Tuesday Night Open Mic for November 9, 2010

I am going to do open mic a little differently this evening. I have been working around the house this week as I prepare for the new job. Yesterday I painted the bedroom (a warm orange) and didn’t get to bed until 8:00 am! Tonight I was cleaning the bathroom and apparently managed to find the sharp end of some tweezers that gashed my finger. As a result typing is a very slow process. Couple that with my only sleeping from 8:00 til around 10:00 this morning and you find an exhausted blogger who cannot type well. So tonight I will find the articles I want to put up for open mic and post them without my commentary. They I will begin answering comments from yesterday and adding my thoughts on the topics I post until I can no longer keep my eyes open. For tonight’s topics we have a Tea Party Candidate (and Palin lackey) being petty, Wealthy Americans cutting back on charity, Quatitative easing by the Fed, and the new START treaty. I will also pull forward a thing or two from yesterday’s discussion. Particularly, I want to pull forward a JAC topic and a comment or two directed at me.

Not Politics Tonight… Easing Back Into the Fray

Whew…. I have to say that I have missed being able to interact on the site. Paying 75 cents a minute is simply not possible when the Tuesday night post ends up with close to 900 comments! But I am back from my excursion to the Great White Northwest. It was a beautiful and restful trip. Rather than jumping right into the politics this evening I figured I would share a bit of my trip with all of you. I am hoping that no one finds it too boring that I do so. For those that are not interested in hearing about my trip or seeing any of the pictures that I took, I understand. Fear not, tomorrow we go back to our regularly scheduled programming and discussing politics. But for tonight, I ease back into the everyday writing practice of the blog. So what has kept me from my wonderful readers these last ten days or so? Alaska and Canada, my friends. And I wish I didn’t have to come back from up there….

Letting Stevens Off the Hook

I have a couple of thoughts on this subject. Many of you will remember that former Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska was indicted on federal charges some time ago. He was convicted of seven counts of felony corruption. It was an embarrassment for the Republican Party, at a time when they certainly didn’t need any further embarrassment. It seems some things have changed in regard to his case, certainly the tone against him from Washington has changed as well. I decided that I would address this from both sides of the issue because I think doing so demonstrates the game politicians are playing with us.