matching tracksuits

Bloomberg’s take:

While campaigning in California yesterday for gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, Kerry said: “Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Kerry’s suggestion “that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and it is shameful,” Bush said at an appearance in Georgia tonight. “The members of the United States military are plenty smart. And they are plenty brave. And the senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology.”

Contrast this with a snippet of a story on NPR earlier this week:

In their living room, Carmelo Roman de Jesus and Gloria Cruz have a shrine to Alexis, a glass cabinet with his baby shoes, baby teeth, toy cars and Medals of Honor. They’re still upset with military recruiters who promised their son $20,000 to enlist.

In an economy without many options for those lacking a college degree, the military can appear to be the only real option. Particularly when recruiters are making empty promises like that.

Michael Moore makes the same point about his home city of Flint, Michigan.

Kerry’s remark could have been better phrased, but Bush’s response shows a typical lack of introspection.

In Poland recently, a middle school teacher was called out of her classroom for some administrative duties — a meeting or some nonsense — and while she was gone, a group of male students assaulted a female student, stripping her to her underwear (or further — I can’t recall exactly) and pretending like they were going to rape her.

She committed suicide the next day. Reports indicated that there were other issues precipitating the suicide, and that her parents held nothing against the perpetrators’ parents.

It’s hard for me to imagine me reacting similarly were something like that to happen to my soon-to-be daughter.

It’s no longer permissible to say parents are responsible in any way for their children’s behavior. It’s this; it’s that — it’s anything but poor parenting. Yet as L’s birthday approaches, I can’t help but wonder at the validity of that assumption.

Read in the Washington Post:

“I have to think there are Democratic strategists out there thinking the words of the old Japanese admiral: ‘I fear all we’ve done is wake a sleeping giant,’ ” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based advocacy group. “They were coasting into an election with a Republican base with dampened enthusiasm. This brings it all back home to the base, what this election is about.”
Religious Conservatives Cheer Ruling on Gays as Wake-Up Call

It’s amusing that the religious conservatives think of themselves as a slumbering giant. Even when in power, they see themselves as victims.

They also think Rove’s “back to the base” campaign strategy will still work its magic for yet another election. Still holding out hope…

What’s even more disturbing is the notion that gay marriage is such a central plank in their whole ideology. Literally thousands of people are dying because of the debacle in Iraq, and these folks are more concerned about something so relatively petty in comparison. The neocon hope of salvaging this election hinges on exploitation of people’s fear.

How…very…predictable.

But it’s really their own doing. The neocons hard-line approach has left them little wiggle room. “Stay the course” has meant “make absolutely no changes in the Iraq strategy” and “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” has turned what should be nuanced foreign relations into Pavlovian over-simplicity. What’s ironic is that neocons are now wanting to stay the course without saying “stay the course” and the “us-vs-terrorist” simplicity gets a little fuzzy when we start talking about Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But they’re staying the course about gay marriage, and they seem to be pretty sure that if you aren’t with the straights, you’re with the gays. Let’s just hope that such nonsense doesn’t win elections.

Listening to Duncan Sheik’s version of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees,”� a slow realization.

“When was I really listening to this song a lot?”� I asked myself. Answer: in late 2002, the beginning of my fifth school year in Lipnica Wielka. “Those were good times,”� I said to myself, almost audibly.

There was a time when listening to music I’d associated with Lipnica could send me into spirals of depression if I weren’t careful. I’d lived an idyllic life there during the first three years, and re-adjusting to the States was tough “� tough enough that I ended up going back and staying for another four years. But before I returned, before I made the decision to return, I lived in the past a lot.

Fast-forward to today. I realized that I no longer look back to those times in the same way, and the reason is simple. I’ve got the most amazing reason ever to look forward instead of backward: I’m going to be a father.

Language Log on poo — of a sort