August 29, 2008
It's Sarah Palin
John McCain has picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, for his running mate. It's history, it's bold, and I like it.
August 28, 2008
Disappointment
What a letdown that The Chosen One did not ascend during his open-air stadium ceremony tonight. I thought he would seek new heights before our eyes.
Instead, it was the usual leftist drivel. How sad.
August 23, 2008
Babbling Biden
So the Chosen One has picked the infamously long-winded senior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, as his running mate. Well.
Two thoughts come to mind immediately. For one thing, Babbling Biden will surely add to Obama's own gaffe-o-matic tendencies. That should provide some opportunities for John McCain.
And it's interesting that Obama has picked a partner who mirrors his own self-aggrandizing personality.
The next 90 days will be tendentious. Let's hope it's only 90 days.
August 08, 2008
The Stupid Party
This about sums things up.
If you thought Republicans were no longer "The Stupid Party," then you haven't met the senators who may have just destroyed the GOP's biggest hope this election year: the drilling issue.
John McCain needs to rip the heart out of this one. More here and here.
August 05, 2008
T.S. Edouard report
Tropical Storm Edouard came ashore earlier today east of Houston, so it looks like we will be spared the worst of the effects. Here on the west side of the Houston area, we've had some rain but nothing severe. We actually hope for more rain just to help the lawn and plants.
Our thoughts and best wishes are with our fellow Texans where the weather is worse today.
UPDATE - 2:45p.m. - rain is about over. According to Harris County Homeland Security & Emergency Management's rainfall map, our total seems to be a little under 1.5 inches. Just some wind gusts for now. For most of metro Houston, this was a drill.
August 03, 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, RIP
A great mind, a courageous heart, and a noble spirit lost: Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died.
Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
His "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.
But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person -- Solzhenitsyn himself -- survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.
The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.
Updates:
Richard Brookhiser at NRO:
I don't know that he was more responsible than Reagan, John Paul II, Gorbachev, or Yeltsin for the fall of the evil empire. But he was certainly braver than all of them. Reagan led the rival superpower, the Pope led a great church, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were powerful insiders. Solzhenitsyn had a few loyal friends, and his words.