I am pissed about the FISA vote. Reid and Pelosi deserve most of the blame as they’ve had multiple opportunities to kill this thing or at least push it out to after Jan 09 when a solid majority and Dem President could pass a superior bill and THEY decided to push it through now (they may have voted against it, but they could have stopped it if they truly felt it was a bad bill).

Obama let a lot of people down yesterday.

But we can still work to try and get better Dems into office. The Christian Right did not spring into being over night; they spent decades working at the local levels to get candidates they liked into power. They were patient.

We’re going to have to be patient too. And yes, it sucks, especially after a day like yesterday. But that means we have to knuckle down harder to get true progressives into office.

Once again, its not just about getting Obama elected. It’s about getting Democrats elected to as many positions as possible.

Think about what the Christian Right did in the 70s and 80s. They spent time and energy in lots of states, building up candidates from school boards to city councils to mayors to state legislatures to congress then to the Presidency. It took time, it took patience but they got what they wanted.

Democrats (and progressives within the party) need to start thinking the same way. They probably won’t win Georgia this time around, but maybe they pick up a house seat or two. Get some people unto city councils and into the state legislature. Experienced candidates who can run again for higher office down the road. They also build up some organization, donor lists, volunteers. Come the 2010 midterms that can be built on. Come 2012, it can be built on again.

It requires patience. It requires the ability to see the future. And it requires getting away from the beltway Democrats who are content with their base while letting the Republicans keep their base and only fighting at the periphery.

If oil STAYS ABOVE $130-140 a barrel.

Offshore drilling is one of the most expensive forms of drilling. The reason the ban was allowed to happen at all was because the oil industry back in the 80s and 90s knew that at those prices they could hot profitably extract oil from costal waters. The ban was meaningless to them so they put up little to no resistance.

Now with oil hanging out at $140 a barrel it may now be profitable to do offshore drilling. But again, only if the price STAYS that high.

Offshore drilling will NEVER bring down the price of oil. Psychological effects or not.

The American public can be remarkably stupid at times. Of course it doesn’t help when the MSM reports the ‘controversy’ of drilling (McCain says this, Obama says this) rather than reporting the FACTS of offshore drilling (no competent authority, even in the oil industry, believes allowing offshore drilling will decrease prices).

Oh well, I’ll most likely be dead before the really nasty climate change and peak oil stuff hits anyway.

My company is Japanese owned. We have three staff members from Japan who work here full time and routinely have engineers over for projects. ALL of them speak English, most of them learned in grade school.

We also own a factory in Tijuana MX, ALL of the senior staff, engineers and most of the support staff speak English, again most learned in grade school.

We routinely deal with our sister facilities in Taiwan, the Philippines, England (two nations separated by a common language) and China. We have customers in the US, Mexico, Germany, Canada and Turkey (the auto industry is VERY widespread). Again most of our counterparts read, write and speak English and most learned from an early age.

The rest of the world has embraced multi-lingual education as a necessity. They get IT. The United States does not. They start language classes in grade school (not high school). They make proficiency in another language a requirement to graduate.

We live in a global economy. Success means being able to communicate and deal with people from half dozen countries.

I really do.

But I can see it so clearly in my head. I’m almost certain there will be a ‘deal’ of some kind announced in Sept/Oct about troop status. It will include some kind of ‘loose’ time line for withdrawal of US troops.

And MSM will latch onto it. I can see the stories.

McCain Proven Right on Iraq

Stay the Course Worked

Tons of stories about how McCain stood resolute, even in the face of opinion polls, in his stance on Iraq. How it proves his ‘maverick’ status, his ‘patriotism’ and his brilliant take on foreign policy. Another group of stories about how ‘cut-and-run’ Obama would have lost Iraq etc etc etc.

You’re right, people shouldn’t buy it. They SHOULD be smart enough to see through it. But all it takes is a couple of thousand fools in the right swing states (we’ve seen that in Florida)to make it close and the 2008 goes to McCain.