Enthusiasm?

It is now 8:50 p.m. on 6-7-08. The &%^$#!*&^%$#^% server is down again. I hate this. It has also been cold, rainy, and miserably windy most of the day. I don’t want to work outside. It is Saturday and not much news (why does everything seem to stop on week-ends?). I am never truly bored but I do feel uncomfortable on days like this. I don’t know when I will be able to post this blog, not that it makes much difference.

I don’t mean to be entirely cynical, BUT, it seems to me that it is always all about Hillary. It’s true she gave her concession speech, and it’s also true she said her followers should vote for Obama. But to me it was entirely formulaic. I could detect no genuine enthusiasm for what she was saying (what she no doubt knew she had to say). Mostly it was still all about her. What she had accomplished, what she wanted to accomplish, how many millions of votes she had, how she was going to work for Obama, how she had made it possible for women to run from now on, what a great fight she put up, how she never quits, and so on. I know it must be difficult for her but I was terribly dissatisfied with her performance. I thought she only very begrudgingly conceded which, perhaps, is understandable, but nonetheless not all that helpful. Listening to a few of the comments of the “pundits” afterwards I had the impression they thought better of it. So maybe it’s just me. Apparently Rolling Stone said it was a “Shining Moment.” I didn’t think so, other than that she did finally concede. I think she would rather have been having her teeth pulled.

Bill Sali continues on his goal of casting the most “no” votes of any politician in history. Now he has voted against a bill that would continue funding states for their lost timber revenues (and thus allowing them to continue their educational programs). As I understand it, he thinks it’s all the fault of environmentalists for stopping the timber harvests in the first place. Blaming environmentalist for the problems in our timber industry is something like blaming the fish for the overfishing. The ubiquitous blaming of environmentalists for all our problems is probably going to increase because of the price of gasoline. These anti-environmentalists seem unable to understand there are long-range goals as well as short-range ones, and if everyone is allowed to continue logging and fishing at will there will eventually not only be a shortage of jobs, there will be no jobs at all in those industries. But it is much easier to just blame environmentalist than to bother to have to deal with any form of thought. Of course I have to agree that having the federal government have to pay people to not destroy our environment, after subsidizing them for so long to do just that, is a problem. I just love the equation: no timber, no education. That’s a real winner for our country. The Republicans who have controlled the state for so many years have never bothered about education in the first place. They would rather do without it as they have made clear over the past few years. They seem to prefer turning our beautiful state into a garbage dump for the rest of the world, with an emphasis on the worst garbage they can find. Why is it that Republicans seem obsessed with having the most polluting industries they can find? Even here, in our pristine and beautiful county, they once wanted a pulp mill, and later wanted a waste to energy plant, two of the worst nightmares a small community could possibly have. I’m surprised there is no attempt to have a nuclear plant located right here on main street. It seems that for a number of years now the idea has been that whatever industry might be interested in locating here had to be timber related. I’m not opposed to good sustainable logging, but this does seem to be a rather limiting criterion for welcoming industry. I’m pretty sure they would be amendable to cannon-ball or pitchfork making, along with a wagon wheels factory and maybe sidesaddles or singletrees.

LKBIQ:
“Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed, the only animal never satisfied.”
Henry George