A Blog Sabbath?

A reader writes:

This is a post that I’m sure many others like me read going, "Yep… Yep… Uh Huh… That’s right…" I have work and a wife and kids to distract me from time to time, but I know I have to consciously pull myself away from the screen, sit down on the floor and join in with the Lego-ing.  I LOVE my family, and still it’s hard.

I grew up seeing my Dad seated, legs protruding out from under a newspaper, so maybe it’s all just an evolution.  But I know there’s a compulsive element to all this.

I know sometimes at night I’ll find myself cycling through my regular blog stops, looking for a new post (and I’m quite aware that out here on the Left coast late nights get pretty thin).  But what am I really looking for?  What is the chemical that’s released when some intriguing piece of information or point of view enters my brain?

I think it’s party that if I look up from the screen, the room is basically the same, but as I scroll from page to page in here, it’s a constantly unique kaleidoscope of information,  We have a small place out in the desert that has no phone, no satellite, no DSL, nothing. It’s an oasis of peace that I crave, so I know something in me wants to step off this conveyor belt of information.

Still, as I drink my tea, sun beginning to rise, the kids starting to stir in their rooms, here I am.  Tapping into the great, world-wide nervous system of information…

$3 Trillion

And all we got was this lousy photo-shoot?

Ahmadtalabaniwathiqkhuzaiegetty

Ahmadinejad’s visit with the Shiite government of Iraq is a useful reminder of what the permanent Iraq occupation means: an expansion of the power of Iran in the region, even as its nuclear bomb aspirations continue, and the slow emasculation of the US. Of course, the visit has inflamed the Awakening forces and widened the gulf that separates Sunni and Shia Mesopotamia:

“I think Ahmadinejad is the most criminal and bloody person in the world,” said Emad Abbas, a university student in Samarra. “This visit degrades Iraq’s dignity, and it proves that Iraq is occupied twice, once by the United States and once by Iran.”

In Kirkuk, where Sunnis are fighting efforts by Kurds to control the city, tribes and political parties rallied against the visit. “How can we tolerate this?” said Salman Abdullah Al-Hamad, an Arab tribal leader in Kirkuk. “Today we live under the regime of the clerics. The Iranian revolution has been exported to Iraq.”

But no worry: the US will spend more billions and deploy 100,000 troops for decades if necessary to make Iraq safe for the Iranian mullahs and keep oil prices lower than they would otherwise be for Chinese industrialists. Bush is the gift to our enemies that keeps on giving.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)

Republicans For Clinton

Well, if I were a pure GOP partisan, I’d vote for her as well:

"One thing we’re hearing that we really didn’t expect is people going and voting in the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton," Markum said. "They come up to me and they say McCain can beat Hillary, but he can’t beat Obama. It’s fueled by guys like Rush Limbaugh, by Ann Coulter, who’re telling them to keep Hillary in this race, and that trickles down to Republicans going into those voting booths who can’t vote in our election. These were some voters we were counting on, so that’s thrown bit of a kink in our extrapolations."

Ohio

The dread rises. Her lead is growing. The Clintons are like zombies. They never stop; they keep coming at you. And if you don’t despatch them quickly and several times over, they simply continue until they despatch you. My worry is that if the Clintons win just one state tomorrow, they won’t be able to be thwarted until the summer. If they win more than one, they will treat it as if they just regained the presidency.