The Dow Jones is fluctuating around. Overreacting like a drama-dependent adult child of an alcoholic, to daily contradicatory reports about the irrational finances of traditionally flaky nations like Greece and Italy. Try not to pay attention to the Dow Jones, as you'll only encourage further fruitless fluctuation. Thank you.
Don’t piss your vote away
A possibly worthy group called colorofchange.org is trying to fight voter suppression of African Americans. But in its online appeal, it counterproductively posted this photo.
"Does it look like this guy is voting or pissing?" asked a correspondent. "And, when it comes down to it, what's the difference?"
And so we beat on: me, Mitt Romney, our dads and my mom
I'm having a lively private dialogue with a big-company speechwriter about, the quality of Mitt Romney's rhetoric. Essentially, he thinks it's passable, I think it's shit. He suspects that's because I'm a Democrat, I think it's because I'm a communication expert. And so on. The conversation is in good faith and is engerizing rather than energy-sapping so far, so I'm keeping it up.
But I had to send him a footnote:
A funny footnote to this whole discussion: My Republican dad was an adman—creative director at Campbell-Ewald, in Detroit. My Democrat mother was a writer—a novelist, but also a copywriter, working for my dad in the late sixties. George Romney was a friend of the agency’s president, and as a favor, the creatives worked on some speeches for him for his [1968] presidential campaign, and helped him with his delivery. Guess who my Republican dad tapped to help? My Democrat mom.
How did she like that? I asked him once (after she died, alas). “How do you think she liked it?”
She was a little too blunt with George, and they took her off the job ….
And here we are—the Republican pragmatist and Democrat idealist inside me, talking to you about a presidential candidate named Romney—44 years later.
… boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past, etc.