My Time to Waste

Debby and I went to the Fort Wayne Home and Garden Show today.  All of the usual were there:  several exhibitors giving away a houseful of windows, plenty of exhibitors promising a dry basement, lots of landscapers and lawn care providers.

New for me (we haven’t been to a Home/Garden show in a few years) was the latest in metal roofing.  Several vendors were pushing metal roofing coated with the same ceramic granules that asphalt shingles are coated with.   So the high end, expensive metal roof is made to look like the cheapest available roofing product.

By this logic, the next advance in siding will be made to emulate vinyl siding.

A shudder went down my back as I typed that last sentence.

The question often arises “What were they thinking?!”  Or, more often, in my own mind “What was I thinking!?”  In my experience the answer to such questions (expecially the latter) is invariably “Thinking?  There was no thinking involved.”

But there must have been some thought involved at the Lower Merion School District in a Philadelphia suburb.  They managed to enable themselves to spy on the students, even when the students were at home, through the laptop webcams.  This did not just happen.

This leads to the question “How did these people come to be in charge of educating our children?”

Nothing leads a child down the straight and narrow like the feeling of not being trusted, right?

Evan Bayh, senator from Indiana, today announced that he is not going to run for re-election.  Although Bayh is a Democrat, he has always been on the conservative side of the tent.  The most recent example of this was the Massachusetts special senate election.  The moment it was clear the Republican won the race, Bayh was making statements supporting the idea that health care reform was dead.

To the end (not that this necessarily constitutes the end), Bayh has been less than helpful to the Democratic Party.  He drops out of the race with a couple of days left to file to run in the primary.   This isn’t enough time for someone to jump in and gather the necessary signatures to get on the primary ballot, so the candidate for the fall would be picked by the Democratic Party.

Except there was one person already out gathering signatures to run in the primary against Bayh.  Tamyra d’Ippolito, a cafe owner in Bloomington, claims to be 1000 signatures away from the number needed to get on the ballot.

I’m not confident she will make it,  but it might have been better if Bayh had waited a day or two.  It is likely that Bayh’s absence really energized d’Ippolito.

If Tamyra d’Ippolito gets the signatures she will be the only senate candidate on the primary ballot.  So she will be the Democratic candidate in the fall.  Judging by her web page, she has no political experience and she has an uphill battle to win.

I think the Democrat’s chances for winning in the fall would be much higher if the party could pick the candidate.

With luck d’Ippolito fails to get the signatures and it will make no difference.  In any event, thank-you Evan Bayh.

Hat tip to TPM.

From The Huffington Post:

Former Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo told an audience on Thursday at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville that “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”

“His name,” Tancredo said, “is Barack Hussein Obama.”

It is interesting how all of those voters who cannot spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English managed to elect the candidate they wanted, isn’t it?

A few years ago (2001) Debby and I were in Toronto, Canada.  One of the things we did there was walk through Cabbagetown, a historic neighborhood.  A few days later, when a local heard that we had been in Toronto and had visited Cabbagetown his response was “You came to Toronto and visited our slum!”

My response to him was that if Cabbagetown constituted a Canadian slum, then Canada was in very good shape indeed.  Yes, the neighborhood did not seem particularly high end, but a slum it was not.

This evening on HGTV’s Property Virgin program was a young man looking for his first house in Toronto.  Two of the houses he looked at were in Cabbagetown.  They were both priced over $550,000.

Geez, $550,000.  In the “slum”.   I guess I could never afford shelter in Toronto (or maybe Cabbagetown isn’t a slum…)

This from a post at fivethirtyeight.com:

Republicans were crowing about socialism and government takeovers way back in the summer of 2008, and opposing virtually every policy that the Democrats put forth from the first meeting of the 111th Congress last January — a time when Obama’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those messages weren’t working for them — they were particularly ineffectual, for instance, for the McCain campaign, and there were lots of stories in the spring about the number of people who identified as Republican slipping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their messaging strategy, and it has allowed them to frame everything that has come thereafter in ways that are more resonant with the public.

This reminds me of the NFC Championship football game between the Saints and the Vikings.  The Saints defensive game plan included an emphasis on hitting Bret Favre.  They got several hits on him but failed to sack him.  Still, they did not change the plan.  Favre threw for 310 yards, but still the Saints worked to hit Favre.  Sure enough, before the game was over, Favre rewarded them by throwing three interceptions (the stats say two because the Saints did not catch one of the balls thrown right to them).

And the Saint won.