Sound Familiar?

This famous political wife was a corporate lawyer.
She served on the Board of Directors of a company that paid its CEO over $26 million in the same year it laid off 150 workers from a processing plan.
An executive at a $100 million hospital consortium criticized for price-gouging, she received a raise that boosted her salary to over $316,000 after her husband was elected to public office.
The woman is Michelle Obama, former associate at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin; board member of TreeHouse Foods; and vice president of the University of Chicago Hospitals.
This is not to criticize either the Senator or Mrs. Obama for the fact that they have been both hard-working and very, VERY fortunate. Rather, it’s to criticize the msm because a) Hillary Clinton has been pilloried for having a resume almost identical to Mrs. Obama’s and b) Mrs. Obama’s lack of progressive credentials has essentially been buried by the usual cast of left-wing characters.
To its credit, the Washington Post did run an article last December on the media bias in favor of Obama. Joe Kline of Time magazine commented on the Obama campaign’s “creepy…mass messianism” and David Brooks, one of the token conservatives at the New York Times, commented wittily that “Obama’s people are so taken with their messiah that soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports”*.
Robin Morgan’s reprise of her famous 1970 essay “Goodbye To All That” is a passionate reaction to the anti-Clinton bias that the mass media has been pushing at us for so long. It’s worth a read.
And I was glad to note that someone else (although I’ve lost the link) agrees with me about this election season’s great irony: of all the networks, cable or otherwise, Fox News has done the best job of covering the Clinton and Obama campaigns in accordance with its much-criticized motto, “fair and balanced”.
*Mr. Brooks does a masterful job of explaining Obama’s appeal to higher-income folks versus Clinton’s support among blue collar families as the difference between what he calls the dialects of self-fulfillment and struggle.

Smoking Cessation

It’s the start of day four.
I decided to quit after the first smoke on election day. An adrenaline rush helps us to wake up, but since nicotine increases adrenaline, the result can feel like a heart attack, or maybe it really is a heart attack. I didn’t bother to find out.
I’ve quit at least three times before: when I was pregnant, when I lived in Orange County, California and after I came back to Mass. I remember exactly when I started smoking again the last time: in the middle of my first commercial .NET project, about four years ago.

Continue reading Smoking Cessation

Letter to Hillary

Dear Senator Clinton:
Living in a Cape Cod town that has a long history of racial diversity, I evaluate people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Thus, I’ve been taken aback by the power of guilt in propelling Barack Obama to national prominence. As many have said, if someone with the same credentials as Obama, but named Mary or O’Shea, had attempted a run for the Presidency, they would have been ridiculed at best.
Maybe everyone should have the opportunity to fine-tune their judgment skills by living in a town like Mashpee, MA.
Meanwhile, I was proud to note that your support on Cape Cod came from the middle class towns, like mine. I’ve had enough political domination by the wealthy, including the Kennedys and the Kerrys, not to mention the Oprahs, thank you very much.
It is said that Obama’s support comes from the intellectual as well as the social elite. I’m a college graduate and a software developer and as such, have been trained to be objective, disciplined and analytical.
After listening to the debates and reading the background material on the websites, I’ve made two contributions to your campaign, based on your intellect and knowledge of course, but mostly on the content of your character and your past performance as a public figure.
I may not agree with all of your positions on the issues, but I trust you not to fold when times get tough, as they do for every President. I don’t have the same confidence either in McCain or in Obama: one is fragile and the other seems shallow and manipulative.
I’ve heard it said that having a brown President would enhance the stature of the United States in the world. I think that’s nonsense: does anyone really believe that the UN has been more effective and enjoyed greater prestige under Kofi Annan than Dag Hammarskj

No Contest

Not much of a Super Tuesday for the children’s crusade.
Of the 13 states that Obama won yesterday, 8 out of 13 are solidly Republican and likely won’t be in play for the Democrats anyway this November: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, Kansas, Alabama and Georgia.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton thumped Obama pretty good in Massachusetts (56 to 41%), which tells you something about our skepticism if not outright cynicism about the judgment of our mainstream mass media, governor and senators.
Meanwhile, reeling from the Clinton victory, the media seem desperate to spin her success into something negative. That Clinton won California and New York, not to mention the biggest surprise of all, Massachusetts, is ignored by their trumpeting that she took “only” 8 states as opposed to Obama’s 13 – but 8 of the states in Obama’s column won’t go Democrat anyway in the generals.
Yesterday, Clinton won 584 delegates to Obama’s 563. The jury is still out on the remaining 534. The split would have broken more decisively for Clinton if the Democrats had a “winner take all” rule, since she carried most of the states with the largest populations.
Clinton has 845 delegates; 2,025 are needed for the nomination.

Super Bowl, Super Tuesday, Super February

January went by like a shot, and considering that we were in the middle of a snowstorm a week ago today, it was nice to be able to do outside activities this afternoon, including the transfer station run we’d postponed and a visit to the Falmouth playground with James after his impromptu overnight.
The sales, marketing and consulting people at the office, including the CEO, dressed in Patriots shirts on Friday. My football pals have a lavish Super Bowl party planned, with shrimp, steak tips and fixings.
The spill-over of communal activity has made this a festive weekend.
Go, Pats. RCP for poll junkies; go, anyone but The Pretender.

Backlash

In reaction to Ted Kennedy’s endorsement yesterday of Barack Obama, I made online contributions first thing this morning to four other Presidential campaigns.
Maybe it’s the times. Maybe it’s the New York Times. Maybe it’s the wearying, relentless Hillary bashing that sounds and smells like the misogyny that is so much a part of our culture.
In this morning’s paper, there’s a story about the epidemic of physical harassment of women on the MBTA’s Red Line. “Experts” are now telling women to slap these predators silly, a positive change from my day when women were advised to react to catcalls, groping and even attempted rape with submission. Still, why are these attacks happening at all?
The big financial companies “richly rewarded” the “wiping out” of $200 billion in shareholder value with bonus payouts of an estimated $33.2 billion.
Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiastic endorsement of Obama intersects with both of these. An unimaginably wealthy, powerful Black woman who has experienced the most horrendous kind of sexual abuse decided to publicly support a – man? Psychologists must be having a field day with this. What does Obama represent to her – a protective brother?
The Oprah and Kennedy endorsements trouble me greatly for another reason.
They remind me of a Presidential candidate ago who won the White House 8 years ago because his daddy and his daddy’s friends manipulated the Republican party and ultimately, the Supreme Court, to ensure a victory.
People get rewarded every day for reasons other than performance and merit, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I have to vote for them.
Anyone but Obama.

Sweet Jane

I’ve been entranced with PBS’s latest series, “The Complete Jane Austen“: the actors, the costumes, the sets and of course, the screenplays, including writer Andrew Davies’ master work, “Pride and Prejudice”.
It was a particular treat to see Jemma Redgrave, the star of PBS’s 2001 mini-series Bramwell, as Lady Bertram in “Mansfield Park”.
Giving “Masterpiece” newcomers their due as well, Mark Dymond gave a top-notch performance as supercilious lady’s man Frederick Tilney in “Northanger Abbey”.
Experiencing the foibles, romances, social triumphs and comeuppances of British country society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries has been a great escape and a refined pleasure.

Financial Genius

I just about flipped my lid the other day when I heard Orrin Hatch describe Mitt Romney as a “financial genius”.
You’ve got to be kidding.
Capping his performance as an absentee governor, Mitt left the state with a billion dollar deficit, and his much-touted Commonwealth Care plan is running deeply in the red.
Further, Mitt made his business reputation as the founder of Bain Capital, a venture company that built up its treasury through the enthusiastic exercise of blunt instruments like lay-offs and offshore tax havens.
Meanwhile, Mitt gets away with making campaign speeches about protecting middle-class and blue collar jobs without getting struck by lightning.
A testament to the power of a really good haircut.

Airhead Ad

Too cutesy for words, the latest ad campaign from Apple for their new laptop, the MacBook Air, views like pure parody.
In fact, some of the actual parodies on YouTube do a better job of pushing the product, maybe because they don’t insult us with yet another “girl singing baby-talk” music track.
Whoever thought up the revolting trend of using cloying, overly-high-pitched female singing voices in TV ads should be permanently banned from the industry. I mean it.
It’s bad enough that radio ads have used “little people” to mimic kids voices for years. Adults can’t seem to reproduce the cadence of a child’s speaking voice, and certainly not the charm.
Instead you end up with something that sounds like that ridiculous speech from Forrest Gump, the one about life being a “box of chok-lits”, that makes you want to punch the speaker in the mouth, just to shut them up.
Thank goodness for mute buttons.