So John Edwards accepted the inevitable today and dropped out of the race for President. (My earlier email, below, was written before he made his announcement.) I don’t feel like I wasted the money I donated to his campaign; I think he brought important issues and thinking to the debate.
I just really hope now that he endorses Obama. It’s time we moved to a new paradigm, and I don’t think the nation can take Hillary Clinton being the nominee. Plus, I think that President Bill Clinton’s actions and words over the past couple of weeks have been WAY over the top; there’s a sense you get, listening to him and other supporters of his wife’s campaign, that they feel like it’s their right to return to the White House.
I don’t think so, and what’s more, for whatever reason, they generate such hatred among many right-wingers that the campaign will be really ugly if she’s the nominee. I’d support her- vigorously and financially- but I’d much rather see Obama.
If he wins, the Republicans will play dirty. The race card will be the central part of their campaign; they’ll be working their butts off to win enough southern states to win the electoral vote. But I think the United States is ready to move beyond that, and it’d be huge for our nation if Barack Obama becomes President.
I guess I’m still idealistic enough to believe. Join me, won’t you?
Here’s the text of an email I sent to Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico. If you feel the same way, click on this link to send him one yourself.
Governor…
I know this isn’t really an email related to your duties as governor, but someone forwarded me this URL so I thought I’d use it to email you.
I would love to see you endorse Barack Obama for President.
To be honest, I’ve been more of a John Edwards supporter from the beginning. But I think it’s obvious- John isn’t going to win the nomination. It’s going to be either Clinton or Obama.
I’d support either of them, vigorously. Heck, I would have supported you vigorously as well; ANY of the Democrats running would be WAY better than any of the Republicans.
But Barack Obama represents a bigger chance to clearly repudiate the failed policies of the Bush Administration and the nutjobs who’ve taken over the Republican Party. He stands for change and jointly working with everyone and anyone possible to move America in the direction we need.
Please consider it and endorse Barack Obama.
Thank you for your time and your service to New Mexico and the United States of America.
I haven’t been writing as much lately. I’m sorry; I want to do more but have been pretty busy, plus winters are always tough for me when it comes to maintaining a healthy energy level.
My girlfriend (who doesn’t exactly want to be immortalized on the blog, so let’s call her “G”) moved in. She’s been here most of the time anyway, so we made it “official” and now what was MY place is now OUR place. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a packrat, so my place was already full of my stuff. Now there’s a bunch of her stuff, and we have to find a place to stuff it all in. Luckily, for a condo, this place is huge, and I’m biting the bullet and weeding through a bunch of crap that I don’t need and making room.
Going through all your stuff and dumping a bunch is a good exercise in Buddhist non-attachment anyway. Or so I try to tell myself as I decide whether I really need some old stereo receiver that I’ve really meant to wire up to my computer and have surround sound… for like four years now and haven’t gotten around to it but I really MEAN to do it one of these days. Sigh.
Anyway, there’s that, and working some extra days to build up some vacation time, and yesterday I blew the morning at the airport trying to fly down to Eugene for the day to attend a funeral, and blah blah blah.
You get the point.
Plus, I’ve been writing a lot on my work-related blog, The FAA Follies. The FAA is getting into worse and worse shape in air traffic control. There are facilities that are severely understaffed because of an entirely predictable and forseeable rush to retirement by many controllers. Things are, put bluntly, getting more dangerous. We’re trying to draw attention to this fact and set the ship on a better course, but it’s not going well so far. Luckily, where I work at Seattle Center, things are not bad yet; but I know there’s a ton of my fellow controllers suffering, and pounding out some of these blog posts takes a lot of my time.
Oh yeah, I also turned 39 yesterday, so happy birthday to me and I’m a bit depressed about my 30s being almost over and I still haven’t slept with a supermodel, or fabulous actress like Jennifer Aniston or Catherine Zeta-Jones or Lucy Liu or Heather Graham, or even one of the SeaGals. My girlfriend is pretty understanding and says that if I can ever manage to talk one (supermodel or actress or SeaGal) into it, I should go ahead and bonk them. Her lack of confidence in my chick-magnet skills unsettles me a bit. Sigh. At least I was a chick-magnet for HER.
There’s a guy writing a weblog called “Fake Steve Jobs“. He wrote it for some time before anyone found out who he was; people loved the blog, because he did an awesome job (haha) of sending up the way the real Steve Jobs promotes things- and has a bit of an ego as well.
Anyway, on FSJ’s blog, he posted a YouTube video that I think you should see. It’s of a protoypical nerdy Asian guy… who has thought a bit “outside of the box” and created a totally cool system for creating a 3D effect for the Nintendo Wii. Thing is, his system doesn’t involved stupid nerdy red/blue or polarizing glasses. (There is a bit of a nerd glasses factor in the product… well, you have to see it to understand.)
I’m going a step further and saying “holy shit, that’s really cool!”
Give the video a few minutes. It is a bit slow to start, but when you actually see the 3D system in action… WOW! I hope the nerd who came up with it makes a LOT of money, because he deserves it. It’ll take video gaming (amongst other things) to an entirely new level.
