Radical Georgia Moderate

It’s dreary as a Kentucky football pep rally outside, but I’m still happy. As of today, I’m free of credit card debt. Hurrah! I still owe some on a student loan, but I’ve been told that’s “good debt.” Regardless, I can make more interest stowing money in a basic savings account than what they’re charging me in interest.

I didn’t vote for Bush or Dole or that weird gnome from Texas either, so you figure it out.

It’s twisting my soul but I am starting to regret not voting for Mr. Bill. At the time, I was much more ideologically inclined and couldn’t bring myself to vote for such a political animal. The final straw was when he made it well known he would not commute the death penalty of a mentally retarded man. It was cold, calculated political move. Not a moral one and it turned my stomach.

Now, I look back at welfare reform, NAFTA and many other issues of his watch and realize more and more I agree with his moves during those eight years.

As I look back at events of the past 6 years, particularly Katrina, I keep asking myself, WWBD? What would Bill do?

Sure, a lot of what he would have done would have been through the prism of cold political calculus. But given today’s climate, I think I could forgive even the most political beast.

Check out new episodes of the North Fulton Drama Club and the GA Politics Podcast, recorded last Sunday at our monthly podcast party. Then, to get in the mood for NCAA Picks, check the SEC West preview podcast I put together with help from Pat at Razorpod, Nico at Roll ‘Bama Roll, and Jay Coulter at Football Saturday in the South. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, listen to its companion piece SEC East preview podcast from Monday. Thanks to everyone involved for making these so much fun and (I hope) educational/entertaining.

This is it kids, the first week of my third annual NCAA Picks contest! I wrote software to run the whole thing this year, which will hopefully make all our lives easier. Consider it alpha quality, which means if something is screwed up, don’t get all huffy… just drop me an email and tell me about it. I’ve tested in IE 6, Firefox and Safari. Beyond those browsers, you’re on your own.

You’ll need to sign up for an account to play. After you register, you’ll receive an e-mail with your user and password which you can use to sign in and enter your picks (which, by the way, are against the spread this year rather than straight up-or-down). The first time you sign in, it’s a good idea to go to the options section and enable automatic e-mail reminders.

There weren’t any opening odds on some of these games. In those cases, the home teams were assigned a 0.5 point advantage. Consider them freebies, because they’re generally games like Western Kentucky at Georgia where Georgia will win 758-0.

First prize is a $50 Amazon gift certificate. Entry is free as in beer.

Need to get in the mood first? Go listen to my SEC East Preview podcast, which was created with loads of help from Orson Swindle of Every Day Should Be Saturday and Joel Hollingsworth of View From Rocky Top and Rocky Top Talk.

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< ?php if (time() > 1157414400) { print ‘The week 1 form has expired. You can find the latest NCAA Picks form on my homepage.’; } ?>

Every week, there’s a small group of hippies that protest the Iraq war in front of the Colony Square buildings in Midtown. There’s usually 10 or 15 of them, standing there quietly with “Honk for Peace,” “Impeach Bush” and other assorted signs with similar themes. Today, apparently, they decided to make their gathering larger than usual, as there were at least 50-100 of them outside. And some of them even looked like they knew how to use combs and deodorant today, which is a departure from usual (note: effective advocates don’t scare potential converts away with heinous B.O. and hair that looks and smells like a used peep show mop). Here are some photos:

I had a new Georgia Political Digest column published this morning, which you can read here. It’s in response to Herman Cain’s “Hezbocrat” column at TownHall.com.

UPDATE: Link to the Townhall column fixed.

UPDATE 2: You can read Jason Pye’s take on my column here.

We’ve got a new podcast up, featuring a behind-the-scenes look and performances from Jeff Justice’s Level II Comedy Workshoppe at The Punchline. We had a lot of fun making it, which I hope is obvious. Thanks to Jeff Justice and the club for being gracious enough to let us hook in the sound board and interview students (even if we knew three out of four of them, the odd man out being Royal Marshall from the Neil Boortz show, who was also gracious with his time).

I‘ve been a lot more interested in making podcasts than I have been in writing anything lately. I feel guilty about that on one level, but on the other I’m not a trained monkey who updates this blog for anyone’s entertainment other than my own. I am here to jerk off my ego, and that is all. If I don’t feel like killing kittens, then no kittens will be killed.

The easy thing to do would be to post an inflammatory, incomplete thought that would draw 55 comments, but the only interesting thing about that would be to take bets on when and how the comments thread would derail. Just about the only way to get a discussion going is to make people want to say, “goddamn it! you left this out!” or “goddamn it! you’re wrong and you didn’t even explain your point very well!” Write something lengthy thorough, and people tend to doze off and/or tune out.

I visited a friend in Tennessee this weekend, and he said he does the same thing at his IT job: he knows how to repair a certain printer, but will bring it around another guy who knows more about printers than he does, and intentionally go about repairing it the wrong way so the other guy will want to correct him. The other guy takes over, and he gets out of repairing the printer.

I’m sure there’s a name for that technique, but I don’t know what it is. I utilize it frequently.

From conservative pundit George Will, via the Washington Post:

Foreign policy ‘realists’ considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists’ critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

I try to avoid talking about national politics most of the time here because it’s practically the most unproductive conversation a group of people can have. But the last week or two the Iraq war has really been chapping my ass. I think Will’s “reprehensibly unambitious” description is brutally on-point. You know things are bad when Henry Kissinger seems like a good choice to run things by comparison.

via The GDGF

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