Blog Master G

Are there people out there who are really dumb enough to think that a vote for Kerry is a vote for the terrorists, as Cheney would have us believe? I sure as hell hope not, given this latest reprehensible claim from the administration.

Cheney: Wrong Vote Invites Attack: “Vice President Dick Cheney says the United States will risk another terrorist attack if voters make the wrong choice on Election Day, suggesting Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.

“‘It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,’ Cheney told supporters at a town-hall meeting Tuesday.”

Talk about unpatriotic and un-American. Scaring your constituency into voting for you. Terrible.

The summer has come to an official end.

Last week (Wednesday) I brought in the WRX for its 44,049-mile oil change, tire rotation, and wiper-blade replacement. Friday I dropped off the dogs at the kennel, and we began our 1,200-mile weekend round trip to visit friends in Central and Western New York, and my family outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The trip was great, and it’s pretty awesome what we were able to accomplish between Friday evening and Sunday night.

Friday night we hung out with Steph and Dave in Sterling, NY, and crashed with them before continuing on to PA to visit my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins. Saturday night we stayed at my grandparents’ place (the same house where my Mom grew up), then headed back east.

Nothing like driving 600 miles in one day (Sunday) with stops at the Finger Lake wineries and the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca to feel like you’ve covered a lot of ground. We met up with Johnny and his crew for stops at a few wineries before heading to a disappointing and overpriced dinner (the restaurant doesn’t touch any of the meals Jen makes from the Moosewood cookbook).

We capped off the summer last night with some delicious cajun catfish on the grill and The Station Agent on the tube.

View the PA Trip 2004 album

As you may have noticed, I’ve added a new link to my individual entries that will allow you to login to your TypeKey account to comment on my blog without having to wait for me to approve your posting.

So… go on and register over at TypeKey and get this party started. Your TypeKey account will be universal, so you can use the same account to comment on many other blogs out there.

[ TypeKey: Comment Spam Be Gone ]

It’s easy to forget in these heated times that life truly is beautiful. Mark Morford, as always, has a brilliant and moving and reflective commentary today on connecting with art and dogs and the one universal thing that we all share, despite our politics or race or religion or sexual preference: Love.

Below are selected excerpts (be sure to read the column in its entirety):

“I am searching for a few good things.

“Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is.

…

“It comes in all shapes and sizes and colors and smells. And here’s the thing: When you start to look, when you finally turn away from the news feeds and the embarrassing Fox News propaganda, and begin to re-notice the wide array of genuine voices of hope and progress and dissent in the country, all the creative types operating off the media grid and striving like calm dedicated Zen-like maniacs to make the world better and to carve out a slice of humanity amidst the clamor and the rabid postindustrial capitalistic cry, well, you begin to feel a little better. A little.

…

“And there are, of course, dogs. Oh my God yes. And what of all the amazing and open-hearted people who run all those dog shelters and rescues, people so generous of spirit and kind of heart and who feel so disenfranchised that they’ve chosen, as so many are wont to do these days, to switch away from people entirely and focus on a breed that doesn’t give a good goddamn how angry your God is and will love you no matter what your hair looks like or how painful that tumor of anxiety in your heart? Pure salvation, that is.

…

“And then it hits you all over again for the very first time: This stuff, love and alt-media and dogs and music, it is everywhere. When you look just a tiny bit deeper, just past the screaming rhetoric and the legalized homophobia and the ugly foreign policy and the mad incessant race for money and power, you begin to realize that all these seemingly small gems and tiny random oases of hope are, in fact, much larger, and more potent and more common than you realized. You just, you know, tend to forget.”

The above excerpts are from Where Is Your Hallowed Balm? Music? Yoga? Porn?

(Thanks, Glenn, for the pointer.)

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my MBNA card was due to be cancelled out of principle.

Now there’s even more reason to do so.

The Center for Public Integrity: “A small number of donations by employees of the credit card giant MBNA Corp. last month was enough to unseat Enron as President George W. Bush’s top career donor.

“The Delaware-based company has given Bush $605,041 over his career, while Enron ($602,625) slipped to second, according to a recent supplement to ‘The Buying of the President 2004,’ a book by the Center for Public Integrity detailing the financial interests behind each presidential candidate.”

Agent: “Is there a particular reason you are closing your account?”

Me: “Because your company is the largest lifetime contributor to George Bush.”

Agent: “The what?”

Me: “The George Bush. I don’t want my money going to support him anymore.”

Agent: Silence.

Case closed. Balance paid off. No more of my money is going to fund Bush. I hate that I have paid interest to a company that gave so much money to him. No more.

In fact, this week we’re also eliminating all our other debt, too, as part of our new commitment to a debt-free existence (aside from the good and necessary debt that is our mortgage and my student loan).

If you’ve missed some of the recent action over on Alan’s blog, be sure to check it out. Jen has jumped in for some good debate: “alan. please. my comments were not meant to be cruel. and i am in fact smiling as i write this. i appreciate your blog and your point of view. my intention was simply to question your painting the issues in such broad strokes, and i felt i was matching your ‘spirited’ tone. you don’t pull many punches– you are an edgy, truth-crusading blogger… i don’t pull any punches– i’m a hostile liberal 🙂 i see how this works! truce.”

I think this is good because though Alan and Jen and I may not agree on everything, we’re at least willing to listen to one another. Something rare and important in these divided times.

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

– Theodore Roosevelt

Dan writes about some of his experiences walking around protest zones in NYC: “I could not figure out reasonable criteria for arrests. In one case, I was threatened with arrest unless I immediately crossed 71st street (against the light). When I did so, the cop on the other side of the street threatened to arrest me for jaywalking.”

It makes me so mad that there’s such tight scrutiny and arrests around anyone who might be perceived as wanting to express dissent from the status quo.

This is America. Let’s dissent. Let’s express our right to speak out and demonstrate our beliefs. It is not “unpatriotic” to question Bush or the war in Iraq. It is possible to both support the troops and disagree with our presence in Iraq.

Good news from MoveOn.org‘s latest email:

Here’s why the hype that Bush is winning doesn’t stand up to scrutiny:

* Nation-wide polls don’t matter. This election will be decided in the 20 or so states that aren’t firmly in Bush’s camp. So while most national polls–which include voters in Texas and California–show a dead heat between Bush and Kerry, polls of the so-called “battleground states” tell a different story. A bipartisan poll from NPR1 has Kerry leading 52-43% in these states, and Fox News2 reports a 47-37% Kerry lead there.

* Historically speaking, Bush is in a very weak position. Most experts agree that when a president is seeking re-election, most voters first decide whether he deserves re-election, and then look at the challenger. And most voters aren’t liking what they see: Bush’s approval rating is very low for an incumbent. Even more importantly, in some recent polls a large portion of voters say the country is on the wrong track, a benchmark that is extremely tough to recover from. Bush is not where he needs to be, and even a significant bounce won’t put him there.

* In the swing states, the name of the game is turnout. There are literally millions of people who prefer Kerry to Bush but who are unlikely to vote at all. In fact, there are far more of these folks than there are “swing voters” who haven’t made up their minds yet. Experts on both sides agree that the winner on November 2 will be the candidate who gets his base out in the places where it matters. And it’s pretty straightforward to get their attention: we’ll call them on the phone, knock on their doors, and invite them to neighborhood house parties. We’ll listen to their concerns and talk to them about both candidates’ positions on the issues. And we’ll remind them repeatedly to show up on Election Day.

We’ve now got 60 paid organizers on this campaign, by next week we’ll have more than 100, and two weeks from tomorrow we’ll have 400 more. But our ultimate success depends on you: talking to millions of voters takes tens of thousands of volunteers, and we’re counting on you to be among them.

Are you ready? Click here:
http://www.moveonpac.org/precinctpartners/signup.html

(Thanks, Glenn, for suggesting I blog that.)

I also just started listening to Air America Radio today. Great stuff. They’re putting some RNC delegates on the spot on floor of MSG, and, of course, the delegates won’t answer their questions (such as a delegate who criticized Clinton’s affair and wouldn’t tell them how many times he’s been married).

Go listen live.

(Thanks, Ian, for reminding me to listen, something I’ve been meaning to do.)

I’ve written some praise in the past about Gmail. I now use it as much as I use email on my own Web server. It’s fast, reliable, and the search, of course, is great.

I have some Gmail invitations to give out, so let me know if you’re interested in one. (Friends, family, and people I actually know will get precedence.)

If you’re using Yahoo or Hotmail, you will most definitely want to switch.

Who’s the flip-flopper now, Bush?

Bush Recants, Says Terror War Will Be Won (AP): “President Bush said repeatedly on Tuesday that the United States will win its war against terrorism, trying to contain political damage from the doubt he expressed a day earlier.

“‘We may never sit down at a peace table, but make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win,’ Bush told 6,500 veterans at an American Legion convention.”

But wait. I thought Iraq was a “catastrophic success.”