Election Coverage

Tonight, I shall watch election coverage. In the spirit of humor, and humor alone, I'll probably tune into Fox News, so I can watch them lie about exit polls, and see Brit Hume squirm as the Obama votes become an insurmountable majority.

But maybe I'll watch boring, dry, non-partisan PBS.

Or I could watch the New Year's Eve-like festivities going on at CNN or MSNBC.

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Tuesday, November 4th.

Happy Birthday to the Abstracted Sister, may all her birthday election wishes come true.*



*Except for the ones I disagree with.

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Why would I want a cure?

What Sharon doesn't understand is that there is absolutely no logical reason why a pharmaceutical company would want to develop a cure for anything. Pharmaceutical companies have a simple business model: treat and treat and treat but don't cure.

Let me put it in analogical terms: if you had a car that never needed maintenance and never wore down, then you'd never buy another car. Curing diseases eliminates repeat customers. But people who try cholesterol medication after cholesterol medication drive a huge profit for drug companies that spent millions on research.

Many promising fields of medical research, like a stem-cell treatment for ALS, never get the funding they need and the research they require from large corporations. Obviously, when you can give a 5 drug cocktail to treat the symptoms but not the disease, milking money out of the patient for years, you stand a lot more financially solid than if you administered a single injection and never saw the person again.

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Countdown with Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck is absolutely brilliant in this skit.

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Defeatism at its finest

My election prediction:

Despite the belief that this may be the greatest election turnout in decades, I boldly predict the numbers will be disappointingly low.

The reason for this will be that many conservative and die-hard republicans will stay home, considering standing in line for a "losing cause" would be a waste of time.

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This fulfills my obligation to say something about the Chiefs.

The Kansas City Chiefs looked absolutely brilliant for the first 29:00 of their game on Sunday against the TB Buccaneers. The reason? Wildcat Offense.*

Back in week 3, the Miami Dolphins faced a daunting challenge: beat the Patriots. To do that they came up with the biggest idea in sports: getting their plays from high school football. Wildcat Offense is a very popular high school play-calling method in which the quarterback lines up as a wide receiver (or stands on the sidelines) while the running back takes the snap. The reason this works so well is that normally on a running play the quarterback hands the ball off to the runningback then gets out of the way and stands around, making it effectively 10 offensive players vs. 11 defensive players. If the quarterback swings out wide as a receiver, a defensive player must cover him, and the running play suddenly becomes a much better 10 on 10.

When Miami showed up with the Wildcat Offense against New England, the Patriots defense stumbled around confused for 60 minutes and handed Miami a great win, boosting Miami's legitimacy as a coming-back franchise. The next week, another team tried it, then another.

This past Sunday the Kansas City "We have nothing to lose" Chiefs showed an aggressive, no-holds barred approach on offense. Late in the first quarter, quarterback Tyler Thigpen lined up as a wide-out. "It's Wildcat!" TAE shrieked at The Abstracted Daughter. She gurgled happily and watched. On the snap of the ball, Thigpen made a half-hearted attempt to block the defensive back, convincing the corner and safety it was a running play. Then, Thigpen broke with all his speed for the endzone as wide receiver Mark Bradley (who?) lobbed a lazy pass over the dumbfounded Buccaneers defense...to Thigpen. Touchdown Chiefs.

With less than a minute left in the first half, the Chiefs were dominating 23-3, as the energized Chiefs offense was powering an aggressive defense to stop all attempts by the Bucs to regain momentum.

Then, in the second half, the Chiefs didn't line up a single Wildcat play. It was as if Mr. Hyde had gone to the locker room at the half and Dr. Jekyll had come back to the sidelines afterward. The Chiefs quickly gave up their 20 point margin and managed to eek out a loss in overtime.

I'll be near the front of the line to rail on Herm Edwards, and I'll cut up further in line if we all get a chance to speak our minds to Carl Peterson, but that first half Wildcat was pure joy to watch. The Chiefs, with nothing to lose, were trying all sorts of shenanigans, many with great rewards. It was as if the Bucs entire defensive plan was to smear two or three players all over Tony Gonzalez, who was basically ignored by Thigpen in the first half. Then in the second half, it was incompletion, incompletion, incompletion to Gonzalez. I felt like Gruden, the Bucs coach, had called Herm at halftime and said "wow, that Wildcat Offense sure put us on our backsides! But seriously, you guys are supposed to lose this one, remember?"

Ingenuity and risk-taking are what separate good coaches from average ones. In the first half, Edwards was being a good coach, and taking a risk on the Wildcat offense and on his young players. In the second half, Edwards was completely average, because anyone could see that the safe thing to do was to just throw to Gonzalez.

*For those readers that have watched the viral spread of the shotgun formation from high school to college to the NFL over the past 10 seasons, expect the same to happen with the Wildcat.

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Deciding factor.

Last night, as I tried to explain the two candidates to Mrs. TAE, it dawned on me that I had a rather easy decision to make.
The problem I have been having is that I see Sen. McCain as a fairly moderate Republican and Sen. Obama as a fairly moderate Democrat. It was hard for me to identify a single issue I considered important on which they diverged that could polarize me to vote one way or another.

But last night it finally dawned on me (when I was trying to explain "Joe the Plumber" and McCain's tax plan vs. Obama's tax plan) that there is a simple way to separate them.
Mr McCain is genuinely looking out for all Americans as individuals. Mr. Obama is genuinely looking out for Americans as a collective unit.

The way I see it, Sen. Obama's tax plan may hurt some people's pocketbooks more than Senator McCain's tax plan will. But by and large, it seems to me that the ideology of Sen. Obama is one of good for all Americans in general, not individually. Senator Obama wants the country as a whole to be a better place, while Senator McCain's ideology seems to be that he wants as many individual Americans as possible to have a better life.*

For me, that made the decision easy. If my instincts on the two men are correct, then a person in my situation (that is, an undecided voter 4 days before the election) would be voting for McCain out of selfishness, and not patriotism. The choice to vote for Obama, though I do not make it lightly, nor especially happily, has become the most logical choice.

There is another thought, however, that arose in me this morning. The idea that my 1 year old daughter could become an adult in a world where a black President was completely normal is an enticing idea for me. My parents grew up in a country that had just erased segregation around the time they were born, and if, in 50 years, we've gone from there to a black President, maybe I can be little more optimistic about this country.
As a parent, I have quickly stopped worrying about things that happen during my lifetime, and instead have instinctively begun focusing on things that will happen during the lifetime of my children.

The idea that my daughter wouldn't be able to understand what life was like before we had a black President warms my heart. It gives me hope that maybe my granddaughter won't be able to understand what life was like when we had cancer. It gives me hope that my great-granddaughter will wonder what life was like when we had war. It gives me hope that my progeny, many generations down the road, will wonder what life was like when people lived on Earth.

It would be such an ironic twist that the Bush Legacy might not be Iraq, or Katrina, or The Bailout, or any number of failures. The Bush Legacy could very well be that his incompetence, his consistent bullheaded ignorance of the will of the people, and especially his (and his friends') arrogance pushed this country so far to the left that he has paved the way for the single most radical act of my lifetime. I saw footage on FoxNews of elderly black women standing in line to vote for Senator Obama and laughing and giving each other "high-five." I can't imagine raising my daughter in a world without moments like that.

When I look into the face of my daughter I realize I absolutely must vote for Senator Obama.

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