Fiat Lux

It took almost a month, mostly consumed by Allstate's inability to get off their butts, but I picked up my newly repaired SL2 from the body shop today!

New side panels, new front and rear bumper, new strut & wheel, G-d know what else... and of course had to pay my deductible (ouch) ... but she's MINE again!!!

I told the body shop to give me an alignment report and they did, but frankly I don't know what to look for on it. I have the paper on file though just in case.

What a relief. Driving that icky Honda loaner car was really a drag.

I'm tired and have been fighing off a cold these past few days. Been tough to get the energy together to post. But Nicholas Kristof has a good column in the NY Times today and I wanted to call a bit of attention to it.

America is riven today by a "God gulf" of distrust, dividing churchgoing Republicans from relatively secular Democrats. A new Great Awakening is sweeping the country, with Americans increasingly telling pollsters that they believe in prayer and miracles, while only 28 percent say they believe in evolution. All this is good news for Bush Republicans, who are in tune with heartland religious values, and bad news for Dean Democrats who don't know John from Job.

It's hard not to see that as a boast that the U.S. has become the global superpower because God is on our side.

Indeed. And highly troubling to this non-Christian.

I wrote about this issue yesterday and here I am back at it again today - a post over at Blog For America set me off. According to The Club For Growth, people who support Howard Dean are part of a vast

latte-drinking,
sushi-eating,
Volvo-driving,
New York Times-reading,
body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving,
left-wing freak show

The Burnt Orange Report posted a nifty comeback. An excerpt:

Even when you work this out on a per-capita basis, there is one Starbucks location in Vermont for every 307,000 Vermonters, versus one Texas location for every 53,987 Texans. In other words, there are over five times as many Starbucks locations on a per-person basis in Texas than there are in Vermont.

Since the market would never lie to us, we can safely assume who the real latte-sippers are.

Although this sort of tit-for-tat admittedly brings a smile to my lips, the underlying issue is a serious one. It all gets back to that great cultural divide in America these days, and it worries me. We have become a nation of "Us" and "Them" and we seem to continually strive for more ways of dividing ourselves.

I am really, really tired of it. Sleazy, divisive, insulting, underhanded politics seems to be the name of the game these days - and not just in Republican circles - and I've had enough. I want my country back.

I hope from the bottom of my heart that Howard Dean is as good as we supporters believe him to be, because I don't think I could stand another letdown. If he turns out to be yet another slimy politician who's brillantly, yet cynically, manupulated himself into his current front-runner status, I'm going to give it up and look hard at moving to someplace nice and quiet like Tonga.

The New York Times, and many other news sources, are reporting today on President Bush's latest proposal, to earmark 1.5 billion dollars to promote healthy marriages. With 7+ years of marriage under my belt, I'll be first to admit that healthy marriages take work, but I'm appalled that in such tight economic times this is considered a big priority by The Powers That Be.

"A growing body of statistical evidence suggests that children fare best, financially and emotionally, in married two-parent families," says the Times. And that's true. But what this country really needs is not more smarmy commercials promoting being a Dad, but a focus on creating the kinds of jobs that help families stay afloat financially and on improving education so that more Americans are capable of holding down those good jobs.

Most of the press coverage I've read focuses on how this plays to the president's base of conservative voters, and how this may be the first step towards federal regulation or legislation against gay marriage. I find myself wondering whether this is another way to get the much vaunted "faith based initiatives" back into play. After all, the Federal government really doesn't have much apparatus for family counseling or marriage training. A lot of churches do, though.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced this is another one of Karl Rove's political moves. It's not really about public policy or actually helping people. It's about having a proposal on the table that you can use to smear your political rivals as being "anti family" if they say anything to oppose it. And to top it off, this proposal appeals directly to the soccer Moms who are key swing votes.

I know this is the sort of thing to expect in an election year. I'm sure more is to follow. But boy, does it suck. This is the kind of blatant political posturing that made me think I'd sooner pick up doggie poo all day than run for political office.
I did want to run for office when I was younger. I thought I would be able to do something good for people. I'm glad I didn't. I don't think I would like being the kind of person who can successfully get elected in America these days.

So Kerry took Iowa. That was quite a surprise. I was not too surprised that Gephardt faded - there never seemed to be much juice behind his candidacy. Edwards, I think, has floated towards the top becasue he's gotten enough name recognition to garner interest but not so much intense scrutiny as to increase his negatives. I'm not sure he can go all the way but he's looking mighty attractive as someone's VP.

Dean took third - disappointing. It puts the presure on and makes New Hampshire a real do-or-die scenario. Although if I recall correctly, Clinton placed 4th in Iowa and did not win New Hampshire, so all is not lost.

We're going to Rome in April!

Oh boy. So many things that bothered me. Where to start? Every time he talked about America's "moral tradition" I kept wondering - whose tradition are you talking about? Some gonzo Christian perspctive, not mine.

I'm late for work, so I'll just hit a few high (or rather low) lights.

And because you acted to stimulate our economy with tax relief, this economy is strong and growing stronger

Yeah right. So where are all the jobs? India and China.

For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent.

And our ballooning budget deficits?

So tonight I propose an additional 23 millions for schools that want to use drug testing as a tool to save children's lives.

Great - make more children into criminals without doing anything about increasing funding for addiction treatment.

Even the good ideas got poisoned. A Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative is a great idea. Most ex-cons get little to no supoort once they leave prison, and recidivism rated are high. But then he just couldn't resist turning the proposal into part of his plan to ram Jesus down people's throats by making it part of his faith-based agenda.

Gotta get to work now. Blargh.

It's coming up on two years since my last layoff, but even so, news of a layoff affects me deeply. Today it was PalmOne, the company formerly known as Palm, Inc that recently acquired Handspring.

I'm well aware that businesses cannot guarantee employment to their people if the tides of business change. Nor am I enough of a Socialist to think that it's their obligation to do so. But after having been laid off multiple times in the dot-com implosion and also once back in the recession of the early 90's, my sympathy is much more with the people being let go than with the companies who make the cuts. Especially so because the trend these days is that jobs which vanish do not come back. Bob Herbert's latest column is one of many pointing out this trend.

The good news in today's announcement is that PalmOne is going to be focusing more heavily on smartphone convergence devices like their Treo line. As a longtime Treo fan, that pleases me. But to do so at the cost of people's jobs also gives me pain.

Ironically, I found the URL reporting the layoffs because the battery on my much-loved Treo 180 is showing signs of permanent failure and I'm starting to think about replacing it. I don't have the cash in hand for a new Treo 600, and even if I did, there are other things on my "to buy" list that come higher - like a new SLR camera to take with me to Italy.

There's an abundance of Treo 180s on eBay for about $100, so if necessary I can go there for a replacement. Despite its slow processor and B&W screen, the Treo 180 is an excellent balance between a PDA and phone and I've been really happy with it. Faster access to the Internet, a color screen, and other bells and whistles would be nice, of course, but that's what my Tungsten C is for.

But getting back to my original point, I hope that what comes out of PalmOne in the future is really, really good. Otherwise those people's lives will have been kicked to pieces for nothing.

So, Dean came in 2nd, 12% behind Kerry. Not total victory, of course, but definitely enough to keep Dean a serious contender. I also seem to recall reading a statistic that nobody has ever become President of the US without finishing either first or second in New Hampshire. If true, then Dean is still well placed for victory. And as I recall, Clinton won niether NH or IA.

One neat thing that happened tonight - I was watching the election results come in over at the Plough and Stars with a bunch of the SF for Dean crew and during Dean's speech, about halfway through, he paused, looked down at some people, and said, "wow, there's people here all the way from San Francisco" (or words to that effect). The entire room went up in a big cheer at that. A reporter from the local ABC affiliate showed up about 10 minutes after Dean's speech had ended. He'd have gotten much better footage if he'd gotten there earlier, but he interviewed a few folks anyway.

I still have trouble understanding Kerry's appeal. I watched his victory speech tonight and I found him boring, full of platitudes -- in short, a typical politician, with no special fire. And I would really like to know how he can justify voting for both the Patriot Act and the war on Iraq when he did NOT vote for the first war on Iraq.

I'm not going to cut my nose off to spite my face. If Kerry wins the nomination then I of course will vote for him. I may not like the guy but I'll take any Democrat over the current occupant of the White House.

Still, I want Dean to be the nominee, not Kerry. I haven't been able to do much on the ground to promote Dean, since the majority of campaign activities take place on Saturdays when I'm at work. But I'm going to try harder to find some that I can do when I do have time off.

So last night I said that I needed to do more for my candidate, Howard Dean. This morning I wrote a personal letter to 10 Democrats in South Carolina, talking about why I'm for Dean and they should be too.

I excerpted most of it here at my Dean fundraising page, which I also worked on today.

And all this before my morning coffee!

I've got a blooming orchid!

We don't generally keep plants in the house, because the cats tend to munch on them. However, last year I was given an orchid as a gift. I stuck it in the kitchen window, watered it every couple of days, and wondered if it would ever do anything after the blooms it came with finally withered and fell off. At one point a few months ago, I was inspired to prune the plant a bit, and that must have been a good idea, because after I did so it started to put out new shoots. As you can see, they've culminated in several nice blossoms, with buds showing promise of more to come.

This is what it looks like in its usual spot:

It definitely brightens up the kitchen, and so far the cats have left it alone. Now I need to figure out how to transplant orchids - this one has really started to outgrow the pot it came in.