Political Roundtable: News, Opinion and Commentary

Are you a Republican voter who is undecided as to which 2008 presidential candidate you are going to support in the primaries? You’re not alone. A mid-November poll of likely Republican voters in New Hampshire showed that 56% were still undecided!

Maybe this will help: Pick a Republican, a quick interactive candidate picker that I whipped up.

This is very interesting to me. The site touts:

“Which Republican Presidential candidate best espouses your views? Choose your criteria on the left, and the candidates who don’t fit will fade away.”

Nice. As a registered Independent, a bit more conservative than liberal, my obvious choice lies in a Republican candidate. The Dems don’t have any, in my opinion, good choices for rep’n the country for the next 4 years.

Consider this a continuation of the last post, as I don’t feel like using the edit feature to add on to it.Which I guess, technically, doesn’t make it a marathon blog but… the spirit of the idea is still there and that’s all that matters. Right? Right. Let’s do it!

Quick hit about these Lipitor commercials, in which the creator of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart is on record supporting the medication Lipitor, a prescription used to lower cholesterol. Really? You’re gonna trust a guy who created a heart for you to use when your heart fails about cholesterol? I mean, the guy’s obviously a great doctor, and I’m sure the medication works. But that the more you see the commercial and think about what’s going on, it’s just laughable. I can’t even think of a proper simile to make a joke about it (i.e., “” was what I had in mind). It baffles me. Whatever, commercials don’t make sense these days.

Regarding the city where my sister was born: Apparently, someone tried to deposit a fake $1,000,000 bill in a bank in Aiken, South Carolina today or yesterday. It doesn’t even matter when it was. I don’t really care. This is just brilliant… In fact, I don’t even have to make a joke, because it just writes itself. People like this make being a smart ass blog writer easy.

Reporting on Bill Simmons’ “marathon chat” I talked about in the first post: Going off without a hitch so far, minus the issues with the font of the chatter’s questions being formatted as black font and clashing with the absolutely ridiculous background (which fades top-to-bottom from red to black. It’s a melting clock away from being something out of Van Gogh’s nightmares). Even posted a quick question about the Magic under my all-time favorite pseudonym “Danny Salamander” asking about the Orlando Magic’s success so far this season and the grossly overpaid Rashard Lewis (I would link to his salary, but it’s not public yet. It’s about $120 million over six years, which is more than I’ve got on me right now). The SG stated that he had changed his tune on the Magic since the preseason (”they’re really good”), but that still “doesn’t excuse them from overpaying Lewis by $50 million”. Agreed, Simmons, agreed.

Clayton’s Fantasy Football Update:
The “Coyne Moneymakers” are a dull 3-9, although we had a convincing 124-93 win this week over J.R. Rice’s “Steel Town”, thanks in part to the results of the Monday Night Football stinker in Pittsburgh. Final score? Zero-to-three, Steelers win, on a Jeff Reed field goal with 17 seconds left in the 4th quarter (as his team name suggests, J.R. had multiple Steelers slated for play on Monday night). You read correctly– I had to type the score out with words because it was bad of a game. Just an absolutely dismal and utterly boring outing by both teams. I feel sorry for anyone who suffered through all four quarters.
I’m still undecided on my long term Fantasy Football status. The team has gone wrongity wrong wrong wrongerson this year, but I believe this kind of bad luck may be unprecedented and I’ll need another season to judge Fantasy sports on the whole. So far, minus the 9 losses this season, it’s been a successful experiment. Good times.

More on Aiken, South Carolina criminal masterminds: My sister tells me that once someone robbed a bank with a pitchfork, was successful, went to Wendy’s for lunch afterwards (!?), and was promptly swarmed by officers before he could even sink into his classic double cheeseburger. Who does that? Imagine the cell phone call on the way to Wendy’s.

Bill Simmons’ marathon chat today was pretty successful. He went for a grand total of seven hours and four minutes, which is phenomenal by all accounts, especially since the last 3 hours unraveled faster than the last 30 minutes of Wedding Crashers. Cheers to the Sports Guy and those people at the V Foundation for Cancer Research. My marathon blog pales in comparison. Let’s continue!

Interesting new musician: A few days ago, I got a message from a Progressive Rock band named Torman Maxt. They’re pretty solid, but you’ll only dig them as much as I do if you’re a Prog Rock fan or atheist/agnostic (quickly peruse the lyrics to the songs they’ve featured on their MySpace and you’ll see why that is). If you’re either of those, or both (as is often the case), then go check them out. Definitely worth a listen.
But while checking out their profile, I scanned over their Top Friends list, noted to myself that Neil Peart and Porcupine Tree were in the top twelve, and decided Torman Maxt had further jumped up my list of good artists (with music the way it is these days, it is easy to gain my support). But while scanning this list, I noticed an attractive female and immediately went to her profile (my first reaction). Her name is Frankie Catalano and she describes her music as “Rock / Pop / Crunk”, which was pretty interesting. After giving the songs a quick listen they’re pretty indescribable, like an insanely eclectic mix of various other female singer/songwriters. So if you dig new music, you should give it a listen. Remember, this is coming from a guy who normally can’t stand female vocalists. Check it out (link above).
And for the record, I don’t get paid for pimping this music (yet) and I just put it all out there for someone to consider on a rainy day when they’re considering cutting their wrists just to see a bit of color again.

Watched the Republican Party CNN/YouTube Debate tonight and was once again affirmed that Ron Paul is the only candidate I can agree with completely. I did enjoy that McCain took some shots at him– it could be good for publicity since the media seems dead set against letting RP get any face time.
I would write about this a little more, but unfortunately my DVR mailed it in for an early night tonight and decided to record only 3/4 of the debate. Don’t ask me how this happened. The HD DVR is probably the single most poorly thought out device that Brighthouse has developed in a while. I’ll have more tomorrow in another post, I’m heading over to YouTube to review the last 5-10 questions that I missed.

Ron Paul In 2008.
– Clayton, “The Late Night Blogger”

In the last Republican debate, the first question asked was what the Confederate flag symbolized to each candidate. A symbol of slavery? A political and social ideology? Historical icon? The easy answer, and the liberal one, is that it symbolized slavery and oppression. The far more historically accurate one is that the flag and the entire secession was a fit on the South’s part because of an economically bleak future and a socially divisive philosophy.

Regionally, the South was very much headed to where it is today: fiscally secondary to the bustling northern markets. Slavery was its strongest and only crouch which abolition threatened. That’s not to say the slavetrading cream of the crop didn’t consider blacks inferior to whites, but motivation for fighting the Confederate States of America varied. Unionists had a number of reasons for refusing secession. First off, there was the question of how much power states should have versus the federal government, others saw slavery (not the rights of blacks, the grossly unfair treatment of them) as immoral and problematic to Manifest Destiny. The most little-known reason though, was that slavery made it harder for Americans to achieve the “American dream” of success. Slavemasters, that were already rich through the trade, became richer which made it harder for ambitious Americans to begin and succeed in the cotton industry.
Abraham Lincoln’s chief concern was retaining the Union and abolishing slavery, not healing society’s condescending view toward blacks. Lincoln’s famous speech where he said “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” reflect his priorities. He was far more interested in the Union and abolishing slavery than equality. There’s so much in history that still echoes today. It would be nice if the political leadership stopped implying and approaching conflicts as simple with a good side (in this case the Abraham’s Union) and a bad side (the Confederates). That’s not to say that many Unionists passionately deplored the mistreatment and inequality of slavery, but there were a number of reasons Unionists denied secession. Too bad even today people just look for a place to stamp “bad guy” and “good guy.”

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