Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

STill blind here.  But the browser font is just large enough that I was able to do some forensic reading of the Seattle Times.  The machine recount of votes for our governor’s race was due this afternoon, and it appears the Republican, Dino Rossi, won by 42 votes.  Out of 3 million cast.

Each party can now pay for hand recounts in selected counties, and all sorts of litigation is sure to follow.  In the spirit of good humor and civic peace, they may as well settle it by a coin flip.  In another situation, I might be able to countenance this and laugh away a negative result, but Chris Vance, the Republican state chairman, has been such an asshole through the recount process that I’m not inclined to hand him anything in the spirit of good citizenship. 

STill, this whole mess is the result of a bungled Democratic canpaign strategy. 

Well, I’m back from Atlanta & Charleston, and actually relishing the Seattle drizzle.  After a couple of days rushing around taking care of Seattle business, I’m ready to just sit home and veg for a couple days.

I finished up about 2 today, got a ling-needed haircut, and decided to pack up my laptop and walk over to Zoka’s for a late-afternoon  espresso and a ruminative blogging session.  The place is usually pretty busy, but, because of the rain and the resulting inability for people to lounge at the tables outside, there were no seats available.

So, I set out for Cafe Maree, another half-mile or more away.  No sweat, I need the exercise after a week of sloth on the road.  I walked in, ordered my coffee and set up my laptop.  As the screen came up, I realized I had left my reading glasses at home.  I really can’t do much,if anything, on the computer without them. 

I groped around the IE menu to set the font to “largest”, groped to the far corner in the taskbar tray for my radio icon and clicked.  The Radio composition box, at least, is big enough to see, so I plopped my cursor inside it and started typing this.  If there are misspellings, or if the handwriting is illegible, you know why.

The ruminative post I was planning, then, is postponed due to rain and low visibility.  Consult your travel agent to book a later post, or reroute to another blog. 

I seem to have gone dead the last month.  None of the usual clever buzzings in my head, working a lot and traveling all over the place.  I spent last week working about 40 miles north of Atlanta, not doing much besides working, eating and sleeping. 

Yesterday, my mom flew down to Atlanta, and my Atlanta brother and I picked her up and we drove to Charleston, SC to visit our middle brother.  As we did last  year, we’ll spend today watching our Buckeyes (we’re all Ohio State grads) get thrashed by Michigan, then roast oysters over a wood fire. 

… still hangs on.  In Washington, it’s prolonged by the governor’s race that has yet to be decided.  I’ve made some fun of Georgia’s having a governor named “Sonny” (I’m in Atlanta for the week).  Now there’s good chance we’ll have one named “Dino”.  Christine Gregoire, the Democratic Attorney General, is in a virtual dead heat with a small-time realtor and state senator named Dino Rossi.  Gregoire started out the campaign way ahead, but played “prevent” defense throughout the campaign while Rossi, an anti-choice Catholic with a very conservative voting record, took a lot of Republican money and painted himself as a moderate.  No way it should have been that close - it’s another example of Democratic campaign strategies that can’t find the end zone.

As a partial cure for election angst, you might be intrigued by The Seattle Stranger’s proposition that Democrats and progressives, as a way to gain the cohesion of message and self-image that the Solid Right seems to have right now, target its politics towards an Urban Archipelago:

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion–New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on.

The article goes over the top quite often, in typical Stranger fashion, but the focus it provides is intriguing.  It also allows us to quit blaming everyone in “red” states (fuckthesouth/) and reach out to like-minded folks stranded on progressive islands there.  I think this article, plus other reading in this issue, might raise your spirits some.

Much as the Kerry campaign was wont to flog the fact that the Bush economy has been bleeding jobs, there are signs that the economy in some sectors is actually very robust.  Look no further than the bare-boat charter industry, a collection of plucky entrepreneurs who, given a fighting chance at operating competitive businesses by an adroit web of state and federal tax incentives, have deployed an enticing fleet of vessels for rent to an adoring public.

The Seattle P-I has published a series of stories about how buyers and sellers of luxury yachts use a combination of sweetheart tax laws and criminally lax enforcement to avoid millions of dollars in federal and state tax.  Chief among the dodges are:

• the monstrous Section 179 depreciation deduction allowed on federal income tax (like, 1/2 of the boat’s purchase price in the year of acquisition) for purchasing business assets.  We’ve mostly heard how this break helps low-lifes finance SUV’s on a December shopping spree, but it’s also applicable to yachts costing millions of dollars. 


• they play a multi-state ruse in order to avoid paying sales tax on the boats’ purchase, while the rest of us land-bound tools have no choice but to pay taxes on our modest purchases.

These guys say that the tax breaks help them stimulate job growth as they pursue their humanitarian mission of cruising and befouling the state’s waterways.  Thank god somebody’s looking out for the working guy.

Still in Arizona.  Went to a dinner hosted by one of my clients at his condo.  Upon arriving, I felt a little sheepish when I audibly locked my car (it honked when I used the key remote), since it was a posh and aggressively gated community.  But, hey, ANYONE might be delighted with my 3-year-old laptop and growing bag of dirty clothes.  Why make it easy?

It was kind of interesting seeing people sort themselves out.  I’m here because two firms are being acquired and merged, and there are some cultural differences.  On the patio where the hors d’oeuvres were served, it was all-LDS, and the beverages were Martinelli’s and iced tea.  After a while, I noticed the absence of certain of the guests, and ultimately discovered a group in a corner of the kitchen gathered around a couple bottles of expensive Cabernet.

The dinner was in Phoenix, and I needed to work in Phoenix the next day, but my hotel is in Tucson, prepaid for several nights through Expedia.  Still, I didn’t want to drive the 100 miles to Tucson, sleep, then drive back, so I decided to take a room in Phoenix.  I didn’t want to just walk up to the desk at a hotel and pay their highest off-the-street-at-10pm sucker rate, so I hatched the brilliant idea of pulling into the parking lot of a hotel I was passing that advertised free wireless internet.  Sitting in the car, I opened my laptop, connected to their signal and perused the deals at Cheaprooms.com.  Finding one to my liking, I purchased a reservation, closed up my laptop and drove out of the parking lot, feeling pretty smug and techno-hip.

When I got to the hotel, however, they acknowledged the reservation but said they were full, and that Cheaprooms shouldn’t have shown any availability.  By now it was nearly 11, and I was feeling a little deflated and, well, silly.  I finally drove up to an old Ramada whose price was not that much more for the night, and contented myself with dialup access to finish the evening.

After slogging through the drenching Seattle rain yesterday morning to vote, I caught a flight to Tucson and an engagement with a new client.  Today, instead of the pity-parties I’m reading about that others are deriving comfort from, I had to endure the smugness of the “it’s a great day in America” crowd.  The weather’s nice, though.

I haven’t really had time to settle my own thoughts, other than to delve a bit into the sort of despair that Christopher Key is imbibing.  I considered, on a long drive from Tucson to Phoenix, whether I could continue to live in and be a part of the America that I postulated would exist in 2 years.

I really feel that we’ve been disserved by the Democratic party in its current form.  I mean, Kerry was sort of a Frankenstein of a candidate, but it could easily have been Gephardt or Daschle, guys who have fumbled the legislative leadership of party for 8 or more years.  On our local front, we have a guy, Jim McDermott, who, as I’ve said before, is a virtual voting machine for me, but, given his “representative for life” status in our district, has not developed into a leader with any stature.  Instead, he buffoonishly stumbles from stupid stunt to stupid stunt.  Recently, a judge ordered him to pay  Ohio Republican John Bohner something like $600,000 in damages and legal fees over his bungled handling of a taped cell phone conversation.  The Party leaders in Washington want donors to step up and bail him out, but I say let him hang.  If we can raise that kind of money, we can buy a legislative race in some Republican district.  The Party needs to jettison the scions of its failed leadership and, in safe districts such as ours, start running folks with some giddy-up and fire in their eyes.

If we all decide to stay here instead of colonizing Canada, I think we need to start with a serious makeover of the Democratic party, or by fashioning a new party to our liking.  I’m thinking the Dems will take a serious look at veering right, reacting to exit polls of yahoos braying about “values”.  Which part of the red-state electorate do you want to bed down with?  We need to pay attention to what tectonic shifts begin to occur in the Party, and not wait 2 years for it to be set in stone.

I had a birthday last week, 55 - the double-nickel.  So from now on, I’ll be exceeding the national speed limit.  Catch me if you can!

So, I had looked at my driver’s license while I was in Ohio, and told myself that I needed to renew when I got home.  On my birthday, I plotted my day so that I was calling on a client in the north end, near the licensing department location.  I went in, pulled a number and waited my turn.  When I got to the counter, I presented my license and the woman there asked if I used contacts or corrective lenses (no).  Then she punched my license number in and informed me that it didn’t expire until next year.  I arrange my life so that I’m late for everything.  I’m so not used to being a year early.  Watch this space, and don’t be surprised if I’m driving on an expired license this time next year.

I wrote a lengthy post on the plane to Seattle last Tuesday night, which I’ve posted in the comments to this post.  When we landed, a flight attendant made an announcement asking me to push my call button so she could give me an important message, and I knew my Dad had passed away.  I called my brother and he told me that Dad’s breathing had become more and more labored after I left, and he died peacefully just after my plane took off from Detroit. 

I flew back to Detroit Friday night as planned, and my brother, sister-in-law and I hung out with Mom and began to pick through financial affairs.  We had a gathering of friends and relatives at our house on Saturday, and I was encouraged to see how many people in the area were still alive and cared about my parents.  I think my mom will have a lot of support in the days ahead.

Thank you all for your good wishes.