Have you ever played the license plate game on long road trips?  That is the game where passengers try to spot license plates from as many states as possible.  Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, several friends of mine from across the country are joining me in a virtual version of this game.  But the catch is this - you have to find the plates in alphabetical order.  (If you can ever get past Alaska...)

Watching thousands of cars pass me this year has revealed a few things about human nature, the economy, and the state of the election.

What happens when a growing new industry threatens the power and the profits of Big Oil?  Why, environmentalists win, of course!  Doing a double-take?  You are not the only one.

It is true that the Democrats have a "Lieberman problem".  But in addition to getting some facts wrong, Sunday's TIME Magazine article from Jay Newton-Small does not really measure the magnitude or breadth of the problem.  So I have.

The House of Representatives passed HR6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, on June 20 by a vote of 293-129.  (The roll call is here, and Democrats who supported the bill are listed below.)  Democrats, the majority party, opposed this bill 105-128. Republicans voted 188-1 for the bill.  [Tim Johnson, R-IL, was the exception.]  It is time to explain to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer the meaning of the word majority.

On Super Tuesday, I volunteered as a poll observer at University Place School in Huntsville, Alabama. The polling location was in a hexagonal, cinder block gymnasium on an unusually warm and humid winter day. During my fourteen-hour day in that gym, I spied the signs of children all around me - four-square lines on the floor; chairs too short for me to sit in; rows of aligned dots painted on the floor for assigned seating; and elementary art on the walls encouraging students to stay active and eat healthy.

Sometime during my interminable day, I discovered this poster entitled "Rules for Fighting Fair":

and I was reminded that we adults seldom remember or exemplify the lessons we are trying to instill in our children. I think it is a worthy desire to want to live in a civil society. I believe the values of tolerance and freedom can exist together and complement one another. And I feel that as our road seems to inexorably lead to another argumentative presidential election, we should go back to what we learned in school about how to fight fair.

I was sitting in my room and the news came on tv;
A lot of people out there hurtin', and it really scares me.

~~ Brian Wilson, "Love and Mercy"

It was about eight in the morning yesterday when my friend Ed sent me a text from Buffalo and said, "Turn on CNN." My first thought was that Buffalo was on the news - he had been telling me about the severe winds, about how school had been canceled, and about how, dammit, he still had to work that day. In the few seconds more before the channel appeared, I wondered a few more things that might prompt Ed to direct me to the news today, but the news I saw was the last thing I was expecting. John Edwards was ending his campaign for president.

[My apologies for the delay since my last diary.  I am one of those invisible Americans who was recently laid off.]

Late in a story about how 67-year-old action star Chuck Norris thinks that John McCain is too old to be president, I came across this nugget:

Huckabee also blamed late snowfall in parts of upstate South Carolina.

"The snow not only froze the streets of the Greenville-Spartanburg area, the votes kinda stopped once it started snowing," he said. "That was an area we were looking forward to having a significant vote margin."

Should Mother Nature choose the president?

After awhile, you get accustomed to his face, his body, his mind.  And when you see him day after day, it is not easy to realize how he has been slowly, marginally, effortlessly creeping away from you.  Sure, people on the outside can see the changes.  Yet you are unwilling or unable to recognize that something has gone wrong.  I have always called it relationship inertia - it takes more effort to stop the trip you are on that it does to just ride it out.  And then you look into his eyes one morning, and you do not recognize the man you see.  You cannot even recognize your own reflection in his eyes.  You were betrayed and swindled.  Now, after all this time, after all your faith has been squandered, you wonder if you can ever trust again.  You wonder who you can believe anymore.  Most of all, you wonder where you go from here.

In searching for a frequently updated source of information on the ever-changing primary calendar for 2008, I stumbled across the website for the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS).  As with a handful of other organizations (ably covered here by Subversive), the NASS has a panacea for the calendar mess - a rotating regional primary/caucus calendar.

While one could reasonably assumes that an organization of secretaries of state could come up with a tenable plan for an election calendar, this idea fails on at least three fronts.

In my geekier moments, I like to research things.  You know, things like "facts," which can then be used to demonstrate, or "prove," other things.

Tonight, I decided to tackle the task of proving that Fox News Channel is not news.

I succeeded.  But you will have to go below the fold to see how.

Reuters:

The White House is trying to clarify something: President George W. Bush is "a commander guy" but not "the commander guy."

Or something like that.

On Wednesday, speaking to a friendly audience, Bush talked about his troop buildup in Iraq and rejected efforts by the Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress to force him to accept a withdrawal timetable.

"The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm a commander guy," Bush said.

That's not what I heard when I watched the event.

Killeen (TX) Daily Herald:

April 16, 2007 - COPPERAS COVE – History will be made today when Copperas Cove resident Bill Thomas and his wife, Georgia, present President George W. Bush with a Purple Heart at the Oval Office.

Thomas said he and his wife came up with the unprecedented idea to present the president with the Purple Heart over breakfast one morning a few months ago as they discussed the verbal attacks, both foreign and domestic, the commander in chief has withstood during his time in office.

"We feel like emotional wounds and scars are as hard to carry as physical wounds," Thomas said....

He has drawn criticism from some locals who have learned of his actions, Thomas said. Nevertheless, he said he earned the Purple Heart and it is his to do with it as he sees fit.

"I feel the President deserved one," he said. "The bottom line is, I paid for these Purple Hearts with my blood."

Where do we start?

I moved to Austin in 1994, just in time to vote for Ann Richards, and watch her lose to George W. Bush. And from the Blue Island - Travis County - I watched as a reasonably Democratic state was swamped by the red tide and turned Republican in less than a decade.  Republican as in 100% of statewide elected offices are Republican Republican.  And the Texas Democratic Party deserves its share of the blame for this situation.

In announcing the firing of Walter Reed Army Medical Center commander Maj. Gen. George Weightman, Army Secretary Francis Harvey said:

"Unfortunately, we didn’t know about" the poor conditions at Walter Reed.  "If we would have known about this, we would have fixed it."

Take your gingko biloba and join me as we revisit other things we did not know in the last six years.

In a speech to the Madison County Republican Men's Club on Saturday in Huntsville, U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Haleyville) blew off the will of the people, expressed in the House vote on the Iraq resolution.  "It was a nonbinding resolution.  Basically, opinions," Aderholt said.

Aderholt revealed his legislative illiteracy, however, when he told the Club "I think it's impossible to support the troops, once they're deployed or over there, with a measure like that."

Bob, did you read the resolution?  It wasn't very long, so you shouldn't have had trouble with it.

My mother doesn't understand why I won't shop at Wal-Mart. She thinks it is an abnormal obsession of mine. She tells me that part of how she raised three children and sent them to college (with my father) was by knowing a bargain when she saw one. But at what price -- is that bargain worth your soul?

It is hard to believe that six years have passed since W. was inaugurated and our country began its descent into Hell. I'll grant you, it was titillating during the Clinton years to wade past Limbo and dabble our toes in the Second Circle (lust). But W. and his entourage have created an express lane to the Eighth Circle and beyond, stacking up a lifetime of sins in only half a dozen years, or roughly the length of a Mel Gibson movie.