Not Dead

Despite the lack of recent posts, I’m not dead — just otherwise occupied. Events over the past 2-3 months have led me to take on another… ah… non-office time project, let’s just say. That has seemed a bit more urgent than blogging, and it isn’t close to done yet.

I will have Toronto trip notes soon, though, I promise (actually, they’re in another Safari tab right now, in an unfinished state). Meanwhile, some thoughts.

• Abu Ghraib — really don’t know what to think about this one, other than the easy superficial observation that it’s bad news. That said, is it being overblown by an opportunistic lefty press? Yep. (I was afraid the BBC World Service newscaster Friday night was going to break down into tears of joy as he read a report of Rumsfeld’s apology.) What can be done about that? Not bloody much. Was the release of this news timed for maximum political effect? Abso-friggin’-lutely! It torpedoed good economic news and quieted the latest Kerry-Vietnam uproar. Speaking of which…
• John Kerry and Vietnam — so now you have to have served in the active-duty military to be worthy of political office, eh? So much for the principle of civilian control of the military. For that matter, why don’t we just change the Constitution so only those who have served can vote? And I probably wouldn’t care that much about his post-Vietnam activities (accusing fellow troops of war crimes, negotiating on his own with the North Vietnamese in Paris, etc.) if he wasn’t making Vietnam his defining campaign issue.
• John Kerry 2005 — what’s he going to do if he does get elected and finds out that Vietnam was done thirty freakin’ years ago? (Other than fly over and kiss Jacques Chirac’s butt, that is.) It seems unbelievable, but when you compare his voting record and his campaign speeches, Waffles-boy appears to have fewer consistent guiding principles than our last Democratic president.
• The Virginia budget — I’m fine with it. Money has to come from somewhere, and if we were going to kill off the car tax once and for all, something had to give. The national left and the Virginia hard-right share a curious blind spot where the dot-com boom of 1998-2000 is concerned: both sides seem willing to accept it as a valid point of reference when it was really an economic “perfect storm” of sorts, in which technology and culture joined up to turn the economy sideways. The lefties blame President Bush for what was essentially a correction in the system following the wild run-up of the dot-com era. The VA hard-right isn’t much better, trying to stick to tax policies that were formulated based on the oversized tax receipts of that time. TANSTAAFL — I’d rather pay a higher sales tax (which I can control, either by buying online or just cutting back on the stupid stuff I purchase on occasion) than either (a) pay Henrico County every year for the right to own my car, or (b) watch my Virginia Tech degree lose value as our state higher-education system goes down the tubes from lack of funding. Can we dispense with the ideologically-based childish tantrums, please?

More soon — really. I mean it.