The weather was awesome yesterday so I and one of my younger cousins spent the day outdoors cleaning up leaves and mowing and trimming hedges and all that fun stuff.
And then we went to the Oakmont Bakery to get a sugar rush from pistachio macarons and donuts.
On the job front, I have a temp position with regular hours but still no bennies. It’s great, except for the no bennies thing, and the fact that it’s going to end in about a month when the permanent employee returns. I like the floor I’m on. There are enough toys to assuage the gadget fiend in me. Plus, once I got behind the wheel again, the computer skills all came back within a couple of hours. The job is not in the computational chemistry field but I could live with it. It’s also on a collaboration floor. I do the team thing pretty well but the floor concept is new to me. BUT, it’s still just a temp job, which sucks. And the pay is just a little bit less than it would take to make me relatively stress free. So, there’s that. I’m still in job search mode. If you had told me two years ago that I would still be looking for a job like this, I would have called you crazy. It’s beyond exasperating.
As for Hilary’s announcement, you’ll find out more about my attitudes towards that pretty soon from a different source. Bottom line: her announcement video showed people in a more positive stage in their lives than me. I’m not feeling it yet, specifically because of the struggle I have faced to find a new job. Clinton may be leading us there but I’m not anywhere near being in the mood. The country has not come out of “tough economic times” yet.
Will I support her? Yes. And here is the reason: if I were a hiring manager and I got a dozen CV’s from people like Clinton, Christie, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, even Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton would be far and away the leading finalist for the job. She’s got the most experience, in the most areas, she has a network of associates she can call on for assistance to push her agenda, she’s got a mentor and she’s passionate about policy. No other candidate in the field is going to come close. And what all those attributes give her is a measure of independence that the other candidates will not have. Think about that for awhile and it will make sense. It also means there will be a lot of people, in both parties, who will not like for her to get the nomination because she won’t be so easy to control.
Just because she’s the best the country has doesn’t mean it’s going to be a cakewalk.
Ok, there’s one other thing I want to talk about. It’s about the PUMAs. I see no reason to run away from the fact that we were PUMAs in 2008. That just stood for Party Unity My Ass and it was our way of protesting how the DNC took the money from Obama’s donors, rewrote the primary campaign rules, disenfranchised 18000000 of us and then told us to get behind the ruthlessly ambitious, inexperienced shmoozer who became the party’s nominee or risk being called an ignorant, uneducated, old, bitter racist. Oh, HELL no. I was not going along with that program and I’m shocked that any loyal Democrat would give up their vote just to protect themselves from vicious group peer pressure. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.
But the PUMA groups went their separate ways after the election. If I were being honest, I would say we started going our separate ways in October of 2008 when I sensed that some PUMA groups were so angry that they were willing to go beyond a protest vote. In the aftermath of the election, the rift between us and the other PUMAs became more pronounced. We evolved but stuck pretty closely to our credo. They went the Tea Party route. It’s safe to say that we haven’t had any contact with other PUMAs since the early part of 2009. We aren’t BFFs, we don’t Facebook, we don’t belong to some super special sauce email group. If there is a widespread belief out there that that’s what’s going on with us and the PUMAs, let me dispel it now.
Nevertheless, that’s who we were and there’s no point in hiding it. It’s possible that the PUMAs on this blog had a different concept of what that term meant than other PUMA groups. It’s safe to say that some operatives on the right saw a certain segment of PUMAs as potential converts. That didn’t include US. As far as we were concerned, the concept had lost its usefulness and it was time to move beyond that. I only regret that I didn’t spend more time organizing some kind of umbrella group that would have been a more effective promoter of behaviors we would have liked to have seen in our elected officials. We should have had something to counteract the Tea Party. Instead, we left a vacuum. And that’s not good.
So, there you have it. There will probably be more to say later in the week. But right now, I am focussing on work. It’s the most important thing on my mind right now.
And mulch.
Filed under: General | Tagged: employment, Hillary Clinton, mulch, pumas, unemployment, work, yard work |
The Confluence 
Valar morghulis
Valar dohaeris
I say one more time: Your are always right on the money…Amen!
I’m still around and hell no I am not tea party.?
Hell, I tried to register PUMA but they wouldn’t let me. I’m still with the Ds but I call myself a liberal– and remind everyone about that awful 2008 debacle every chance I get.
I especially like the resume analogy…. That really makes sense to me. And … I also don’t feel it. Yet.
Also, I am torn still over the lack of a floor vote in 2008. And that Hillary was successfully fundraising on the promise of campaigning through the summer up through the moment she suspended her campaign.
And now, the promise of a billion I dollar primary? Why? Seriously? The primaries and caucuses don’t count for a thing… Right? So just let the big wigs go into that hotel room where they decided to give 4 of hillary’s Michigan delegates to a guy who wasn’t even on the ballot and get on with it.
I’m fine with Hillary and her resume. It’s the process that is completely trashed.
I suspect that she had every intention of running through the summer but that the party or the Obama campaign gave her an ultimatum. They had to have had the super delegates all bought to a tipping point scenario. Someone must have pointed that out to her. The strategy was to dump so much money into the campaigns of everyone else and to pressure them to surrender or the money would vanish.
At that point, what do you do? You can continue with your campaign fully justified but jeopardizing everyone else, or you can suspend. She suspended. Maybe she hoped the delegates would have a change of heart by August. But they were bought. Then the convention was rigged to humiliate her.
They were thorough.
I always figure that when I give someone money, it’s a gift and out of my hands after that. I can have certain expectations, but if they fall through for whatever reason, there’s not much I can do about it. That’s the risk I take. I am not a banker. If I don’t like my odds or if I believe, truly believe at the time I give money, that the money won’t be well spent, I don’t give money. Or if I can’t afford it, like I can’t right now, I don’t do it anyway and then resent it later. I was happy to support her when she ran in 2008, gave as much as I safely could, knowing that security in my industry was fleeting. Then I let it go. Running for office is expensive and the party made it very, very difficult for her to pay her debts.
They were brutal assholes in 2008.
Let it go.
I did let it go. And I think I actually donated to help retire her debt. But for all the reasons I mentioned… Where by dropping out lost millions of voters lost their voice — their vote — I can’t get over that.
The primaries are an archaic system. They’re a holdover from the days when the Parties were a private club. And as a club they could write the rules for picking leaders.
Is that how a modern country wants to pick a president? If so, that’s fine. But don’t pretend our votes matter. Just hold your convention and pick the candidate.
I remember reading and seeing some dissident video about how she anb Obama were both summoned to the Bilderberg Society meeting at Chantilly, Virginia. That is where the ultimatum and the division of tasks and positions was delivered to both of them by the Bilderberg Insiders. I remember reading that was where a bunch of media was tricked into getting on the Obama campaign plane and then after they were all on the plane told that Obama wasn’t on the plane after all.
So they were flown far away from Chantilly, Virginia.
You’ll do such a good job that the company may decide they can’t live without you. Or maybe, the permanent worker will get swept out to sea.
It’s safe to say that some operatives on the right saw a certain segment of PUMAs as potential converts
Yes, sad to say, flattery got them everywhere.
It was a sad lesson to learn that some people’s need to be flattered and cosseted is so great that they cease to examine the source of such blandishments.
(Nodding)
Can you give some examples?
No, it would be like saying “Beetlejuice” three times.
Wipes brow with relief…
Here’s a hint, Niles: You visited the blog of “Beetlejuice” recently, and I commented on that fact on this blog. 😉
I not sure flattery really had anything to do with it. It seemed to me at the time they’d resolved go all-in with the “less effective evil”, whatever that took.
Did you guys see Dana BRAZIL talking about the 18 millions votes Hillary got. She said winning the votes doesn’t count unless the party backs you duhaa
I didn’t see that. But she made her opinion perfectly obvious in 2008.
Is that Donna Brazile?
Yes Donna sorry for the misspelling. It was last week or so in CNN. I thought it was kind of a confession and also she seemed too smug for me. Because the way she put it ( Hillary found it the hard way last time winning the most votes wasn’t enouhg) you kidding me… I just couldn’t continue to watch because it brought back very bad memories. I remember I was physically ill from what happened.
Donna is a professional political “operative.” Has been for decades. Like Carver, she’s a dem operative, a one party gal. There are, as you might have noticed, rewards for loyalty and long service, which I don’t object to. But the parties’ iron grip on elections, policy, and legislation is ruinous over the long term.
As it happens, I’m reading in Roman history right now. The parallels are striking. IMO, human nature doesn’t change and in aggregate, it’s always our downfall.
Donna is correct. That’s how the system works in this country.
I think, as a start, it’s time to eliminate the Electoral College; but electing presidents on popular vote will not fix the system, as popular vote senatorial elections have, sadly, demonstrated, bc the parties still run the system: not the politicians, the parties. Bernie Sanders, ostensibly, notwithstanding.
In addition to the Electoral College, we have to make the nomination process democratic. Take it out of the hand of private clubs.
How?
Start by talking about it. No one does …. Not publicly anyway. But as long as the will of voters can be overturned by delegates at closed door meetings (rules committee, May 2008) and conventions then primary campaigns are a waste of time & money.
Perhaps a NATIONAL Primary day. A month or so before the General Election?
Yes, I support a national primary day. I also support an amendment to term/age limit federal judges and SC justices: 12 yrs or 75 yrs of age, at the beginning of the yr in which the judge becomes 75, and cannot be appointed if by age will serve less than five full yrs.
A national primary day has been talked about publicly. The problem is that the importance of the issue and how the current hot mess affects politics and policy is not discussed, nor are the possible outcomes of a change. People have to have time to soak in this stuff. Changing to a popular vote senate took almost 100 yrs, first proposed in 1826 and seventeenth amendment passed 1913. Hotly, ferociously, debated especially, as you might imagine, by the senators whose seats were at issue. But in the end, you know, having a House of Lords in the american congress didn’t make sense. Still doesn’t, actually, and that’s another change we need.
It’s a complicated mess. I hate the ‘conversation’ concept but we need a national gripe session or something until regular people (the ones who barely think about these issues even in election years) understand the non-democracy of it all.
First, I do hope that you can find a job which is reasonably fulfilling, and which pays you enough to live comfortably. I have no computer skills whatsoever, so I am fortunate that when I began a legal career, it was not required. You have such skills, but I am sure that the field is very competitive. It is a shame that you cannot have a career in writing, because you are literate and expressive; but I know that except for a very fortunate few, that field pays less than just about anything; which to me is an example of a very misplaced sense of values in this country.
On to Hillary. What happened in 2008 was appalling. The DNC wanted Obama, probably because he is African-American, and also because they didn’t want the Clintons running things. Brazile was determined to get Obama the nomination, and she disenfranchised about five million voters in Michigan and Florida to do that. Dean was worthless, as I always figured he would be. They got their wish, and almost lost the Democrats the election (Hillary would have won easily), except that the housing bubble collapsed two months before it.
I voted for Obama twice, as there was no choice. Hillary did exactly the right thing: she left the Senate, where they were never going to give her any power, and took a powerful and somewhat nonpartisan job as Secretary of State. She left after one term, maybe because she was tired, maybe because she wanted to distance herself from the presumed second term. She would make a great President, perobably the best since FDR. I am very excited that she is running, and will be on edge until she actually wins and is inaugurated. Obama managed to lose both Houses (not all his fault, but much of it is), so we now have to win at least one of them, or she will be mostly stymied.
When the DNC called me for money back in the Fall of 2008, I actually yelled at the poor person who called, saying that I had no intention of ever sending them money, after the dreadful way in which Hillary was treated. However, after having just gotten a letter “from” Senator Warren, ostensibly to raise money for the Senate candidates, I will likely send in some, to help try to take back the country from the ravages of Citizens United depredations. I will never be a loyal DNC supporter; and I will never forgive the way that they and their cohorts not only shamefully treated Ms. Clinton, but indeed mocked millions of loyal Democratic voters who gave her victory after victory in major primaries. But this is another chance; and we desperately need to take it. I do hope that anyone who has become disillusioned, bitter, or disinterested, wakes up again. and realizes that there is an opportunity for a wonderful revision. And Hillary will make a much better President than Obama, and history will hopefully validate all of it. Brazile, Dean, all those other DNC people; all the online sites filled with Obama adulators who thought they were doing something wonderful by cheating in caucuses, or derogating the actual primary results, are not going to be the story this time. I hope they truly enjoyed the last eight years, because they had their turn at bat, even though they had to rig the lineup to do it.
While I share your opinion of obysmal, mine perhaps even more so than yours as I think him a narcissistic psychopath, I do not support Clinton. I did in 2008, I don’t now. No argument will persuade me.
If Clinton is visibly instrumental in behind-the-scenes pressure to get the Congress to defeat Obama’s Fast Track, I will view that with great favor. If she isn’t, then I will continue to view her candidacy with agnostic carefulness.
I realize the truth of Riverdaughter’s contention that Clinton is the most qualified possible occupant in terms of experience, knowing how the system works, etc. The problem is, does she support Free Trade Agreements or does she oppose them? If she is an American against Free Trade Agreements, that would likely make me vote for her right there. If she is an anti-American traitor FOR Free Trade Agreements then I will never vote for her, no matter what. If she keeps her position on Free Trade Treason hidden and undiscussed, then I will be suspicious.
At this point, I have no suspicions, only confirmations.
I love your comment.
Do you come here, often? 😉
Thank you!
I did come here a good deal back in 2008, but after the bitter disappointment of that campaign, I basically eschewed political blogs, except for election nights.
I am very excited that Hillary is running, and I had hoped that she would, even back in the darker days of the 2008 campaign and aftermath. I wanted to find a really good Hillary blog, and so I wanted to visit this one again, which was an intelligent and stimulating place in the more enjoyable days of that race.
Looking forward to reading more of your thoughts.