind Barack Obama. I can’t guarantee that my whole heart will be in it, though. Party politics as usual, combines with corporate greed, both well spun, may be enough to do him in.
The State of The World
The world seems always to have been full of petty dictators. If you will think back to your high school history, it was pretty much a parade of monarchist, fascist, socialist, communist, and other-ist dictators. They were everywhere, from ancient Greece to, well, modern Greece and beyond. Generally, those leaders with even a single altruistic quality were quickly gunned down in favor of someone much more self absorbed.
With very few exceptions (the United States was one until very recently) the world has been run by the greedy, the wealthy, the power-hungry, the corrupt, the heartless, the cruel, and the sadistic. Names such as Torquemada, Stalin, Trujillo, Hitler, Batista, Nero, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Duvalier, Mussolini, Attila the Hun, King Herrod, Saddam Hussein, Chairman Mao, and George W. Bush roll trippingly from the tongue.
Without these people, history would have been a boring succession of scientific achievement and artistic glory set in flower-filled fields under puffy pink clouds. None of that for the human race, though! Not us! All that humans really need is a asshole in a uniform or clerical robes to follow into battle and half of us will be happy to be hewing pieces out of the other half with large iron swords while the gutters and oceans run red and all of the children and the elderly slowly starve to death in their caves.
History has made me the optimist that I am today. 
Hack and Johnson - Sunshine and Stocks
There is a scandal brewing right here in Lawrence, Kansas. The Mayor of Lawrence (Sue Hack), and the head of the County Commission (Bob Johnson) have been found to own stock in Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, during a period where they were determining what tax and fee concessions to give that company to locate in Lawrence. This comes on the heels of their having been found to have met, at last twice, behind closed doors with Deciphera during this same period, in direct contravention of the Kansas Sunshine law. I’m not sure why we have to give away the store to every company that’s thinking of moving to Lawrence, anyway.
We may be getting an idea of why they think it is necessary. Both Sue Hack (the Mayor of Lawrence) and Bob Johnson, head of the Couty Commission, wound up, somehow, with $5,000 each in Deciphera stock at the time the tax and fee deals were being cut. I don’t know that either Hack, and ex-school teacher, or Johnson, are doubling as day traders, but the direct purchase of that much stock doesn’t sound like something either one of them would do on a daily basis.
Lew Perkins Fires Hank Booth
It looks like another era is passing this week in Lawrence, and at KU. Hank Booth, a very popular local radio announcer has been off work for a week or so as the Jayhawks men’s basketball announcer at Allen Fieldhouse due to an injury. It looks like Lew Perkins is taking the opportunity to replace him with one of his people, Eric Danielson, who has been doing the women’s basketball games. Booth is an icon in Lawrence, a very public-minded, intelligent, and gifted man who has been in the radio business in Lawrence for many years as a station owner, executive, and announcer.
I would imagine, and I have heard rumors, that Booth would not kowtow to Perkins, who is as intent on growing his power base as he is on anything. So Hank Booth seems to have worn out his welcome with the transplanted Easterner Perkins, a man who has been in Lawrence less than ten percent of the time that Hank Booth has. He has a reputation for running roughshod over anything that preceded his tenure as King of the KU Athletic Department, and he has proven that true again today.
Idiots In Sports
In the news today, I see that Roger Clemons says he is upset about being named in the steroids scandal, Michael Vick says he is not the beast, and Jason Kidd is unhappy about being named in a lawsuit by a model that he allegedly groped. This is not too difficult, boys. Pull up a chair and just pay attention for a few minutes. It might be too late for you three, and all of the rest of the athletes that have been arrested and convicted lately, but maybe we can save some of the young ones.
If you’re upset about being associated with the steroids scandal, stay the hell away from steroids, Roger. If you don’t want to be the beast, Michael, don’t get involved in fighting dogs and killing the ones that don’t win. If you don’t want to be in court, Jason, don’t grope the model. You three are among a tragically large number of stupid effing jocks that give all jocks a bad name. Believe me, there are a lot of professional athletes that don’t deserve to be associated with your stupidity.
Want a Mortgage on a New Home?
For all of you worrying about the twin crises involving housing prices and mortgages, please note that the government is worrying right along with you. According to a report by the Census Bureau, new home prices managed to tumble another 13% in October. That is the largest dip in home prices since 1970. One reason for the fall is the approximately 200,000 new homes that still remain on the market from prior months, driving prices down.
The extreme issues facing the mortgage market are also contributing to the crisis conditions. Facing a record number of foreclosures as payment amount increases hit more and more variable mortgagees, the mortgage market is in disarray. This is keeping many buyers from finding the financing they need to buy a home. The mortgage crisis may be more dangerous than the slide in new home sales, with approximately 250,000 American homeowners currently involved in some sort of foreclosure.
Kansas Bites the Dust
The Kansas Jayhawks ran into a buzz saw at Arrowhead stadium Saturday night. When they came out the other end of that device, they were considerably smaller in both stature and reputation. Even the coach was smaller in the latter, which is saying something. It is not possible to blame the players for this loss. If you wish to blame anything, it is the Kansas system, from Lew Perkins down to the assistant coaches.
The Jayhawks played the best team they had faced all year and they just were not up to it. They got rocked back on their heels in the first few minutes of the game and could not recover enough confidence to play well until it was almost over. This is why people have been complaining all year about the level of competition that the Jayhawks have faced. When you get your first test on the last game of the regular season, you have no idea how to respond to the challenge.
Recycling the Wrong Way
I was dismayed over the weekend to learn that much, if not most, of our recycled electronics are involved in a very seedy and human-damaging processes. It would seem that many of the items that we discard ever-so-carefully carefully in order not to harm the environment are being harvested in such a way that they are very harmful to humans, instead. To make matters worse, the process still harms the environment, albeit the environment offshore.
The electronics that we discard in a manner that we are told is “green” turns out to be anything but. Much of our electronic refuse is collected and shipped overseas (China, Nigeria, India, etc.) where very poorly paid workers manually disassemble it, often using their only their bare hands, hand tools and blowtorches to do so. In the process they are exposed, in an up close and personal manner, to the very cocktail of harmful chemicals that we are trying to avoid by recycling these items.
The State of Education
Oddly enough, I had to get this Kansas topic from a friend in Australia. Yvonne (her blog is here) emailed me about a great YouTube video exposing the archaic methods of education being used all over the world, and the way that young, internet-savvy students feel about that, which is mainly annoyed. I would paste the video in, but as I have said before, this WordPress theme is broken and won’t work with the YouTube code. You can find the video here. Please watch it now. It is much more powerful than my words. And that is part of the point.
These students, who happen to be from Kansas State University, make an excellent point. I think they do a good job of saying what students elsewhere would also say. Although college was a long time ago for me, I still remember it well. It was drudgery, mainly, sort of a continuation of high school, only with beer. Since then, technology has come a long way. But you would not know it by visiting the classrooms in the university of your choice. We are still stuck in a room, listening at the same speed that we did in the Middle Ages, usually bored out of our trees.
