I'm Back!

Ah... it has been a long time since I have updated Turpentine (Note: my old blog) and lots of things have happened since. So to bring everybody up to date:

In mid-October 2004 I was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome so I was forced to give up much of my typing and since I have to do some at work...this blog had to suffer.

In early November 2004 - Bush was declared the winner of an election that had MORE irregularities than the last one he was declared the winner of in 2000. Not to mince words - this fucking depressed the hell out of me. To compound my depression Kerry basically gave up without a fight. He reneged on his promise to make sure every vote was counted; he really screwed the folks in Ohio.

This depression/funk lasted through Retail HELL Season (Christmas) when we store owner work 7 days a week 12 hour days, and towards the New Year when we STILL didn't have a governor here in Washington.

Then Christine Gregoire (D) was determined to have won the election for Governor by less than 150 votes after 3 counts. This gave me some hope for the future of Washington even though this result is still being disputed by the Republicans. In some of the thickest political irony I've ever seen they want to have a REVOTE. Can you see the bloody murder they would be screaming if the Democrats had suggested such a think if Rossi had won? (Not to mention Bush.)

But what finally snapped me out of my funk was Howard Dean being elected to the chair of the DNC. Now I have hope that the Democratic Party is not going to swerve to the Right to try and get votes from people that will never vote for them anyway. I think that I would rather have us fail and be true to our values and ideas than try to squirm and weasel our way into victory.

Coincidentally, my carpal tunnel symptoms seem to have lessened so I can type now. I even got another letter to the editor published in the Seattle PI, this one about how the Republicans are trying to twist FDRs words into an endorsement for their "private/personal" Social Security accounts. The letter I was responding to is here.

Thanks for stopping by...see ya soon.

Scott

First Debate to Kerry

Thursday's debate was pretty important, especially for the leaners and undecideds in the country. I think that Kerry showed that he could be a strong confindent leader, not the wishy-washy flipflopper that Bush tries to make him out to be.

This debate should have been Bush's to dominate. Foreign policy is his ONLY strength in the polls. (Ok people would rather have a beer with him but he's a teetotaler so that doesn't count.) Instead of coming out on the attack he basically just stuck to his normal stump speech points - Kerry flip-flops and Iraq wasn't a mistake. His first point is wrong but can easily be made to appear correct if you edit the footage correctly. The second point is so incredibly wrong that you wonder if Bush is in the sam universe as the rest of us. I mean obvioulsy he can't say "I made a mistake." But I really don't think he has any concept of how screwed up Iraq is. He blew his best chance to score big and grab a lead that Kerry couldn't come back from, so Kerry gets the Win for this one.

That said, I think that Kerry could have done better. He did well to get Bush on the defensive right at the start, but he kind of fumbled in the middle. If Bush hadn't been making faces at Kerry like a petulant 6 year old and unable to think on his feet, I think the debate would have been a tie more than the grand victory the Dems and most media outlets have declared it to be

We're Doing Our Job in Washington State.

We're doing our job in Washington State.

How are you doing in your state?

Some new local polls came out today. Despite the huge margin of error +/- 5% and ridiculously small number of people polled (405) it is still good news for Washington State.

Kerry 52%
Bush 38%

Governor
Gregoire (D) 49%
Rossi (R) 38%

Senate
Murray (D) 57%
Nethercutt (R) 37%

Nethercutt, by the way, ran for congress in Spokane(WA-5) on an anti professional politician platform. He pledged to only serve 3 terms. Five terms later he's now running for senate. Ya gotta like a guy who keeps his word huh? With any luck though we can grab his seat away from the Republicans, its not likely but you never know.

Unpublished Letter to the Editor

Editor,

John Kerry has been repeatedly tagged as a flip-flopper by President Bush and his supporters by taking his statements out of context. A great example of this is his supposed flip-flop on maintaining the troop strength in South Korea.

On August 1st on 'This Week', Sen. Kerry said, "If the diplomacy that I believe can be put in place can work, I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just (in Iraq), but elsewhere in the world. In the Korean peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps."

On Wednesday, Kerry said that he was concerned about Bush's "hastily announced" plan because it would be "withdrawing unilaterally 12,000 troops from the Korean Peninsula at the very time that we are negotiating with North Korea, a country that really has nuclear weapons"

Is there a flip-flop here? No. Kerry said that he would perhaps pull troops out of South Korea if he could use diplomacy to defuse the situation there. He is worried that Bush is pulling out troops out and weakening our hand against the threat of North Korea without first defusing the situation. Sounds pretty consistent to me.

Sincerely,

Scott M Taylor