McCain Sticks Up For Palin. Finally.

Realy, there's no excuse for McCains late-to-the-game defense of Palin:

Former U.S. presidential candidate John McCain on Tuesday shrugged off criticism leveled at his running mate, Sarah Palin, saying he expects her "to play a big role in the future of this country."

The Republican senator from Arizona rallied to the defense of his vice presidential pick in an appearance on NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," his first television interview since losing his White House bid to Democrat Barack Obama a week earlier.

This kind of thing makes me wonder if mayb the right person for the job has, in fact, been elected.

A Suprise Tax Hike?

This doesn't look good:

. . .Dan Clifton, superanalyst at Strategas Research, has noticed that Speaker Pelosi is pushing for a permanent refundable tax credit on payroll taxes paid. Clifton thinks that tax credit could be paid for by a five percent surtax on higher income taxpayers. "While this achieves the same goal of raising the top tax rate, to achieve the permanent middle class tax cut, the 5 pct. surtax will fall on top of the higher income tax rates after the Bush tax cuts expire (39.6% + 5%)."

So we could end up with a top rate of 45 percent, higher than the top rate during the Clinton years. . .

My Nephew's Blog

Hey, visitors, when you're through browsing here, why not mosey on over to my nephew's blog? He's being schooled this semester in Australia and his adventures down under are the very definition of amazing. Makes you wonder how he finds the time to study.

Visitors

I'm up to 413 visitors - last time I noted, about two months ago, I'd had only 75 - and I'm glad you all have dropped by.

The most popular post is this one, which logs our last day in Disney. Don't know what's bringing people to it. The next most popular is the main page, so the Emily Winehouse post is beginning to fade in the rearview mirror.

I'm getting visitors from all over. I haven't figured out how to publish a screen grab but a map of my visitors would show you they're coming mostly from the United States but I'm getting a few from Europe and South America. As soon as I figure out how to do that, I'll do that.

In the meantime, and once again, I thank you for coming by.

Housekeeping

Just a housekeeping note or two about some changes I've made:

In addition to changing the fonts, I've added some color to the blog's banner and the post dates while sharpening up the blog titles. It makes for an easier read, I think.

I've also coded the HTML to make the blog titles a link to any articles I send to Blogger. If you don't see a highlighted link, try clicking the post's title.

Of course, none of this makes any sense to any newcomers. To you, everything looks as it always has. But if any of you are coming back after the changes and you've been wondering why things look different, well, that's because they do.

The Great Debaters - Movie Review

We avoided the election returns by renting the DVD of The Great Debaters and even if the election had turned out differently, I think we made the better viewing choice. A true story of the debate team from Wiley College, it's a sports-movie style treatment of an academic team. And since it sticks to the style of sports movies, you won't be surprised at the ending. Director Denzel Washington may be juggling a few too many sub-plots but overall he pulls it off nicely. I like southern culture, despite the history of civil rights abuses - really, wouldn't it be nice to have a movie about the south that didn't shine a negative light on this? - but I think the movie does a good job of showing how things probably were. Yeah, it's convenient the team never seems to argue a point it doesn't agree with but, well, what're ya gonna do? Overall, a good one.

(And, interestingly enough, the character played by Denzel Washington, Melvin B. Tolson, has an Oklahoma connection. He later became a professor of some renown at Langston University and he's buried just up the road in Guthrie.)

The Changeling - Movie Review

Clint Eastwood's Changeling is a good period piece that's also a cracking good suspense movie without any car chases and only a few shots fired from a gun. Based on a true story of the disappearance of a small boy during the late '20s in Los Angeles, Eastwood's portrait of the era never lags during its two plus hours. A little too slick in places - the placards of the protesters look a little too well constructed and, if I'm not mistaken, I think I saw some of the same ones in two, separate scenes. But that's a quibble. Eastwood gets fine performances from his actors and the look of the film appears spot on. Not his finest but good enough.

Rachel's CODA Audition

On Saturday, Rachel had her annual audition for CODA. Which meant it was also our annual tradition of going to the CODA audition and then going to Starbuck's and Petsmart afterward.

With all of her Color Guard activity these last few months, Rachel had little time to practice hard. She steals a few moments of practice here:

(I'm sitting down the hall to give her her space, man.)

They were nearly two hours behind in on their audition times. Finally, they called her in:




But she didn't make it. Dang. Well, Rachel hasn't made it these last few years she's been auditioning so it's nothing new. She still has OYO and she points out she prefers orchestra over band anyway. A positive spin on the outcome? I dunno. But she didn't seem too bothered by it so neither was I.

Off we went to Starbuck's. Pumpkin spice lattes for both of us and a blueberry muffin for Rachel and blueberry coffee cake for me. The difference? Rachel's was a muffin-shaped, mine was cake-shaped. See?

No Petsmart this year - we've got Pepper and Lucky now and the reason why we'd visited before was to look over the rescue puppies. Instead, Rachel opted for a trip to the library. She'd never been to the new downtown library so that's where we went. She spent some time browsing the science and history shelves while I checked out they mysteries. We both came away with a couple of nice stacks that should keep us busy for a while.

A great day. I'm glad Rachel allowed me to be a part of it.

iPod Shuffle Post #D'oh!

Yep, it happened: I went to fire up my iPod for this morning's session and found it was chugging along on its own. It had somehow reset itself and begun playing and it was already up to track 250 or so.

Sigh.

So, what to do, now?

I don't think I'll take up this project again. The downside of trying to get through my entire iPod is having to put off listening to some of the things I want to listen to. Oddly enough, with the freedom of giving myself up to the control of the shuffle, I gave up the freedom to listen to anything else. So committing to any one plan means giving up freedom and I don't want to do that. But I do want to find a way to track what it is I've been listening to and comment should the mood strike me.

I'll play it by ear. (Heh.) For now, though, this experiment's finished.

Put on a Happy Face

Fred Barnes joins Tom Coburn in telling Republicans to buck up and do the right thing in this post-Obama world.

Seems to be the consensus out there.