I thought this was a really great speech.

Now that he's won a majority of the pledged delegates in this primary race, Obama seems to be re-launching his campaign, coming out against McCain with renewed purpose and renewed force. He strikes a tone here that I've not heard from him before. Not as diplomatic and thoughtful as he's been when campaigning against HRC and his other democratic opponents in the early days. He's tough and direct. Time to go head to head with McCain. Time to kick these corrupt, dead-end, war-profiteering criminals out of our White House and get down to the business of moving our country forward in the 21st Century.



Let's go win this thing.

-jw

I went up to San Francisco the last weekend in April to visit with my brother John, my sister-in-law Michelle, and my (very) little niece growing in Michelle's tummy! The picture on the left is my niece at about 19 weeks and the 2 on the right are pictures I took of John & Michelle that weekend (only 9 weeks to go at that point!).



It was great timing because I was able to coordinate my trip up there with my mom's visit from Maine. It was the first time the 4 of us had been together in a year! We all had a really great time but fun and frivolities were not the only reason for our visit, we had real work to do getting the baby's room together. My mom and I spent many long hours scraping paint and repairing cracks in the plaster walls but years of paint and wallpaper (paint on wallpaper on paint on wallpaper on paint) turned out to be hiding some pretty big damage.



You can see the room's original paint (the building is a turn of the 20th century Edwardian)- it's the red toned paint in the video but there is also another early paint visible, a tan color that is probably milk based. The red was gorgeous! That hole ended up being this big:



We were hoping to get the room to the point where it was ready to receive a fresh coat of paint but unfortunately there was too much to fix so we will be returning for at least one more working vacation.

There was time for some frivolity- John just got his pilot's license a few weeks ago and he took my up for an early morning bay tour.




THE ROCK!


And here is our landing...so smooth!



John waited, of course, until after we were back on the ground to tell me that I was the first passenger he had taken up without an instructor in the plane. Thanks John...


-liz

If Hillary is really able to pull off the so-called "Nuclear Option" to win the nomination, she will be perceived forever to have done so by underhanded, duplicitous cheating. She will prove to America what many of us have come to suspect based on the way she has conducted her campaign in the last couple of months: that she will literally say or do anything to win, party and country be damned. As the great blogger Oliver Willis puts it, "There is still no scenario beyond the destruction of the Democratic party that leads to a Clinton nomination."

With all the noise about Reverend Wright, why has the media been so reluctant to talk about John Mcain's holy man, the apocalypse-loving, hatemongering wackjob who has proclaimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's revenge upon New Orleans for planning to hold a gay pride parade? Not only has McCain not rebuked him, he actively sought his endorsement and has praised him on many occasions. Listen to a bit of what John Hagee has to say, if you can stomach it. . .

Speaking of John McCain, Arianna Huffinton, who was once a big fan of his like many on both the political left and right, has a great column here that totally demolishes the image he once had of a straight-talker and a maverick within his own party. As she illustrates, he's lost virtually all his credibility by selling out those principles we all used to really respect. Sad, really. Oh, and apparently he and his wife told her in 2000 that they didn't vote for Bush!

There is, however, this example of accidental McCain straight talk: he let slip the other day that the Iraq War really is about oil. See for yourself.

And a U.S. Government study has predicted the possibility that suicides among veterans may eventually exceed the number of combat deaths in Iraq (you read that right) because the men and women who volunteered to risk their lives in service to their country are not getting adequate care. Slap on all the yellow ribbon magnetic stickers you want, but can we please work on really "supporting the troops?"



-jw