Quote of the Day
We come into this world crying
while all around us are smiling.
May we so live that we go out of this world smiling
while everybody around us is weeping.
Persian proverb
Hurricane Sandy: No Outage Yet
I've heard the wind since last night; my power briefly flickered off late afternoon, but I'm still online as of this post.
My Old IL Congressional District, Dold, and the Tea Party
I returned to Illinois in 2001 to work for a Naperville (SW Chicago suburb) headquartered government contracting company for a suburban Milwaukee project. The company wanted me to live in Wisconsin, but the project was only for a few months and they had only one Wisconsin client. I used to live in a different SW suburb about 15 miles away. The daily commute from the southwest suburbs was unacceptable; the Wisconsin commute from the NW suburbs was long but uncongested: I decided on a NW suburb near a Metra station (to downtown Chivago): Buffalo Grove. Ironically I lived within 1.5 miles of a plant for a former California employer (in fact they used to be headquartered there).
Now Senator Kirk used to be my Congressman until I moved to Maryland a few years later for a job. It is a purplish upscale district. Kirk is a party moderate; he is/was one of the few pragmatic Republicans with a chance to carry Illinois statewide. People seem to foget the GOP controlled the governor's mansion until the downfall of former Secretary of State George Ryan, undone by complications from a DMV drivers license bribery scandal. (There was I believe a horrific accident involving I believe a cleric's family and a truck driver holding a tainted drivers license.) Chicagoland has always been controlled by the Democratic machine, but most of the rest of the state leans GOP: usually it's a question of whether the Dems can pile up insurmountable leads in Chicago. In 2002 Blago came to power; and the GOP has mostly been in exile, paying for Ryan's sins.
Conservatives went all out to derail Kirk's nomination to the Senate for his vote on climate change, which died in the Senate. Kirk prides himself as environment-friendly. The Dems went all out to try to grab Kirk's open seat.
I'm not sure how I got on Kirk successor Dold's email list; maybe it came from a Kirk email list. But the point is Dold is a pragmatist and he is getting targeted by his opponent as a Tea Party "extremist". The latest mailing features I think a Tribune cartoonist showing Dold's opponent throwing teabags at Dold, saying, "Drat! None of them are sticking."
I want to rant a bit about idiotic morally self-superior progressives, yes, the same hypocrites whom are intolerant over sport team nicknames,are, in fact, creating a straw man. I've consistently found fellow conservatives and libertarians to be the nicest people I've ever met. I've mentioned my maternal grandfather, a mom-and-pop grocer and a rare Massachusetts Republican. He would often tell me about opening his store (a few blocks away) at night for a customer to buy something he needed. His store barely survived the Depression. My Mom told me a lot of people owed him money, and he could have gone after them but didn't. He was a member of St. Vincent de Paul ,contributed to Boys Town, and volunteered at church. He loved his grandkids; I remember during my fifth and sixth grade we briefly lived with him while dad was securing family housing at new assignments; Mom would send us to pick up groceries at the store. He had a huge jar of Hershey's kisses on the counter and sneak a few into the bag for us. I remember visiting him while my family was in Europe. We never talked about politics, but he loved to watch the national news. Then out of the blue one day, he started lecturing passionately to me on the evil of abortion. He was preaching to the choir; I felt like saying , "Grandfather, I don't even have a girlfriend yet."
The Tea Party doesn't go around key-scratching cars with Obama bumper stickers (and I live in an area where about 75% of the Sam's Club members and nearly all employees are people of color; there are several stickers in my complex parking lot); we don't threaten riots or assassinations,calling people we don't agree with "racists" or go around defacing Obama signs. We don't go around go around engaging in voter fraud, illegal multiple voting, buying votes with cigarettes and pizza, etc. Our candidates don't act like juvenile jerks in front of a national audience: constantly talking over and interrupting our opponents, staring, eye-rolling, waving arms, laughing, smirking, etc.
I think the worst I've heard was a prank of someone dumping a load of horse manure in front of an Ohio Dem office (cleanup after Harry Reid's speeches?)
Progressives who try to hurl the term "Tea Party" or more pejorative references are creating a straw man. First, there are probably less a dozen "true believer" legislators, e.g., rejecting government intrusion on individual rights (e.g., Kelo, the Patriot Act, etc.) and morally hazardous social policies and want scaled back foreign intervention policy, and an end to crony capitalism (e.g., the GSE's, the Fed, etc.) Second, unsustainable, inefficient, ineffective federal programs delivered by well-paid, impersonal bureaucrats are hardly comparable to charities in the private sector
The reality is a President who borrows 40 cents on the dollar after promising to halve the deficit, adds over $5T to the national debt, more than any multiple-term President, close to the entire debt through Clinton and has rarely proposed anything more than statistically insignificant or accounting gimmick cuts demonizes his opposition and refuses to compromise.
Election Countdown 2012
With the election 8 days off, I'll make a summary under this feature heading; the Battleground Poll predicts Romney will win the popular vote 52-47. This is consistent with my previously published conjecture Romney would flip the results of 2008: 53-46 and over 320 votes . Gallup is reporting 1 of 7 voters has already cast ballots consistent with the Battleground poll.The best showing of Obama in RCP this week are 2 polls with a 1-point lead and under 50%, i.e. undecideds (unlikely to break for Obama). Two generic Congressional ballots now show the GOP with the lead. Battleground says the GOP will hold the House; the Senate is tougher with difficult battles to hold Massachusetts and Maine and tight but likely defenses of Arizona, Indiana, and Nevada. The GOP is likely to take North Dakota and Nebraska. Romney may have coattails in tightly-contested Montana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Missouri.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Carpenters, "Close to You". The best-singing, cutest drummer in history (sorry, Ringo and Phil Collins). I earlier wrote that this, which I consider the Carpenters' signature hit, came over the radio one night, and I serenaded my then girlfriend by singing along--and did the same when the Beatles' "Something" closely followed. She then sang to me--a cappella. It was one of those spontaneous magic moments in life you live for.
