Toast

When I come back in here and look at all of my older posts, it's striking how involved, obsessed even, I was with the 2004 election (and look where it got us). Despite the network and cable news manufactured drama of late, the 2012 election looks to me like the 1996 one. Yes, Obama is not the savior everyone seemed to anoint him as (self included at times), and he may not be as good a salesman as Clinton was, but I don't think Clinton would have ordered the raid on Bin Laden's compound, among other things. Anyway, point is, this election was over already when you looked at the GOP primaries, with their whack-a-mole frontrunners. Romney's a shitty candidate and a shitty human being. We know it, and the GOP knows it too. As the Rude Pundit has said about Obama in general, Obama played rope-a-dope in the first debate. Romney's gonna wear himself out as a debater as with everything else. Romney won the first debate? If judging on style, maybe, but in the substance he basically backtracked on his positions, as Bill Clinton himself pointed out. And KOS has a great clip of Romney debating with himself. Dude's so toast you can't even stick a fork in him. We're talking serious carbonization here.

Roberts' quote of John Marshall

I've started reading the Obamacare ruling and the most striking thing, aside from the fact that Chief Justice Roberts came down on the side of the more liberal Justices on the Court in the first place, is this passage:

"Nearly two centuries ago, Chief Justice Marshall observed that 'the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted' to the Federal Government 'is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.' McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 405 (1819)."

In interviews I've read, particularly a long one from the Atlantic Monthly nearing the end of his first term as I recall, Roberts often name checks John Marshall as the model of Chief Justice he wants to be.

Now, I need to read the rest of the ruling before drawing any conclusions, but I thought that passage being cited near the beginning was rather noteworthy. This could mean Roberts
(and, for that matter, Marshall himself) is simply espousing the fatalistic view regarding the trajectory of all Empires, but I guess I need to go back and look at McCulloch after I manage to finish the current ruling at hand.

I doubt many in the coming months of hellfire 'til November will bother to do that, and certainly among the loudest of voices you'll hear. I am certain by the time he gives his speech, President Obama will have read it. And that is the kind of person we need to keep in office, certain disappointments notwithstanding. In fact, once Obama's second term is up, and maybe about fifty years or so have passed, 44 will go down as one of a very few voices in American politics with any dose of reality, or sanity, for that matter. As I've mentioned often in here, in today's climate, President Eisenhower (and the GOP Congress he had in 1954) would be considered a "tax and spend liberal." Obama extends that to Reagan too but that is a bit of a stretch IMHO. Summer reading, here we come!

Ah, the blog. Starting to gather dust. Still here for the ages, but rapidly becoming extinct. Most of my private thoughts I keep to my written journal, one I've kept since 1990. That had fallen by the wayside a bit as the online activity picked up, but now things are evolving back to public v. private. And that is a good thing. Because unless you can read my handwriting, it's like interpreting code.


A few things have happened in the past couple of months that could be considered "life changing" to a degree. Probably the biggest event was the burglary that happened at our house back on March 13th. We had this false sense of security that an alarm system would keep us safe. But the perps had obviously been casing all the houses on our block and in our neighborhood, because K & Brenna had left to pick up Livie from preschool and headed right back. They were gone for 15-20 minutes. When they returned, the alarm was beeping and the house was ransacked. All visible electronic devices were taken, but thankfully not my external drive with virtually all of our digital photos. K ran next door to our neighbor's house (he is somewhat older and hard of hearing so did not see what was taking place) and called 911. By then our neighbor on the other side of our house's alarm had tripped off, too, so the cops were heading their way. But it took 5-10 more minutes. See, this is also what the perps know: an alarm system is only as good as the police response time. And OPD is severely understaffed. It seems our society's zeal for "lower taxes" strikes again. Oh well, I guess the real taxation comes by way of private insurance, which thankfully was there for us to replace our (replaceable) items.


Two things cascaded from that event. The first is a brand new iMac which I am now devoting time to building a proper DAW studio once and for all. I was planning on getting Logic and building off of that, but then a friend of the family, Scott Ghene, who was visiting from Rochester, floored me with what was to come next. He was at guitar center and wanted to get me ProTools, so he showed up with Protools MP Fastrack Ultra the next day. This will help me get up to speed more quickly and start taking on more music. It has been tough since our house doesn't have enough room for me to set up all of my old (antiquated, but not vintage) analog gear...so I've sort of been lying in wait. And, it's time to wake up. Huge shoutout and thanks to Scott!


The second event was much bigger (for me): We got a dog. I was the firewall between the girls' desire to have one and the reality of us actually getting one. But the burglary breached that firewall in a big way. So we took our time to find the right rescue dog. We wanted one that was house-broken, good with kids, and also somewhat menacing looking. We found him through Coppers Dream Rescue. His name was Amos, but that name is unacceptable. So we began thinking...what would be a good name that sounded somewhat like Amos? Seamus!


And here he is.

Here are some more photos.

My sweet little Brenna is now 2 years old. She's a craft one, and parrots her big sister often these days. I have a lot of cute videos of this, but the time to edit and post I need more of. In the meantime, here's a photo album that chronicles the past year for our family.