Forced National Pastime

The bigger boys thought they needed a turn getting their photo on the blog, so here's one taken a while back right after Sam lost his first tooth. Needless to say, Tommy was pretty proud of his big bro, as you can see here.

Moving right along to politics...is anyone out there keeping up with the political scene for me? I was sick of the campaign before it ever officially started, so I'm just blocking it all out these days...which is odd for me, because I used to really thrive on politics.

Every election it seems that they start the next presidential campaign earlier and earlier. I've never given much thought before about why that is, just that I can't stand it. Well, tonight I found a headline on Drudge Report that caught my eye:

Modern road to White House 'verges on insane,' says Gingrich

This sounded like a headline echoing my own sentiments, so I read the article. Good piece. According to Newt,

"The job of the candidate is to raise the money to hire the consultants to do the focus groups to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate."

Sounds about right. He goes on to explain how it's necessary for candidates to get started so early because they need to build up their organization in order to raise more money--money they need not only for their campaigns, but to write the checks to all their advisors and campaign managers, who are naturally advising them to start campaigning earlier to raise more money. Meanwhile we get to read and hear about all these, as he puts it, "almost unedurable" debates (I'd omit the "almost") long before we ever vote.

I like his plan for debates: the two candidates do one 90-minute "dialogue" once a week for the nine weeks leading up to the vote.

Candidates would pick the topics, and their answers would be uninterrupted "except for fairness on time," he said.

"After nine 90-minute conversations in their living rooms, the American people would have a remarkable sense of the two personalities and which person had the right ideas, the right character, the right capacity to be a leader," he said.

Just think of it: no debates until the homestretch of the election. Wouldn't that be nice? And no, I'm still not sure who I'd vote for if the primary were tomorrow.

So whatever happened to baseball?