an open letter to John Edwards

Dear Edwards Family:

The wire services tell me John will bow out of the race in a speech to be delivered mid-day today. I just chipped in another $100 last night. No news in this tumultuous political year has hit me so hard. Though you were behind in the polls all along, that says more about the nation than it does about you. I hope you will continue to stay visible to the body politic and keep opening eyes and ears to your message that the nation cannot make the much needed turn for the better until it opens its worried little heart to the conditions of its very neighbors. You did widen the debate to better include the interests of the class of citizens the Bush years have actively marginalized. I pray that breadth of political debate does not wither in your absence.

The best lives are lived in such a way that the lives of others can be a little less troubled. Your choices all along have been to live that way despite the personal sacrifices required.

A hundred dollars is not much, just ask people how far they expect to get on the desperation dollars to be doled from our nation's nest egg as a "stimulus". But the numbers of us who each put in $50 or a $100 to your campaign should have been bigger. Like I said...thats our shame, not yours. I am confident you know a dozen better things to do with that money than I do.

minor technical note

Might not have occurred to me if I had not accidentally stumbled upon the effect: If you have a hit counter embedded in your template and it gets deleted from the HTML but not disabled at the server of the hit counting service, then your stats page may still register hits from visitors who are running with cached versions of your page. That could include versions squirelled away by search engines. [Ask.com in my case].
Now, as to how a dab of hit counting Javascript could fall out of a template when you had not touched it...that is typical of Blogger providing unsolicited improvements to your template.

BTW, do hop on over to Majikthise and see what a busy week in muck-making it has been for the Corrupt Old Party. One party with no balls, one with no scruples. Do you blame Americans for tuning out politics? I find the report on the stealthy growth of corporate militias that operate with no more oversight that Shiite or Sunni militias particularly alarming. The second amendment applied to individuals, not corporations and it is quite bad enough that corporations already exercise the rights of speech more powerfully than any of you little piss ant voters.

the cocoon is wiggling

I am not sure what will emerge.

some intentions at the moment are

• to keep to the "short attention span is adequate" theme.
• to honor the input a few readers did provide when I queried your preferences a few months back.

Divergence into multiple blogs is the likely and simple solution and it would accommodate my form of multiple personality disorder. Many blogs, all with one author who is writing less and less...you should have no trouble keeping up with whichever, if any, you find to your taste. I'm nothing if not thoughtful;)

but in the interest of actually having some content, one thought short and sour:

Preaching and Bragging: both are calculated to inform "my way is probably better than yours".

That would be the sort of information to which a healthy mind is most resistant.

What I am trying not to be

In the quest not to be an over stressed "name brand" blogger, I am marvelously endowed for success.

I'm Molting

And its not a pretty picture is it?
When we say of something that it is for the birds,
Don't we particularly mean the vulture?

Listless experimentation will continue for a while.
The hit counter has me locked in to the damn Blog Title.

CREDITS:The photo has a link associated with it. Andy takes some great pictures.