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Lynwood Boulevard

Lynwood Boulevard
Originally uploaded by schatzkins.com

Driving home from Cool Springs yesterday... I just had to stop and make a picture of this cliff-and-trees against the deep blue sky.

Hey, Here's a Platform...

....we can all support:

So let's recap: 70% of the country wants the war over yesterday, so we nominate Hillary and McCain, two of the politicians who abdicated their constitutional responsibility re: the declaration of war and handed the bullet over to President Barney Fife.  So much for "change."

Yeah, It All Adds Up

The picture pretty much says it all.

Sunset Jan 11, 2008

Sunset_080111DSC_0017
Originally uploaded by schatzkins.com

Yes, this is exactly what the sunset looked like behind our house on Friday. It's like this in the winter.

Sunset over Tanglewood - Jan 7, 2008

I'm trying (ha!) to do a "photo a day" in 2008.  I'm also trying to make better use of web photo resources like flickr.com -- just figured out how to post daily photos to the 49chevy blog.  This should be fun. 

I did this one on Monday afternoon, Jan 7.  After going ballistic about some digital bullshit, I figured I should take a walk through the neighborhood and take advantage of the late afternoon light.  This was coming back down my street, just before getting back to the house.

Hillary 08 = Bush 00

Andrew Sullivan again, spotting the wounded prey:

Now they have to either kill or coopt the hope that Obama has unleashed. Just as Bush coopted McCain's New Hampshire message in 2000, so Clinton is coopting Obama's message in 2007. She didn't find her own voice; she took Obama's, removed the eloquence and added a spice of identity politics.

Don't Cry For Me, New Hampshire

This should be the lead story in tonight's news:

Woman Who Made Clinton Cry Voted For Obama

The woman whose empathetic question -- "how do you do it?" -- sparked uncharacteristic emotion Monday from Sen. Hillary Clinton ended up voting for Sen. Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary.

Marianne Pernold Young, 64, a freelance photographer from Portsmouth, N.H., told ABC News that while she was moved by Clinton's emotional moment, she was turned off by how quickly the New York senator regained her "political posture."

"I went to see Hillary. I was undecided and I was moved by her response to me," Pernold Young said in a telephone interview with ABC News. "We saw ten seconds of Hillary, the caring woman."

"But then when she turned away from me, I noticed that she stiffened up and took on that political posture again," she said. "And the woman that I noticed for ten seconds was gone."

 

What's the old line, "the key to success is sincerity, and once you've learned how to fake that, the rest is easy..."

I got that from J.R. Ewing.  He stole it from George Bernard Shaw.

New Hampshire: Tears for Fears

There seem to be two recurring themes in the wake of last night's results:

The first is that Hillary's little tear-up on Saturday broke the ice-queen mystique.  Fine, but it seems ironic to me that she keeps calling Barack an inexperienced  lightweight and then "finds her voice" in a few choke-backed tears.  As somebody pointed out somewhere, you never saw Maggie Thatcher or Golda Meir tearing up in public.

But the really worrisome thing I'm reading about is the 'Bradley Effect," named for former/late LA Mayor Tom Bradley from when he ran for guv'nor.  Seems a lot of people told the pollsters that they'd vote for the black guy,  and then pulled the switch for the white guy in the privacy of their own voting booth.  That the NH primary is a voting booth affair and Iowa was a public-outcry caucus might reinforce that theory.  So.... maybe we've still got farther to go than we'd like to think.

I didn't stay up for Hillary (recorded it for later) but I did watch Barack, and... that's just the voice I want to listen to. Him I would follow.  Hillary... just more of the same ol' same ol.

Why Obama ?

Here is Andrew Sullivan, my very favorite gay / Catholic / conservative / Republican pundit, on the heels of his brief appearance on the Colbert Report, explaning why Barack Obama is the man of the hour:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. ...

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

It's a really long article, from the December Atlantic magazine. Better start reading it now, because by the time you're done, Barack will the the nominee-designate, and Mrs. Clinton will be toast.  Who's got the butter?

Obama Wins the Iowa Caucus

...and delivered the kind of 'victory speech' you long to hear from presidential candidates.  I watched Hillary "concede," I watched Huckabee, and then I watched this, and I for one found the whole thing downright inspirational: