As of this moment — not even noon on my 28th birthday — about 20 people have “written” on my “wall” to wish me a happy one. That is more people, I feel confident, than ever called me on the phone between my 1st and 27th.

I really have to apologize — mostly, perhaps, to myself — for being such a slacker on the blog front in recent weeks. There are lots of reasons, but it still pains me to suddenly realize I haven’t written in a week, and that I have nothing substantial to add to anyone’s discussion. 

That hasn’t changed today. But, in lieu of actual thought, I’d like to give you a few glimpses at the things that are making me tick right now.

A Palestinian man wails over the dead body of a Hamas security officer Saturday. (This is the version we ran in the paper, CLICK for the uncropped, much more gruesome version.)

1.) Pictures of dead people. That sounds weird, I’m sure. But today’s Israeli attack on Hamas — the bloodiest single event in decades of the conflict — has me thinking about fallen man in fallen world; and how in the world we, America, can presume to know anything about these people in a land far, far away; and how thankful I am to live in such a peaceful place; and how spoiled I am to live a life so detached from the real struggles being dealt with by most of the rest of the world.

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I think it’s a combination of the economic meltdown (my 401k lost 25% this year) and my general stress level. Whatever it is, it’s making me take stock of my life and attempt to blow away the chaff.

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It’s been a while since I’ve done this… so here’s a good one of P-E O.: Pie you can believe in?

Leave yours in the comments.

Interesting blog thread over at The American Conservative, which has become my unlikely first click when I open my computer and start to surf. Blogger Sean Scallon writes:

(Modern “conservatives”) tried to assert the government’s authority over education with No Child Left Behind and in a private medical case in the Schiavo affair. When the nation’s financial institutions crumbled and buckled under the weight of bad investments, the Federal Government stepped in to prop them up as any socialist government would. And of course, in order to defend the state that does all these things, the right-socialists established police powers that are common in nearly all socialist countries that limit the right to dissent and allows the government to spy on potential enemies, real or not.

Despite such socialism, these right-socialists persisted in calling themselves “conservatives” and lied to themselves while lying to the nation about how they supposedly supported “free markets” and “freedom” in general for political reasons.  However, the voters got tired of and saw right through their lies. The present economic crisis has caused the right-socialists to be replaced by the more honest left-socialists … [bold mine-R]

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Doing things in reverse today, first the punchline: The always pointed Daniel Larison (of The American Conservative) explains Palinonics — the method of decoding the governor’s record-breaking run-on sentences.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

“Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.”

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely … Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.

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Another trip to Louisville, another visit with my sister-in-law. She’s really awesome, and of some importance in the GOP of that quite large metropolitan city. She has no problem talking about the faults and flaws of her GOP colleagues locally, and even on a statewide level. However, she’s still under the illusion that Sarah Palin was unfairly “railroaded” by the media. So, as a member (albeit a lowly one) of “the media,” I feel compelled to explain that while “media bias” exists, it’s not really equivalent to what Republican propaganda has long made it out to be.

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First off, apologies for the delay in writing about the election. When it was all said and done, I found myself at first paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the moment, and since then so full of thoughts that it was impossible to make much sense of them. I still feel a bit like that, but I’m going to attempt a cohesive thread.

The Obamas: Putting the "first" into the First Family

That Barack Obama won so handily came as no surprise to me (though the electoral numbers ended up even a bit bigger than the most positive polling suggested), given his message and the real wants and needs of mainstream America — not to mention the audacious atrocity that was the McCain campaign. For months, however, the actual narrative of Obama’s journey has been lost in the details (of attack ads and policy pronouncements, gotchas and gaffes, pitbulls and plumbers). It reared its head again on Tuesday as soon as the first results starting coming in, and it is this: Americans have elected a black man as president, and (in modern terms, at least) by a landslide. But a sad truth is that the epochal nature of this moment hasn’t hit everyone — in fact, I’ve talked to a number of people here in southcentral Kentucky who either don’t recognize what a moment this is or who cynically dismiss it as being of little real importance.

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Everyone else called it. President-elect Barack Hussein Obama. The deal is done. More thoughts in an hour or two, as I’m still blogging at the Daily News’ election central.

It’s worth noting in all this that, according to the Seattle Times:

McCain also has ties to Khalidi through a group Khalidi helped found 15 years ago. The Center for Palestine Research and Studies received at least $448,000 from an organization McCain chairs.

IMO, the association game just doesn’t work that well in a political world that’s so small.

For a long time, “liberals” have seen their label turned into a four-letter word… its synonyms include “extremist,” “socialist,” “gay,” “weak,” “anti-American,” “elite.” Most have stopped using the word as a self-description — going instead with the rather vague “progressive” — though it’s blisteringly invoked by the opposition. “Conservative,” meanwhile, has experienced something of a resurgence. Seen in the ’70s and early ’80s as “old-fashioned” or “prudish,” conservative has come to mean “common sense” and “with the people.” (Note, please, that none of these “synonyms” really reflects the political histories and deep meanings of these two terms, and I endorse none of them.)

In the wake of a hypothetical likely Obama victory, however, it may finally be time to return these words to their rightful places in history — and, subsequently, to leave them there and come up with some that work. “Liberal” is already out except as a slander; “conservative” now has no relation to its previous meaning and will likely fall out of common use except for a few brainiacs and purists. This was foreseeable in the GOP primaries, when Ron Paul continually explained that HE was the “real” conservative — the guy calling for an immediate end to war in Iraq and American occupations in general; a return to sound financial principles and abolishing not only the IRS, but also the Federal Reserve; a cease-and-desist on warrantless wiretapping and torture and secret military tribunals. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, did his best (which was not very good) to stand as the Reagan caricature, while Mike Huckabee tried to revive the “compassionate” conservative label that George Bush shed as soon as he took office. John McCain, once the nomination was mostly locked up, stepped in and claimed that he was a Reagan “foot soldier” and a great conservative, until he got to the general election and instead took to calling himself, once again, a “maverick.”

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