Do the Yak

Instead, I'm amusing myself with some new blogs: Yo Mama's Blog and Steam Me Up, Kid . Also today's post about the Big Three Boston-area furniture companies on Surviving Grady (Jordan's Furniture, Bernie and Phyl's, and bob's Furniture). They asked which was most annoying, and I commented thus: Isn't Bob the one whose commercials say, in most severe Boston accent, "You get the DRESSAH, the MIRRAH..." just so cheesy but without the unintentional camp of the others. I'll excuse Barry and Elliot because they have something of a brain between them, and I have a soft spot for Bernie and Phyl because I can go around saying "Quahliddy, com-fit and price ... that's NICE!" Becky is also amusing me. As I woke her from a sound sleep this morning at 6:45 (and don't get me started on predawn arisings), I tried to get her brain in gear by asking what she wants for her birthday (she turns eight in February -- jeez). After just a brief mo...

Lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking on the Scott Brown victory and what it means. Drew Westen in the Huffington Post nailed it down the best, I think: if we view Brown's victory as a referendum on Obama's performance on the economy and the health care mess, it's saying that Obama has disappointed voters by: Not creating enough jobs (even though the recession was not in the least bit his fault) Bailing out the banks and other big businesses with taxpayer money Screwing up health care reform by not selling its advantages to Joe Sixpack and allowing the GOP to portray it as expensive and risky, and by allowing too much Kumbaya bipartisanship and foot-dragging transparency rather than just ramming the thing home with the mandate and large Congressional majorities he enjoyed. On point #1, the argument was that the stimulus wasn't enough, even though it seemed massive sat the time. There is no way to say with certainty that if we spend X dollars, it will create Y job...

What. The. FUCK?! Some obscure GOP state senator wins a special election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat?? Jesus Christ. All I can do is curse and moan. Plenty of blame to go around, apparently. My top choices: Coakley and her aides did not take this election seriously after she won the primary. The campaign was asleep at the switch. And Martha had little to say other than "I'm a Democrat so of course you'll vote for me." The lukewarm Dems and independents likewise didn't think this was worth going to the polls for. Many voters were lukewarm about the health care bill or actively turned off by it, and voted for Brown as a protest. ElectoralVote.com and the Boston Globe both have good analyses. One notion is that even some initial Obama supporters are disappointed in his record so far: watered-down health care reform, Big Business bailouts, etc. Obama voters wanted change in 2008 and haven't gotten it, so they stayed home yesterday, while anti-Obama types ...

There's an interesting piece by Newsweek blogger Michael Scherer about Sarah Palin's recent hiring as a Fox News commentator. Scherer claims that Roger Ailes -- head of Fox News, former political consultant to Nixon, Reagan and Bush #I -- is a "genius"  because while his peers hire on-air talent on the basis of their abilities (debatable, but OK), "Ailes knows you can also hire talent for who they anger, who they unite and what they represent... Ailes had not hired another talking head in Palin. He had hired a mascot for Fox News, a living breathing symbol of all that the network hopes to be: a place for the forgotten, besieged, suburban and rural American middle, long victimized, often dismissed, beset on all sides by elites and liberals, haters and foes." In reference to "60 Minutes," Palin herself is quoted as saying, "More and more Americans are looking at some of these networks, that biased journalism, and saying, 'Nah, that gig is u...

That sort of sums up the rest of our vacation. I'm ecstatic to report that the kids will now sleep as late as we do (or in Sarah's case, wake up earlier and read quietly). So Ben and I got to loll around in bed until 9:30 or even 10 on some of those mornings. There is no greater pleasure than a good night's sleep and a gradual awakening when it's not still dark out. What did we do when actually upright, you may ask? For the most part it involved sitting in front of the fire, playing Monopoly, watching DVDs, cooking and eating, seeing friends, and just hanging out. Somehow the time seemed to pass in a normal fashion. We also caught up on some stuff we'd been putting off while Ben was unemployed, like taking the cats to the vet for shots and getting a plumber to deal with the clogged drain in the kids' bathroom. Isn't that exciting?Buy we did get out a bit... we went to a fun potluck in central Mass. at the home of an old colleague of Ben's. There were m...