I decided to stop by Howard School and get my early vote in before the certain last-day rush at the Hermitage Library site tomorrow. This is the second election where the electronic machines have been in use, and I noticed something I did not notice before – how utterly easy it now is to vote for a write-in candidate. No more requesting a special ballot. No more waiting for that ballot to be provided. And no more uncertainty about the process. You just hit the “write-in” button and type. Very nice.

I had no preferred candidate in my council district, so I wrote another one in. Same for vice mayor, though I resisted the urge to add my own candidate on the council at-large ballot. Prospectively, there are certainly going to be some worthwhile write-in campaigns.

UPDATE Oh yeah – I voted for Karl Dean for mayor.

I went to vote this morning at Hermitage Library.  Several candidates were there holding signs and asking for votes, mostly those who represent the nearby areas (Districts 12-15).   Surprisingly, my councilman, Harold White, was actually there.  I thought he might not be able to find the library, since he apparently couldn’t find the adjacent police station the night of the candidate forum.

As I walked by, Councilman (for two more weeks) White said, “Hi, Mrs. Moore.  Nice to see you see this morning.  How are you doing?”

After recovering from the giddy blush of excitement that came from him remembering me, I let him know that I was having a wonderful day.

I was almost to the entrance of the library when White yelled out, “Thank you for your blog … moorethoughts.com!”

I responded with a hearty, “You’re welcome!” and proceeded inside to vote.

I’m not sure if Councilman White expected me to be intimidated or embarrassed upon learning that he has seen my blog.  I haven’t exactly been complimentary of his leadership in District 14.  Quite the contrary, sir!  Thank you for taking the time to visit the blog.  Nathan and I appreciate every reader!

I also would like to thank Councilman White for loudly yelling the name of the blog in front of fellow candidates and the dozens of voters who were there.  I always love free publicity!  I’ll have to check for a spike in page views this evening as a result of his comment.

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I love my husband. My husband loves the ridiculous movies on the SciFi Channel that focus on some form of mutant animal life. So, as a way of spending quality time with Nathan, I joined him on the couch last night for two hours of cinematic genius. The prime time feature we enjoyed was Supergator. A huge alligator/dinosaur gets brought back to life by an idiot who grabbed some DNA from a fossilized leg bone. This beast then runs around Hawaii ripping at flesh and biting off people’s heads. As the intricate plot developed and took spellbinding turns, I sat on the edge of my seat and marveled at the exquisite acting and directing I was having the honor to observe.

Some highlights from the movie include:

* A great deal of time is spent developing the sexual tension masked by verbal barbs that takes place between an old boat captain and an old scientist who can’t figure out how to use her GPS device to track the monster. It was like African Queen for a new generation. Imagine our shock when we discovered halfway through the movie that the aging scientist was being played by Kelly McGillis! First of all, aren’t those Top Gun residual checks enough to keep you in the black for a lifetime? Second, my poor husband will never be able to kick back and enjoy “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin in the same way again. Kelly McGillis is the hot flight instructor no more.

* A young woman with large breasts wearing a pink thong bikini runs through the woods to escape the feared supergator. She reaches a point of exhaustion and decides to take her chances hiding behind a fallen tree. Instead of crouching and making herself as inconspicuous as possible, she stretches out into a pose that belongs on the front of Maxim. She dies.

* In a shocking twist that is sure to rock the horror/sci fi industry to its core, the black character is still alive at the end of the movie. (Didn’t they read the horror movie manual? Girls with large breasts, stupid drunk guys who at first laugh at the beast because they think it’s a hallucination and black characters always die first) This surviving character who defied the odds is a journalist for a college newspaper who traveled with a professor of volcanology to document his research. I’m sure all aspiring journalists in their early 20s are clamoring for that gig. “No, really, Sally. You cover the drunk spring break parties in Panama City and then head to the Final Four for interviews with our championship team. I want to go with the old dude and listen to him talk about lava.”

Overall, Supergator delivered a lovely way to spend a Saturday night. I hope that next week brings us a mutant spider or a twenty-foot-tall cricket that kills people by rubbing them between his legs. Is that a cricket chirping or the bloodcurdling screams of a human being rubbed to death? Tune in to find out!

A recent Associated Press report indicates that al Qaeda is at pre-9/11 strength. The question then is, where does that lead us?
I suppose many may conclude that our position and tactics are ineffective. That may be so. But the inquiry begs the question as to what ought to be done.

Some would assume the enemy to be rational and adopt an isolationist approach. Live and let live, those might say. Why anyone would say that escapes any sense of rationality. You cannot reason with a Muslim terrorist any more than you can reason with a dog or a one year old child. A long litany of recent history enables us to know that Muslim terrorists are not rational in the sense of utilitarianism, capitalist incentive, or any tenet of Western philosophy, and at their basest are no more interested in living themselves than letting us alone.  This enemy is so unreasonable that it has declared war on Pakistan, which has remained rather moderate in the grand scheme of the Muslim world, yet very much Muslim nonetheless.  If Islamists are peaking once again, empowering a cadre of individuals who can justify infinite death and destruction to bring about a new religious world order, it means only one thing. We have not destroyed enough of them yet.

That’s not terribly understanding of me, I know. In fact, it is quite harsh. And at once, it is completely rational and morally right.

Our most recent religiously fueled war ended over sixty years ago. The Japanese empire thrived on the cult of emperor worship – Shintoism. The result of our victory was the complete decertification of the emperor as a god. Our terms of victory made it impossible to revive the religion. I am not advocating the destruction of Islam, but I am certainly advocating the destruction of a particularly virulent form of it.

However, for sake of discussion, I am happy to entertain thoughts and comments otherwise.

The “fairness doctrine” has been revived by a cadre of congressional, well – weenies. Wimps, maybe. Legendary local journalist and publisher John Siegenthaler takes on the lunatic belief that the fairness doctrine holds up to even the most basic constitutional muster. Plus, if traipsing upon the Constitution doesn’t ruffle one’s feathers, it’s also easy to see that the idea just makes for bad public policy.

In summary, the fairness doctrine would demand that any station that played three hours of Rush Limbaugh, such as WLAC talk radio in Nashville, would have to offer a counterpoint equivalent to that three hours in some form.  Among those advocating that the First Amendment be gutted are Democrat Senators John Kerry, Dick Durbin, and Dianne Feinstein.  Not to be outdone, Democrat Congressman Maurice Hinchey of New York and Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio dutifully walk about the House side with the First Amendment stuck firmly to their heels.

If anything approaches Newspeak, the term “fairness doctrine” is it. To support it, you must believe there is some First Amendment penumbra / exception that the Warren court never got to, or that the free market, and the free market of ideas, is an expendable luxury. Republicans get unfairly blasted daily for shredding the Constitution in fighting the War on Terror. In reality, it is proposals such as this that really put the Bill of Rights in the outhouse.

The New York Times editorial staff has outdone themselves this time, call for the full and immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, the consequences be damned – or, in this case, simply wished away absent any critical thought.

Much like our local Gannett affiliate, the Times opinioneers often live in a delightful world where fairies, gnomes and Teletubbies are each courted equally for their vote. Toon Town never had it so good.

Adding to the amusement, while the editors consider Iraq an unmitigated disaster, the front page of the Week in Review discusses how successful American and Iraqi forces have been in using both diplomacy and force to quell the unrest in Anbar Province, most specifically in the former deadliest city in Iraq, Ramadi

Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq’s most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.

This is no small feat. And it was done by using ingenuous tactics combined with effective force. More interesting is a rather gloomy, and now incorrect, Marine assessment of Ramadi from just last year

Ramadi, which lies on the edge of a desert that reaches west from the city to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, had a population of 400,000 in Saddam Hussein’s time. That was before the insurgents — a patchwork of Al Qaeda-linked militants, die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party and other resistance groups fighting to oust American forces from Iraq — coalesced in a terror campaign that turned much of the city into a ghost town, and much of Anbar into a cauldron for American troops. Last year, a leaked Marine intelligence report conceded that the war in Anbar was effectively lost, and that it was on course to becoming the seat of the Islamic militants’ plans to establish a new caliphate in Iraq.

Now back to the call for withdrawal.

The Times’ editors want an ample dessert to accompany their din call for surrender. Broken down into easy-to-refute sections, the editorial blasts Bush for failure, yet sets up a roster of haughty goals unattainable without a significant troop presence in Iraq. For instance, the Times wants us out, yet still demands that the Turks stay out of Kurdistan, that Iran’s influence be checked among the Shiites in the south, that al Qaeda not be given refuge to train anywhere in the country, and that those who allied with the Americans be protected. How this is to be done without an effective military ground presence is apparently left up to the gnomes. Though in fairness one solution is presented – work closer with the United Nations.

That must come from the Teletubby wing of the ideological Left. They are of European origin, after all.

I daresay that the opinion leaders at the world’s paper of record are nothing short of naive. Tucked between the Hudson and the Atlantic, they toil away, devising a world recognizable only to them and the self-proclaimed elite who buy into such rank nonsense. And then in an effort toward self-validation, offer pronouncements as to how they would make their world work better. Of course, this is a completely useless exercise. A make-believe world where you concoct your own rules and offer your own pronouncements does no one anywhere much good, except those who buy into the hype, who receive the benefit of a feel-good ideological fix. Meanwhile, the real world demands real solutions. Whiny, thoughtless editorial pieces only work to make those solutions harder to find.

UPDATE More water to douse on the Times’ fire.

UPDATE UPDATE And of course, Turkey would never interfere with Kurdistan.

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I discovered yesterday that I occasionally (by “occasionally” I mean once while his mom went to the post office) babysat one of the contestants from the season of The Apprentice that was filmed in Los Angeles.  Since I never watch the Trump marketing tool, I was not aware of my link to a celebrity until my sister called me from Brooklyn with the news.  She was looking up some old friends on My Space and found our long-lost neighbors.

I remember Aaron Altscher as a three-year-old boy who joined his older sister for afternoons of play in my backyard (his sister was good friends with my sister … I was several years older than all of them and therefore quite self-important).  We had several conversations sitting by our sandbox during which he would explain life through his toddler eyes.  I’m sure he doesn’t remember these conversations, but my mind is like a steel trap (I can tell you about the time when I was four years old and my friend Greg accepted a dare to walk over a driveway filled with broken glass and what I was wearing when my first boyfriend asked me out after German class in ninth grade).  Also, I had the benefit of already being ten years old so my memories of 1985 would understandably be a bit clearer.

Aaron and his family moved to another town in Maryland when he was still quite young, and I never saw him much after that.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I see that little Aaron has grown up into quite the good-looking young man.  Way to go, Aaron!  I’d like to think those early years in Laurel, MD on Clarington Court helped you in some small way become the success you are today!

Bob Clement starts his air war for Nashville mayor tomorrow during the evening broadcast news. The first roll-out is a 2 minute spot (ahem, yes, that would be 120 seconds), which, according to the Nashville City Paper, is intended to show that Clement is the right candidate to transform Nashville from “good to great”

A source close to the Clement campaign said the television add will posit that with the “right leadership Nashville can reach its destiny as a ‘World Class’ city.”

“Bob Clement is presented as candidate with experience and a specific plan to improve schools, attack crime and ‘hold the line’ on property taxes,” the same source told the newspaper Wednesday.

The ad will also feature “real people” giving testimonials about Clement, as well as a “brief” appearance from Clement stating that Nashville can move from being “good to great” – a allusion to the popular business books by author Jim Collins.

Buy some Twizzlers, pour the 128 ouncer, and settle in. In the world of advertising, 60 seconds is long. Most television ads are 30 seconds. This is practically an inescapable infomercial, the primary difference being that it’s not on the Sci-Fi channel, it’s not running at 2am, and there won’t be a creepy animated fox pitching his candidacy (I hope).  Plus, I’m not so sure that 2 minutes of Bob Clement is going to make anyone more likely to vote for him, anyway (anybody see that debate on public television a few days ago?). He claims to have great proposals drenched in specifics, but I’ve yet to hear him say much of anything I’d deem worthy of making Nashville “great”, and I can’t say there was a single original idea during the campy “30 ideas in 30 days” played out on YouTube. For the most part, I’d say he’s hardly even been cogent, whether in one of the debates or being interviewed on 104.5 The Zone.

But hey, no one has proven to have great media, so maybe this will be effective.  If I’m off the mark, you’ll hear it here first.