This Fark headline made me chuckle:

Despite 90+ degree heat, thousands turn out for joint Obama-Clinton Campaign rally in Unity, NH. Through a spokesman, God apologized for the unseasonable heat, saying it was necessary to keep hell from freezing over

This morning’s NY Times contains a column about depression by Dick Cavett.

Part of me wants to write a great deal about my own struggle with depression, but I’ll spare my readers that except to say that, like Cavett, there were many times I wished I had the energy to strangle those who told me to “snap out of it.” Like it was that easy to do. Yah. Why didn’t I think of that?

My recent change of medications, brought on by my long-term success with a medication just not working for me any more, sent me through some weeks of a return of suicidal thoughts and the inability to get out of bed and go to the office. Thankfully, I went through that period with professional help.

My anecdotal experience is that depression is often a “paired” disease (my own formulation, btw), with the depressed person also suffering from alcoholism/drug addiction and/or anxiety. Sometimes the mood swings for some sufferers are so great that it’s bipolar hell. For me, I had to sober up before I could really address the depression.

Hope the column amuses you and deepens your understanding of some of your fellows.

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This is my 801st post on this site since Sept. ’05.

So much wasted time and words. Oh, my Lord, what was I thinking?

Somebody notify Webmaster Ultimate that I’m due a session in Stillwater. Maybe a weekend soon?

Anyway, Tuesday is patch download day for us Vista hostages and it must be a helluva patch this week. My Hotmail server has been down for a Friedman Unit or so I’m guessing. It feels like that long a time in Internet world, which is kind of like dog years or something.

I’ve started a project in which I’m writing family stories for my daughter and grand-daughter. I hope to get around to sending her the first installment any day. Anyway, she asked specifically for stories about my father, for example, and I’m trying to write about my father’s handwriting. It was immaculate. Few people saw my father’s handwriting without remarking on its clarity and beauty. My mother says my father was a “switched” lefty and the experience made him constantly practice. In all events, every scrap of paper in the house was filled with my father practicing “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0″ and the alphabet in both capital and lower case lettering, sometimes printed and sometimes in his lucid cursive. While this is interesting for me, it’s hard to put into a story because my perspective had nothing of the drama of how difficult it may be to change from left to right handed. Stories without some kind of conflict (and resolution) aren’t really stories. At this point, my effort is merely a fragment. It’s making me restless and puckish.

I’m not so sure how I feel about giving U.S. Sugar $1.7 billion, but I favor the idea of returning hundreds of thousands of acres from cane growing back into Everglades. I would even favor giving federal funding assistance to the State of Florida, Republican as it may be, in order to accomplish this. We tell Brazil to protect the Amazon and I think it’s time we pick up part of our burden of trying to restore ecosystems. However, instead of just paying this monopolist labor abuser and polluter, I think I would put the land through condemnation. Maybe even force them to clean up some of their mess rather than just pass it along to us after they’ve pulled gazillions of dollars out of the land.

I don’t envy Obama’s speechwriter nor the candidate the task of the nominee’s Denver convention speech on Prime Time Television. The very nature of the speech is such that it will be difficult to the extreme for the speech to match the inspiration and admiration of some of his other speeches, not least of which is the 2004 convention keynote address. It is the speech in which the nominee is expected to be programmatic and tick off a list of priorities and legislative goals, but this does not make for soaring rhetoric. A failure to lay out his program in favor of “inspiration” would be greeted with howls that he’s an “empty suit” and “inexperienced” and would mark the speech as a failure. If he tries to do both, it’s an uneasy marriage and runs the risk of satisfying neither the wonk or the fanboys/fangirls (the Kool-Aid drinkers). In all events, he’s sure to compare favorably to the still uneasy speechifying (I can’t make myself use the word “rhetoric” for this speaker) of Sen. McCain at his Minnesota convention a short time later.

Speaking of the convention speeches, not an awful lot that’s happened or is going to happen between now and the end of the GOP convention will be as important to the November outcome as what follows the conventions, the vice presidential choices excepted. A couple of reputable polls have lately shown Obama leading McCain by double digits. Most other polling indicates a race within the margin of error. My best guess is that Obama leads, but McCain is certainly capable of changing that to his advantage. Looking at the state by state polls and thinking about the Electoral College, it appears that Obama is comfortably ahead in states with 238 EVs and McCain leading in states with 190EVs with 137EVs in tossup status. It takes 271 EVs to win. In the tossups, McCain holds the better hand at this point, but Obama only needs to keep his 238 and grab off as few as 2 of the 11 tossup states.

Liberals like me are upset with Obama for dropping out of public financing, but I don’t think the GOP voter particular cares because that was never a big Republican issue. I just wish he’d used McCain’s alleged violation of FEC rules during the primary as his basis for the decision.

Far more repugnant to me is that Obama has apparently decided to vote for the Telecom Immunity bill and to continue with a bare veil of supposedly stronger civil liberties protections that is now passed by the House and will soon be before the Senate. Sen. Feingold’s condenmation of the Blue Dog Dems that are voting with the Repugs states my sense of the isse very well except that my own outrage would likely be a good bit more profane and unusable on broadcast television. I’ll show him. He won’t get my $25 this month. That’ll show him. In the end, be careful what you ask for. I wanted him to win the primary and still think he’s the better choice of two closely matched breakthrough candidates. I’m sure as hell not going to switch to Sen. McCain’s Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran foreign policy and lame economics matched with no health care on the domestic side. I realize that I am in a very small minority of the political left wonkish clan and that most people find the topic too technical, but I’m steamed even if no one else cares.

I can’t believe that the McCain campaign has chosen wisely about a couple of things recently. The AZ Sen. now favors a gasoline tax holiday, drilling in the Gulf and off California, and now wants to award a $300 million prize for a next generation car battery. It just clanks for me. It seems more like gimmick than the authenticity, experience and mature judgment image his campaign is based on. All three ideas seem lame, unlikely to do any actual good, and just a little desperate. I’m just thinking out loud, but doesn’t it seem a little contradictory to talk about your coolness under fire as the mature and experienced leader of men and still claim to be a “maverick” at age 71. I mean, don’t you sort of expect a guy of more than three score and ten to settle down and stop being a stubborn and impulsive child? Is he going to throw a fit in the grocery store checkout lane if he can’t have his shiney new battery? Do we really want a “maverick” with a suspect temper with his palsied hand on “the button”? Don’t mess with the U.S., ’cause our president’s a maverick, ya hear? His campaign sure has that cowboy in the White House ridin’ him politically, apparently taming McCain’s opposition to tax cuts and torture.

Enough blathering.

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From Matt Yglesias in Atlantic Magazine

On the advice of some readers I picked up Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World where I learned that Genghis Khan banned torture in his empire.

So, yes, under George W. Bush the United States of America is regressing to an understanding of humane treatment of people that doesn’t reflect the enlightened views of Genghis Khan. That’s your feel-good thought of the day.

George Carlin is dead

Anyone reading this blog knows I gave up the sauce some time ago. My sobriety will be 13 years long on June 22 if I don’t drink and I don’t die. I thank God for my sobriety and consider it a gift — a gift of family, friends, financial well being, spiritual well being, all the things that make my life worth living.

Nevertheless, here’s a list of 40 Things Every Drunkard Should Do Before He Dies from Modern Drunkard Magazine. I must say that this is a list of which I approve. If you are going to do something, do it well. I have a personal favorite that I would put on the list, and that is that I once tore out the yellow pages for Taverns and went to all of them alphabetically from A to P. I have been places you wouldn’t believe, I guarantee.

My son and I have a certain penchant for a kind of old school manners and value of the best (not always the most expensive). We like nice pens and calling cards and thank you notes and such. We both believe in personal style. I like my son, quite apart from being his father — he’s the kind of guy I like to hang around because he’s funny and smart. I think he would approve of the list, if declining to try to live up to any cheap magazine’s crude tongue-in-cheek list himself. I’ve done a good bit of the 40, although far from them all. I don’t even want to know Jack’s score.

My daughter, Rebecca, on the other hand, no doubt sees such a list as utter foolishness and has no admiration for drunkards. She’s far too practical to see the romance of such a list. Thank God. Women like my daughter actually have to grow up and be sensible once they’ve had a couple of my grandchildren. It’s an unfortunate requirement, but there it is.

Jack and I are unencumbered by such reasonable obstacles because, as everyone knows, men grow older but not up.

Speaking of silly rules, today is the first day of summer and all and I just got my white silk pants from the cleaners and I’m going to dress in the way that my friend The Gary calls “A guy in search of a marina.”

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Just looking at the presidential race through the lens of the electoral map as I’ve set it out below, I’d say Richardson of N.M. is Obama’s best choice of the conventional lists. New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada are “in play” as battleground states and that’s 19 electoral votes total from the three (Ohio has 20 and Michigan has 17, to give you perspective).

With Richardson’s ability to shore up Obama’s Latino vote (Bush got 40% of Latinos in ’04 and McCain is currently polling about 30%), the N.M. Gov. can also play a little mischief in Texas and if not win that state, at least make McCain spend scarce money in what should be a very red state.

If the Latino vote in the Southwest (as opposed to Puerto Ricans in New York and Cubans in Fla.) is 85% Dem, then even McCain’s home state of Arizona goes into play.

Just mentioning the Florida Cubans reminds me that a poll has now shown an Obama lead down there, but it’s mostly seen as an “outlier”, an unreliable result. That result, however, may look more real once Floridians start thinking about Gulfshore beaches exposed to offshore drilling, as McCain proposed this week.