Friday, August 22, 2008

Biden our time & other musings

If Barack Obama chooses Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate (and we now know he's picked somebody), how will he reconcile Biden's well-publicized plan to partition Iraq into three different countries with his own campaign promise to get us out of Iraq? Anybody who thinks a Democratic president will stop this bloody war or put an end to our government's pathological need to engage in nation-building is fooling themselves.

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An Obama/Biden ticket would also mean of course that anyone voting for Obama because he had the wisdom to oppose the Iraq war would now be pulling the lever for another Democrat who voted to cough up the Senate's Constitutional power to declare war to the Bush Administration.

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He may indeed know how many houses he owns, but Biden is still no friend to working men and women. The Senate's top recipient in campaign cash from the finance/credit card industry led the effort to pass the legislation that made it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. This was a bill that Bill Clinton vetoed twice during the 1990s, but that sailed through under Bush in March of 2005. The finance industry made an expensive show at the time of castigating people who overspend and get in over their heads, but statistics show that far and away the number one cause of bankruptcy filings is health and medical expenses. Either Biden didn't buy the numbers or he just wanted more of the dough.

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Can't we just agree that Obama and McCain are both elitists? Let's put that false campaign dispute to bed.

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Garrison Keillor seems to have enjoyed his visit to the Iowa State Fair. He went all "Garrison Keillor" in this summary.

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The Nation's Andrew Rice reviews two baseball books released this summer-- Nicholas Dawidoff's "The Crowd Sounds Happy" (which I've read), and Will Leitch's "God Save the Fan" (which I haven't)-- thoughtful critiques for a person like me who, in Rice's words, "devote(s) large portions of his conscious attention to the fortunes of a bunch of men in colorful hats who wave sticks at a white speck and run around in circles."

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Anonymous web comment of the week not from this site: St. Louis Post-Dispatch reader "coedhacker", on the topic of a career-threatening elbow injury to Cardinals' reliever Jason Isringhausen-- "Yeah sure, Izzy can pitch again, for the Olympic team perhaps, or maybe my company tee-ball game. Yes, I said he could pitch in my company tee-ball game."

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Baseball is about to disappear as an Olympic sport, but the U.S. and Cuba had a nice sustained rivalry while it lasted-- right up there with Dodgers/Giants, Michigan/Ohio State, Celtics/Lakers, and Cheney/U.S. Constitution. Fortunately, it will live on with the tri-annual World Baseball Classic, coming again in March. Will it have been three years already?

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I'll be spending Sunday night with Bruce Springsteen in Kansas City. If you're nice to Aaron, maybe he'll give you a blog review when we get back.

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