My friend Don

On a recent trip to Australia, my friend Don, who will one day run Microsoft, finds truth in signage.

Joe Biden chokes on own leg

Joe Biden on Barack Obama: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man."

Chris Rock said when someone calls you articulate, it's as if they are surprised the brother can talk.

But that's not even the worst part of this quote. "Clean?" Obama is the first "clean" black man to seek public office? Who knew Jesse Jackson needed to shower? Who knew Doug Wilder was so out of the mainstream? My God, we nearly elected that nappy-haired, smelly, ugly and inarticulate Harvey Gantt to the Senate a few years back!

This mess comes on the heels of this beauty: “Delaware was a slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South — there were a couple of other states in the way.”

Good lord, someone please take Joe out to pasture before he hurts himself again.

Art Pope and big glass houses

Art Pope, the conservative gadfly whose fake newspaper started the John-Edwards-built-a-big-house kerfluffle, is under attack. And the results are delicious.

Greg Flynn at BlueNC has uncovered public information that tends to show that Mr. No Tax takes his creed quite seriously, to the extent that he's Delinquent on his own real estate taxes.

Now, I certainly don't begrudge the man a late payment or two. Lord knows my own vehicle taxes are often on the "hasn't paid in a good long time" list. I pay them before registration is due, and they overvalue my two older cars anyway. But, then again, I have never been late on a house tax payment. Those are paid into escrow and taken out by my mortgage company.

Oops, I forgot, Art Pope probably doesn't have a mortgage. I guess when you are so immensely wealthy with your Daddy's money that you can look down on and mock the efforts of self-made men, it's hard to keep up with owing a mere $25,345.92 to Wake County.

The Cutting Edge

A truly important meeting happened yesterday in the Headquarters of the North Carolina Democratic Party. Chairman Jerry Meek convened a meeting of "prominent NC progressive bloggers." I managed to get in, despite not being very prominent. In fact, it was quite easy. One or two of the participants let me know it was happening, and I walked in, took a seat away from the table, and horned right in on the conversation.

The invited participants?

Jerry Meek
Congressman Brad Miller
State Representative Jim Harrell
Matt Stoller of mydd.com
Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend and Pandagon
Southern Dem, Greg Flynn, Anglico, Robert P, George Pence and others from BlueNC.
Matt Hill Comer.
Tim Cullen of the Chris Dodd for President Campaign
Christian Kendrick of dailykos
Kirk Ross of Exile on Jones Street
Aric Vance of The Syntax of Things.
Gordon Smith of Scrutiny Hooligans
Schorr Johnson, Communications Director, NC Democratic Party
Stephen Gheen of The Political Junkies

It was really a cool event.

Jerry Meek gets it. He gets that this medium, combined with the social networking sites, is transforming politics. Jerry wants NC to be on the leading edge of that revolution, and today's meeting may go a long way to setting the agenda for that transformation.

Matt Stoller discussed what he (and I) believe to be the most important change that will be brought about by the blogosphere. It offers the chance to break the iron triangle of politicians, the big media, and consultants. Kos and Jerome hit the same notes in their book, Crashing the Gates.

And Jerry Meek gets that. If the NC Democratic Party can ally itself, and fundamentally work with a site like BlueNC, the next time a candidate like Larry Kissel catches fire on the web, the Party will know about it when we do. And maybe the next time they won't come in too late. Instead of listening to the highly paid consultants telling the big time reporters that a guy like Larry can't win, maybe they'll put the resources on the ground early, and change the dynamic of the race.

Bloggers are playing the role of all three of the traditional points of the iron triangle. Atrios is one of the foremost,and most feared, media critics working today. One mention on his blog can make or ruin a reporter's day. Kos and Jerome Armstrong have become respected pundits and consultants. And the next generation of politicians will surely see some who got their start as politically-interested bloggers.

More telling is the movement of the three of the traditional points o the triangle towards the blogosphere. The establishment is moving to coopt the challenge, and to take advantage of the opportunities it brings. Among the media, those who see it first, and who show an ability to use it properly, are going to survive. Those who don't, will go the way of the dodo. (hint: locking your content behind a paywall? Not net friendly).

Some politicians are getting it. While Hillary Clinton's idea of a web presence is to put her television commercials on line, John Edwards is building a social networking site around his website, and Barack Obama is pretty much taking over facebook.com. Guess which two of those three are more likely to appeal to young voters this time around?

And what of Brad Miller? Well Congressman Miller spent 5 hours at a table with 15-20 average citizens yesterday, and earned perhaps a career's worth of good will in the process. He's easily one of the more popular congressmen on Daily Kos, because he treats the medium and its participants with respect, and he lets his real personality come through in his posts.

Brad Miller gets it. Others? Dodos, man. Dodos.

Even consultants are starting to get it. On their website Talking About Politics, Gary Pearce and Carter Wrenn have actually gotten a commenting function, though it looks like something one might have seen on Compuserv. But they are out there.

The future of progressive politics in North Carolina was being discussed with greater verve and vitality in that room today than at any meeting of any group I have been a part of in a long time. It was good to see that two of the preeminent voices in the NC Democratic Party were in on the conversation.

Estate Envy

emo, trying to score a rhetorical point, asks in comments to the post below what the carbon footprint of the Edwards's new home in Orange County would be. The question is the latest unoriginal spew coming from the right wing, and it started at the Carolina Journal. It was then linked by Drudge, and awaaaayy we go.

The righties, laboring under their continual impression that being a liberal means one should never be able to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, are simply apopleptic that John Edwards, a massively successful trial lawyer, would dare build his family what can really only be described as an estate.

This is a sign, they claim, that Edwards is a hypocrite. Building a multi-million dollar home is allegedly inconsistent with caring about poverty (a statement they would never accept as true if made about a Republican) and must be environmentally unfriendly to boot.

They fail to realize that by buying a farm and keeping it at its original size - 102 acres, the Edwards have done one thing right away - they have prevented the subdivision and development of a significant piece of wooded property in Orange County - something that doesn't happen every day in that rapidly-developing part of the state.

But enough from me, I'll let Elizabeth Edwards tell you the details. She has tackled the issue (and the freeper commenters) at www.johnedwards.com, and her post is a thing of beauty - as the house is, evidently.

Here's Elizabeth on the Edwards's efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint:

Here is what our family has done and is doing.

We sold the conventional fuel SUV that we used to carry children, strollers, luggage and toys between Washington, DC and North Carolina, and we bought a hybrid, a Ford Escape.

All the water (all of which comes from wells) in our home and some of the flooring is heated with solar energy.

We built a highly energy efficient house. In fact, our home is Energy-Star rated. Energy Star is an EPA regulated designation for homes that are at least 30 percent more efficient than the national Model Energy Code. In building we made sure we had effective insulation in floors, walls, and attics. We chose efficient heating and cooling equipment and high-performance windows. Our builder paid close attention to making sure the construction was tight to seal out drafts and moisture. The day the independent inspector came to evaluate the house, we were on pins and needles while he tested our home's energy performance. As he packed his equipment, he gave us the good news: we are an Energy-Star home!

And as the incandescent light bulbs the electrician installed in our fixtures burn out, we are replacing them with fluorescent bulbs. If you are thinking that we are living now in harsh light, with buzzing sounds and constant flickers, you are thinking of your grandmother's fluorescent bulbs. There are a wide range of shapes and fittings available now; there are even dimmable fluorescents, and honestly I cannot tell without checking which of our bulbs are still incandescent and which are now - and will continue to be -- fluorescent. Switching is a little bit of a bite, because the bulbs are more expensive (although Costco and eBay have some good prices), but replacing a single 60 watt incandescent with a 15 watt fluorescent you use just six hours a day could see an energy savings of more than $40 over the 4 year (4 year!) life of the bulb. And it is not just energy. A single fluorescent bulb "can prevent more than 450 pounds of emissions from a power plant over its lifetime" according to the Energy-Star website. That same site has these incredible statistics: "If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars." One bulb.

Later, in comments, she gives even more detail:

We actually had a foremost name in green architecture (I would want to ask him before using his name, but he is maybe the US's best in this field) visit our site when he happened to be in NC and make suggestions -- one of his ideas was for Belvederes, which look like 3 little cupolas on our roof, and let in light reducing the need for additional lamps but unlike some skylights do not up the need for AC in summer

The house actually has solar panels, and is rigged for a geothermal heat pump when the technology becomes more affordable. Says Elizabeth:

Actually we are "geothermal-ready." The system was built in a manner to allow us to integrate geothermal. And, although we thought we would be talking about it in four or five years, we are already talking about installing it. For those who don't know, geothermal uses the more constant temperature of the earth to keep your house warmer in winter than the air outside and cooler in summer than the air outside. It is tremendously more efficient.

She then issues acall to join in the National One Corps Energy Day of Action. Do something tomorrow to save energy. I'm going to replace some light fixtures in my house and weatherstrip a particularly leaky window. What are you going to do, emo?

"Condos sit unbought on Carolina coast"

Says the News & Observer. The bubble has burst, as the mad rush to build more and more has led, SURPRISE, to a glut. Good. Maybe now they'll stop destroying the waterfront and every inch of wetland just to build more ugly walls of condos.

Although maybe the walls of condos can serve as barrier islands when the shoreline is at Little Washington:

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.
'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

Lovely.

Fun with her cousins

Children can have fun anywhere, even in church gyms after a funeral. Here's my little girl engaged in a furious game of tag on Saturday.

Wouldn't you like to be this happy?



Congratulations to Apostropher, who just found out his wife is having a baby girl. You want to raise her just like you're raising your sons, but it's still different. You will shortly find yourself wrapped completely around the smallest finger you've ever seen. You'll have to rely on your wife to make sure you don't spoil her, because, believe me, all semblance of rationality you still possess will depart with the first smile, nevermind the first "Aw, Daddy, puhleeeeeeeese?".

Cue the angry comments calling me a chauvinist tool of the patriarchy.

Skate with the Canes

Continuing this blog's bipolar existence as a politics and hockey blog, I turn now to the events of this past Sunday, when the Hurricanes hosted "Skate with the Canes," a charity event that benefitted the Hurricanes Kids and Community Foundation - a really good cause.

They sold 750 tickets in September for this event, and your ticket allowed you 40 minutes of time on the RBC Center ice with 1/3 of the team, 40 minutes of tours of the lockerroom and photos with 1/3 of the team, and 40 minutes of autograph time with 1/3 of the team.

I took Duncan, and we had a great time.

We started out on the ice, and the first person we saw was Stormy - here's a pic:



The next person we saw was Rod Brind'Amour, and Duncan wasted no time getting across the ice on his new skates to meet his hero:



Then we skated around a bit, and by skated around, I mean we fell down:



And of course, Duncan ended up in the box:




At one point, Duncan skated up to the Captain, intent on telling him they share a birthday, and as soon as Rod bent over to talk to him, he fell right on his butt. Brindy picked him up and put him back on his skates, and then posed for this one:



We saw several other guys, and Coach Laviolette liked my picture of him with the Cup so much he asked for a copy. On its way, coach.

More later.

PFC Skelly

This weekend, I attended the funeral of my wife's Grandfather. He died last week at the age of 87. He was not well for the last several years of his life, and I, unfortunately, never got to know him before he got sick. That is to my great detriment.

Towards the end of his life he remembered one experience vividly, and often talked about it, though always with the same few stories. The high school physics teacher, the GE engineer, the tall, bespectacled, slightly grumpy guy who loved to play cards and watch his grandkids and greatgrandkids play in the yard, was a war hero.

Big time.

While I never was able to sit down with him and question him about the war, he was interviewed by a college student at Edinboro University, and his widow retains the tapes. As soon as I can get them, I will have them transcribed. Here is what I know about the service of his unit.

He must have arrived in Northern France in the weeks after D-Day, with the rest of the 83rd Division. Within hours, he and his fellow infantrymen were engaged with the enemy. The 83rd was the point of the American spear across northern France and the Rhineland, and Pvt. Skelly's discharge papers listed several place names that indicate the ferocity of the combat he must have seen:

Normandy, Carentan, Luxembourg, Ardennes, Rhineland.

He served for months as a scout, a member of an intelligence platoon whose duty it was to patrol close to and behind enemy lines and report enemy positions and movements. For his actions in one early engagement, near Carentan, France, he was awarded the Bronze Star:



At some point during his service, and we are not sure when, he was awarded two Purple Hearts. He was wounded after spending three nights in the same house. The first two, he slept on top of the kitchen table, while his buddy groused about sleeping on the floor below. The third night, he allowed his friend to sleep on the table, and he took the floor. The mortar killed his friend, and left him with shrapnel wounds. That experience must have deeply affected him, because it was one of the last memories that survived his illness.

Here is a picture of the medal ceremony at the field hospital. You might recognize the guy pinning the medal on Pvt. Skelly, even without his dog and pearl handled revolvers.



If your grandfather was in World War II, go talk to him and ask the questions he might not have previously been willing to ask. Talk to your grandmother about what life was like on the home front. These stories are passing, and their loss is deeply felt.

For now, I just want to say thanks, Mr. Skelly.

Bringing King's vision to bear on Iraq

On this day that we have set aside to honor his life's work, it would be good to remember that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. towards the end of his life, had turned his vision outward from the South, to tackle issues which many deemed too controversial for a minister to speak upon, but which he considered to be part and parcel of the same societal sicknesses which led authorities to unleash police dogs on children in Birmingham.

On April 4, 1967, King spoke to a meeting of the Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, to unequivocally state that he considered it his, and every American's, sacred duty to confront his own nation's policies when they were wrong. A complete audio and text of the speech is available at the American Rhetoric website.

Throughout the speech, the parallels to our situation today are uncanny. This is a sad testimony to how little things have changed since 1967, but it should also give us hope - hope that a concerned populace can, as it did in the late 1960's and early 1970's, bring its government to heel and end a disastrous war. Let's just hope it doesn't take another seven years.

This passage in particular is riveting:

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

One national politician has seized on Dr. King's vision of a revolution of personal values and action and made it the central theme of his campaign. John Edwards marked Dr. King's birthday by speaking at the same church yesterday, and delivered a fine speech of his own, a speech that threw the gauntlet at the feet not of President Bush, who seems incapable of recognizing his own faults, but at our feet. It is up to us, as individuals, and to Members of Congress, as individuals, to begin to act in ways which better mankind. It is up to us to end this war:

I voted for this war. And I was wrong. I take responsibility for that vote. It is no one else's responsibility. The challenge today is not how do we achieve a military victory in Iraq - there will never be a military victory in Iraq. The question is how do we achieve a political solution that will bring peace.

Escalation is not the answer. All you have to do is listen to our own generals to know that escalation is not the answer. The answer is for the Iraqi people and others in the region to take responsibility for rebuilding their own country. And the best way for that to happen, is for America to make clear that we are leaving Iraq. And the best way to make clear that we are leaving Iraq is to actually start leaving Iraq.

This is why I have spoken out against an escalation of this war and I have urged others to do the same. That's why Congress must step up and stop the president from putting more troops in harm's way.

If you're in Congress and you know that this war is going in the wrong direction, and you know that we should not escalate this war in Iraq, it is no longer ok to study your options and keep your own private counsel. Silence is betrayal. Speak out, and stop this escalation now. You have the power, Members of Congress, to prohibit this president from spending any money to escalate this war - use that power. Use it now. Do not allow this president to make another mistake and escalate this war in Iraq.

And to all of you here today - and the millions like us around the country who know this escalation is wrong - your job is to reject the easy way of apathy and choose instead the hard course of action. Silence is betrayal. Speak out. Tell your elected leaders to block this misguided plan that is destined to cost more lives and further damage America's ability to lead. And tell them also, that the reward of courage is trust.

***

If one thing has been proven over the last few years, it is that raw power alone does not make you a leader. You actually have to have the moral authority to lead. If we want to lead. If we want to actually have the moral authority to lead, we cannot stand idly by and watch hundreds of thousands of people be slaughtered in Darfur and Western Sudan. We cannot stand idly by and see thousands of children born with AIDS every single day in Africa. We cannot stand idly by and watch half the planet live on two dollars or less a day. We are better than this. The United States of America is better than this. Our purpose has to be to ignite the revolution of values that Dr. King talked about...

***

It is time. It is time, brothers and sisters, for the United States of America to be patriotic about something other than war. It is time. The world needs to see that we have a responsibility not just to ourselves, but to humanity. The world needs to see our better angels."

Once again, I am proud to support this man for President of the United States.

George W. Bush's latest speech

Shorter version:

"OK, so beating our head against a concrete wall hasn't worked so far. Therefore, we will continue to beat our heads against the concrete wall, but this time, we'll put a bandaid on our forehead and hit the wall a lot harder. If you think that's a dumb idea, well, you're a quitter and a terrorist sympathizer. God Bless America."

Just like the old man

Today I am bursting with pride in my son.

This morning, my Kindergartner asked his Mommy to write down his phone number. Assuming it was for a class project or something, she did.

This afternoon, just before he arrived home on the bus, the phone rang, and it was a girl from his class, asking to talk to my boy.

Attaboy, Duncan.

Now, if anyone calls for my daughter, I'll kill 'im. Double standard? You're darn straight.

Look what I got!

One of the ultimate Davidson Basketball collectibles. The 1968 Sports Illustrated Basketball Preview Issue, wherein we were rated #4.



Click on the image for a closer look at Davidson's Mike Maloy with some guy who shall remain nameless from UNC and Kentucky's Mike Casey.

The Top Ten:

UCLA
UNC
Kentucky
Davidson
Notre Dame
Kansas
New Mexico
Cincinnati
Houston
Santa Clara (!)

Says the article:

All five starters are back from the 24-5 team that won the Southern Conference championship; the toughest league opponent, West Virginia, is now an independent; of 27 games, only eight are on the road -- and one of those on a neutral court; they have muscle, shooting, defense, experience and rebounding. As they might say in rural North Carolina, "Ain't no way Davidson's gonna lose many.

Davidson College, a liberal-arts school 20 minutes north of Charlotte, has 1,000 men students, and it seems as if at least half of them are blue-chip basketball players just drooling to get off the bench and help operate Coach Lefty Driesell's double-post offense.

***

It's a scholarly team of would-be doctors, attorneys and architects, and -- don't laugh -- would-be Eastern champs.

Back in today's world, the Wildcats have returned to some semblance of former glory, and are now 13-3 and headed to a monumental surprisingly-high-RPI showdown with App State later this month. They are drawing over 4000 a game to Belk Arena, and the biggest complaint is parking.

My, how times have changed since the early 1990s.

Go Cats!

National Champs

Two things became clear in the world of College Football this bowl season, and especially last night:

(1) The Big Ten is really the Moderately Big Three and the Really Kinda Crappy Eight. Ya got Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State and then everybody else. And you saw what happened to Michigan and Ohio State.

(2) Florida, with a loss, will always have a bit of tarnish on what should be a sparkling accomplishment. Why? Because the powers that be couldn't figure out a way for them to play the team that, at 13-0 and with a win in a BCS bowl over a very good Oklahoma squad, are the REAL national champs:

The Boise State Broncos.



The Undefeated Boise State Broncos.

Elsewhere in sports, two execeptionally deserving players were nearly unanimously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame today. Cal Ripken and Tony Gwinn belong in Cooperstown, no doubt. The question is, why did the Baseball Writers of America see fit to screw Goose Gossage and Jim Rice AGAIN!? Gossage nearly made it, and one must conclude that some warped opinion that Ripken and Gwynn should go in as a duo without anyone else led to his snub. But Rice's percentage actually DROPPED from last year, meaning some bozo believed him qualified for the Hall of Fame last year, but not this year. WHA!?

Let's get this straight. Out of shape wannabe athletes with a pen, also known as Baseball Writers, should not stand in the way of a truly great player's admission to the Hall of Fame just because he didn't kiss their ring when he played. Jim Rice is a Hall of Famer. Period.