This will be the first holiday season since 2001 that I’m NOT working retail. For that, among many other things, I am extremely thankful.
I’m not so thankful for the Economics exam that I have in a few hours, though. More later.
UPDATE: Exam over. Typos in blog post corrected. Time to relax & enjoy myself for a hour or so. After that, I need to start cooking for tomorrow!
Don’t let it be forgot
that once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot
Jacqueline Kennedy (as she was then called) said it best in the Life Magazine interview of her, the week after JFK was assassinated:
There’ll be great presidents again … but there’ll never be another Camelot again. Once, the more I read of history, the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.
Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics to Camelot and in whose autobiography I found the quote above, said that he was never able to watch a production of Camelot again afterwards.
On the weekend before Thanksgiving six years ago, I bought my first-ever car: a Saturn SL2. It’s a great car that has taken me safely through two nasty accidents, still gets 30+ MPGs on the highway, and is very reliable. I will probably drive it until it falls apart.
So to wake up to the news that the Spring Hill, TN plant where my Saturn was made is slated to be closed was a little sad. It’s been years since Saturn was the “different kind of car company” it started out as. These days, Saturns are made in a number of GM plants, have reverted to steel frames, and are generally Just Another GM Brand. When the day finally comes that I do get another car, it’s not likely it will be a Saturn.
I wish I’d been able to get to see the Spring Hill plant in its heyday.
Wow, I go out to study for a few hours and all sorts of stuff hits the fan in Israel.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will quit his ruling Likud ahead of snap elections and form a new centrist party.
[snip]
Sharon will tear apart the movement he helped found to break from the far-right Likud “rebels” who opposed his withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip and potentially free him to give up more land that Palestinians seek for a state.
But the 77-year-old’s gamble is possibly the biggest of a military and political career built on risk-taking and polls indicate it is uncertain he can turn the popularity of the Gaza pullout into electoral victory.
Dumping the hardliners and moving towards the center. Good move. I hope it succeeds.
It will be interesting to see how the tinfoil hat crew responds. So many of them are convinced that Sharon is some kind of evil puppet master; I wonder how they’ll spin this?
I saw the documentary ‘The War Room’ when it first came out. It was a fascinating look at how Presidential elections work. But ultimately, it was about politics, not policy. When the election was won, the war room disbanded.
Contrast that with this:
A war-room defense was “something we did well during the campaign,” said Nicolle Wallace, Bush’s communications director. “Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn’t be necessary after the election.”
It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove.
Campaigns are about selling a candidate. That’s fine. After the election, especially after the re-election, is it too much to ask that the focus be on actually governing the country?
The problem facing Bush is not that he didn’t sell well enough. It’s that his policy on Iraq stinks and needs to be deep-sixed immediately. No matter how much the new “War Room” tries to spin and smear, it’s not going to change the essential problem here.
I managed to miss most of the House debate last night due to a cable box that seems to be flaking out (Comcast is coming Tuesday). But I did catch the last hour or so. I’m not exactly a CSPAN junkie, but it seems to me to be quite the piece of political theater. I had no idea who John Murtha was before 48 hours ago, but his gravitas and sincereity is fantastic. I wish we’d seen more of him in the past. All last night needed was some better scriptwriters, a few cute young House interns for jiggles, and a happy ending, and Hollywood would have loved it.
Seriously, though, what did it all mean? I don’t know. Supposedly the Republicans introduced the ‘get out now’ resolution to embarrass the Democrats. True, now everyone can go into the 06 election cycle and say ‘See, 400+ members of the House voted against getting out, so we must Stay The Course
NTodd has a good take on things, but I suspect we will not see Murtha’s resolution coming to the floor anytime soon. The House leadership won’t see any benefit in allowing debate over a proposal that’s acutally reasonable, now that they’ve had their chance to make a calculated political gesture.