HumidCity

This pretty much sums things up. If you remove a lot of the emotional knee jerk rhetoric and conditioned responses from the discourse you end up with a number of fundamental facts (stronger than Sen McCain’s strong fundamentals of our economy I hope) taken from voting records, media archives, and other official and independent sources. If you pull out and look at the big picture you can see Obama thinking three moves ahead like a good chess player. You can also see the McCain’s recently developed ability to contradict himself and spew forth and amazing array of outright lies as he becomes more frantic.

The Editors of The New Yorker have published the most powerful and digestible single statement about this presidential run and why there is really only one choice that can be sanely made.  would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure. (Click here for the full article)

Presented for your edification by Loki, HumidCity Founder

Jazz Fest is always a busy and energizing time for me. Working out on the Fairgrounds, ground zero for entertainment during the season, is always fun. (Well, maybe not running through the rain with PCs wrapped in garbage bags trying to safeguard the gear, the rest is pretty great.) Its especially good this year because I actually have a team to work with. The pictures here were taken by one of the long standing HumidCity Irregulars: M. Styborski (who you may well know from his blog Nation of Morons). We’ve been putting out a good variety of nearly real time content and having fun doing it (except for the rain).

This year I have two surprising new bits of additional good fortune to share.

The first one is tomorrow. Instead of my usual ride to the Bywater on my bike I will be making my way to the French Quarter on the streetcar and heading over to Aranud’s for drinks. The lovely ladies of Tales of the Cocktail have been generous enough to ask me to be a judge, so tomorrow will be an afternoon of careful cocktail appraisal. Their office is next to my own, and we have been working together on fund raising efforts for the Ashley Morris Fund, yet despite knowing me they asked anyway. Brave or foolhardy, you be the judge.

If you’re not familiar with them click the banner below and check out their website:

The second is an odd bit of internet flotsam. I noticed a trackback in the site log that appeared to be brand new, yet when I followed it I got a surprise. Evidently my yearly anti-caterpillar rant here on the HumidCity was picked up and quoted in The New Yorker. Not only that, but the article is almost exactly a year old. I must admit to being quite amused that my words ended up there of all places not to mention puzzled at why it would take a year for a trackback to show. I’ll be damned.