Seeking A Homeland

Don't get mad, get even

News sources and blogs are afire with reaction to South Carolina representative Joe Wilson's disgraceful heckling during President Obama's speech tonight. Amazingly, to me anyway, there's already a paragraph about the incident on the Wikipedia page for Wilson. There have been nearly 200 revisions to the page in the last few hours and it "is currently disabled due to vandalism."

What makes this even stranger is that today Wilson's son Alan launched a campaign for South Carolina Attorney General, a position that may call for even more propriety than the office of U.S. representative does.

This has certainly been a busy day for SC pols. Earlier, in a move that Wilson must also have known about when he went to the Capitol to hear Obama's speech, the SC GOP caucus delivered a letter signed by 60 of its 73 members asking Mark Sanford to resign. Since that chamber only has 124 members and all 51 Democrats will most likely agree, that makes it nearly unanimous.

Between that Wikipedia page and this CNN story I think I can see why Wilson did this. He may claim, "This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President's remarks," but I suspect it was a calculated political tactic. Rob Miller, the Democrat who pared Wilson's share of the vote in 2008 down to 54%  (it was 84% in 2002) is running against Wilson again in 2010. Wilson is worried, and he needs to do something to energize his base, which must be demoralized after Sanford's debacle made a mockery of the religious right's so-called "family values."

I propose that we not just get mad, though. Let's get even. The way to let Joe Wilson know that his behavior is totally unacceptable is to help Rob Miller. We can donate to his campaign at http://robmillerforcongress.com/ or on his ActBlue page.

I got the ActBlue link from Suburban Guerilla, who had the exact same idea I had. I promise you, though, that I came up with it before I saw her post. She found a good video clip of this incident from TPM, too. Later I saw the same general idea on Daily Kos.

I knew there was something I liked about those guys!

Last October, in one of my typical screeds, I started off with an allusion to "Fake Empire," the lead off song on one of my most favorite albums of 2007, The National's Boxer. Well, now it seems that they might not have minded my using their song that way. I see today on I Guess I'm Floating, a good music blog, that  they've declared themselves for Obama and have donated the use of an instrumental version of "Fake Empire" for the background version of an Obama commercial. It works real well, as you can see:

The National is also offering this great T-shirt and donating all the proceeds to Barack.

My banner

I've thought for a while about trying to explain my use of a quote from the book of Hebrews in the banner of this blog. The other day I found in this book I've been reading rather fitfully some observations that are not about Hebrews but still explain my understanding of it in a way that is probably much clearer and certainly more elegant than anything I might have come up with. I'm just going to quote from it at length.

"Hope does not only give the power to break out of oppression, like Israel, and to seek the promised land of liberty. Hope also alienates people from their native land, their friendships and their homes, and makes them ready to let these go and to seek something new. By this I mean that hope for an alternative future brings us into contradiction with the existing present and puts us against the people who cling to it...If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should come to terms with things as they are, either cheerfully or unwillingly. The fact that we don't come to terms with them--that between us and the existing reality there is no harmony, either friendly or resigned--is the unquenchable hope for the fullness of life, for righteousness and justice on the new earth, and for the kingdom of God. That keeps us unreconciled, restless and open for God's great day.

"Against the horizon of the resurrection of the crucified Christ, life in history becomes a charge, a mission. The promise opens our eyes for the potentialities of history and the goals which we are intended to reach. It is only against the eschatological horizon of hope that the world appears to us as history. But history is not just full of everything possible, good and bad; for this future is not the vacant 'where to?' of possible changes. the promissio, the promise which God's future opens up to us, gives rise to the missio, the mission into history, so that this future can be anticipated in the context of the possibilities open to us. There are historical conditions in the world which are in contradiction to the kingdom of God and his righteousness. These must be contradicted so that they are changed."

Moltmann wrote this in the section of his autobiography about the time when he published his most famous book, Theology of Hope . I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were to find out that a certain well known American politician who often writes and speaks about hope and who is open about the role of faith in his life had read that book. I wish I could ask him.

Overwhelmed

Sometimes I really overcommit myself!

1) I agreed to be a Precinct Captain for the Barack Obama campaign. The Colorado caucuses are Feb. 5th, two weeks from tonight. The pre-caucus party I'm supposed to be organizing, and I think I'm going to be hosting, is Jan. 31st, nine nights away. I've got hundreds of phone calls to make, and I'm going to try to go to the doors of the people I can't reach by phone. I'm also going to try to have a speech of some sort written and more or less memorized for caucus night, too.

2) I've applied for a job that would have me transferring from the Business Division to the Elections Division. That would mean an even more interesting job, by far, and a lot more money. In order to sound informed when I'm interviewed, I need to study up on HAVA and such. My interview was supposed to be today, but I got a reprieve--the guy who's going to interview me rescheduled it for Thursday.

3) A couple of books I had on hold at the library came in and I picked them up on the way home tonight. I was already reading this slim but very intense book by Jaspers and Bultmann, this Man Booker Prize winning novel and this autobiography of Jurgen Moltmann. Now, on top of those, I've got The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a book about (mostly) classical music of the last hundred years, and The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By coincidence, those last two, very different books are both by New York times staffers. Or maybe it isn't such a coincidence, after all.

4) My wife talked to someone a week or so ago about refinancing our house and getting some cash with which to knock out some higher interest credit card debt, and I need to get some papers together for that. The possible advantages might be even greater after the Fed made the biggest cut ever in the prime lending rate.

5) It was my intention for the new year to post here more often, but that's going to have to wait. I have one longer, more substantive post saved in draft form and another in the back of my mind, but I can't take time to finish them.

Will someone please volunteer to do my sleeping for me?

A Colorado blogger's final post

The first U.S. casualty of 2008 in Iraq was a Colorado blogger named Maj. Andrew Olmsted. His final post was written in advance, in case he was killed, and posted by a trusted friend. It is well worth reading and agree with him or not, he deserves to be heard. There is a newspaper article about him here.

Out of respect for his sacrifice and in accordance with his express wishes, I'm not going to say anything else about it here. My sincere condolences go out to his family and friends, and most of all to his widow. I'm also going to remove from my blog, at least temporarily, the tabulation of the cost of the war in mere dollars. Seen in proximity to this post it seems obscene.

My new look

I decided that this blog was looking dull as dishwater, at best. Since I got my daughter, Anna, to help me the other day in picking out eyeglass frames that didn't look like leftovers from the 1970's, I also got her to pick a new design theme for my blog. This is her choice.

My new widget

I've been thinking that everyone who visits my blog must be thinking, "Man, this is so 2005," so I decided to spruce it up a bit.  After looking around a little I installed a Streampad widget.  Then I picked out some songs that seemed to fit in with the overall purpose of my blog. If I understand the way the widget works, if I link to a song in a post, Streampad will pick it up from there and play it on command. Since this is not principally a music blog, I'm not going to describe them here--at least not this time.

The songs posted here are samples, and if you like them I encourage you to support the artists by buying their cds. If you are a copyright holder and would like me to remove your work from my blog, please contact me and I will do so immediately. However, this may be covered under fair use, has no commercial purpose and will only be featured here for a limited time.

Maybe now visitors will think instead, "Man, this is so 2006."