Arriving in Las Vegas

My trip was so easy this morning. No line at the airport, parking readily available, easy flight to Charlotte to change planes. It just went soooo smoothly.

On the flight from Charlotte to Vegas, I had THE MOST INTERESTING seatmate, who spent almost three of the four hours telling me about his job as a "special ops trainer," global high-end security master and, for four months of the year, he takes rich clients on safari to kill elephants, giraffe, rhino, lions and anything else they want to shoot, how much they pay for each "trophy," and what they do with the animals and skins. He also delivered a lengthy discourse on liberals, Hillary Clinton being the antichrist, Bill Clinton being the worst president ever, and how god sent him to us just so that Jimmy Carter wouldn't have to be known as the worst president ever, Muslim terrorists and how he took his daughter to see a real bullfight in Barcelona or Madrid and how exciting it was to see the bullfighter rewarded with the bull's ears and tail after the animal had died.

Have I mentioned how much I love my iPod? The new Bruce Springsteen is particularly good, especially at the higher volumes.

The Luxor is crazy big and full of fun things to do and see. Had a great night at the blackjack table -- up $400. Sadly, my bed is insanely uncomfortable, and I will be changing hotels tomorrow. Tonight, I'll be sleeping in the chair.

Travel is like live theater -- you just never know what can happen.

A moment from the SOTU

Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy meet at the SOTU on Monday night, after Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama:

"When Clinton straightened up, Kennedy quickly reached across Barack Obama to shake Clinton’s hand. She took it. As they spoke, Obama turned away. Then the senators seated to Obama’s right – Ben Nelson and Ken Salazar — both shook Senator Clinton’s hand and talked to her. Instead of doing the same, Obama turned to look at the back of the room. Sen. Claire McCaskill, who has also endorsed Obama and was seated next to Kennedy, reached across the Massachusetts senator — who was still talking to Clinton — and tapped Obama (still twisted toward the back of the room) on the shoulder. McCaskill engaged Obama in conversation until the moment passed." -- from a CNN blog

More interesting than the actual SOTU? You decide.

But definitely take three minutes to laugh at Harry Shearer's "Silent Debate" with Edwards, Huckabee and Tim Russert. You have to just keep watching. The uncomfortable silence is hilariously unbearable.

Love the snark

After homer candidate John Edwards' sad finish in the primary here, someone asked his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, what it all means.

His response: "It's fairly simple. We get to continue running for president until we decide we're not running for president."

I love a snappy quote!

Hot diggety!

Whenever you need a six-foot statue of a hot dog in a bun, with legs -- including tennis shoes and athletic socks -- in mid-squat, forcing ketchup into its own forehead while wrapped in an American flag, I know just where you can find one.

I think I had a nightmare about this when I was a kid, after watching one of those '60s-early-'70s anti-drug movies with some teenage girl who "accidentally" dropped acid and fried her brain into psychosis. I'm not kidding, either. I saw this on my way to a polling place today and had to flip a u to get a shot of it.

Election coverage is over for me, for now. Most gracious loser: J-ed, my political fiance, who, I suspect, wants to break up with me now because he's got to concentrate on Super-Duper Tsunami Tuesday.

Not a single voting mishap today, unless you count people who didn't know where their precincts were. I don't. That's just normal.

Can't even say how tired I am of hitting refresh on CNN.com, scvotes.org. But, all in all, we did some ass-kicking election stuff. Hot dawg!

Great substitute

The Monte Carlo is out because of the fire, so we've been relocated to The Luxor.

It looks funky-cool to me. Never been there, so I have no idea, but why not?

So far so good on Primary Day. No apparent voting machine/human errors. Knock wood it will stay that way, we'll get results on time and everything will go smooth.

The Southern name of the week

Dexe S. Bostick, mayor of Bennettsville.

Well, damn...

The hotel I booked for the trip to Vegas next week is en fuego. Right now.

Is it an omen?

I hope things aren't that hot when I get there. At least, not like that...

The Bear of Friday

Hooray. It's Bear-of-Friday time. Why do baby bears so often look like they've been caught doing something naughty? This one looks like maybe he's got a stolen cookie jar hidden in the flowers.

I think I've hit the wall, now, on my 13th straight day of work. One more, then I have Sunday off, then back to work Monday and Tuesday.

The good thing is that on Wednesday, I leave for Vegas, baby! I'm taking my comp days and going to Sin City for a lot of, well, relaxing, actually. Jocelyn is meeting me there, and we're seeing a Cirque du Soleil show, having a spa day and just generally kicking back. And, of course, trying to win a million-dollar jackpot while having free, watery cocktails.

Four...more...working...days... I'm soooo sleeping in on Sunday.

Betsey's new BFF

Betsey has a new best friend. He also happens to be running for president. I think Betsey would be a great Cabinet member, except she's already an awesome features editor. Perhaps she'd accept a job that would get her a trip to Dublin. She could be Secretary of Corned Beef, or maybe just the ambassador of Guinness with a couple of Jamesons shots. Is it me, or does Obama look a little more into having his picture taken with Bets than she does with him? I think he wants to be BFFs.

Marking a birthday

Here's a little Johnny Cash in honor of my dad, who would have been 85 today.

He bought me my first Johnny Cash record, and I can picture him now, out in the garden, listening to Johnny on his portable cassette player, pulling weeds or harvesting corn or tomatoes. Or maybe sitting out on the deck, relaxing at the end of the day, listening to some music.

Nothing but Cash on my iPod today.

MLK Day

Here's hoping everyone has a non-violent, yet revolutionary, day of change for the better.

It's Democratic Debate Day here.

Maybe I'll run into Wolf Blitzer at Chik-Fil-A.

Cheap Trick models

Cheap Trick -- the first name in... women's perfume? No, no, it's men's fashion.

What the? Who cares what they are modeling? They could be modeling Play-Doh and singing "The Alphabet Song" and they'd rock.

But in this case, they are rocking even harder. Check out the new ad campaign for John Varvatos. No really, go. Click on it. This is so cool.

I LOVE these pictures. Especially of my favorite lead singer in the whole wide world, who does not look like somebody's dad in these shots. Damn... But they all look great! Well, Tom looks a little scared on the back of that tandem bike with Rick driving. I love that they gave him a bike with hanging handlebars like we used to have when we were kids. Is this a play on the In Color album cover, with Robin and Tom on motorcycles?

Am I overanalyzing an ad for men's suits? Maybe.

But who thought "Hmmm... John Varvatos, chic suits... that just screams for CHEAP TRICK!"

Whoever it was, all 20,000 of us who bought the last album should chip in for some flowers or maybe a muffin basket for that guy.

Check out the photographer's site that's linked off the page, too. His Springsteen and Patti Smith photos are especially nice.

But, you know, not as nice as the ones of my favorite band.

If I had need of a men's suit, I'd be tempted, but I can still support my band by buying that perfume. Only at Saks this spring. Oooohhh, ahhhhh.

P.S. -- thanks to Pete for acquiring the pictures for me. I love my computer-savvy friend!

The political coverage continues

I'm having brunch with John Edwards' parents today. Meeting the parents? I think J-Ed and I are getting engaged soon.

Oh, wait. It's just a campaign stop.

Can't wait to hear more about what happened with our county's voting machines yesterday. Not that it would swing anything -- McCain was 14,000-plus votes ahead of Huckabee -- but it's interesting. Why don't these kinds of things happen during the testing and calibrating, but do happen on Election Day?

Murphy's Law, I suppose.

The rain stopped, but it's cold here. The roof of the building across from mine was all covered in frost this morning.

Last week, I saw an owl land over there just at dusk. I guess it's probably too cold up there for him to come back for now. He's probably nested up somewhere warm.

Delicious Primary Day

The rain is pouring, 80-90 percent of our county's voting machines have been unusable for a good portion of the day (just to remind you, this is the day of the GOP primary in SC, or, if you prefer, we could call it GOPPD) and, holy cats, one of my fellow reporters made THE FREAKIN' BEST cinnamon rolls ever.

Seriously. These things must be coated in crack, because we in the office cannot stop either eating them or staring longingly as others eat them.

I think I heard someone growl as another person approached the baking dish.

I'm going to try and weasel the recipe out of her, but then I'll have to lock it away until I have company, because otherwise, I'd wind up lying on the floor in a carb-loaded diabetic coma with a roll in one hand and my face all smeared with cinnamon, butter and pecans.

The Baby Bear of Friday

Flocke, or "flake" in German, is a new baby polar bear who needs human care at the Tiergarten Zoo in Nuremburg because her mother abandoned her. Tell me you would not want this keeper's job, at least while Flocke is still this tiny.

If I had a baby polar bear in my lap, I might never move.

Surf's up in the MB

Some crazy winter storm has blown in, and the ocean is all stirred up. It's been calm as a pond all week, but last night the rain came -- I think it might be here to stay for the weekend -- and this morning, the sea was, well, a little wilder.

There were actually tiny breakers this morning. Baby waves.

The other day, I heard someone talking about wanting to "preserve the surfing zones" along the beaches here, and it made me laugh a little because this is the calmest ocean ever. The beaches here are perfect for walking, shell collecting, sitting and watching the birds, getting a tan in the summer and easy swimming. But hanging ten? Shooting the curl? Not so much.

Of course, I'll be eating those words when a hurricane comes.

This weekend is our state's GOP primary. I love Election Night, and I say that with no snark whatsoever. I have always loved being in the newsroom on Election Night. It's exciting. And this year, I get three, because SC does its primaries on two different days, then we have the general election.

There's just this buzz when you're actually covering stuff as it's happening. Everyone's all tense, deadline feels like a guillotine and then, suddenly, you're done and everything is filed and the paper's being put together and it's like a little miracle -- people are actually going to have a paper to read in the morning.

It's like that bit from "Shakespeare in Love."

"It will all work out."

"But how will it?"

"I don't know. Its a mystery."

Time to cough up some cash, kids

Lots of you know, or know of, our friend Kevin, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma the same week as the 9/11 attacks.

Instead of giving in, Kevin fought back. He underwent the terrible treatments and traded all his bad habits for healthy things like triathlons and butternut-squash soup.

He hasn't had a cocktail or a cigarette in years, and, frankly, has become a bloody bore, spending all his time on old-lady cruise ships with perverted porpoises, or porpoi, if you prefer. But we love him anyway.

The good news? He now tests clean for cancer.

This year, Kevin, who turns 40, is running the Boston Marathon to raise money for the AIDS Action Committee, where he works in Boston. The committee provides housing, legal assistance, social services and financial assistance for people who are sick -- an eminently worthy cause.

Let's face it. Almost no one with AIDS is lucky enough to die like Tom Hanks did in "Philadelphia," with lots of family and friends around in a nice private hospital room. The people the AAC helps are those who cannot pay their bills and have no one to help them. There but for the grace of... whoever you believe in. Any of us could be in that position with any number of horrible diseases.

You can make a donation online here and Kevin will be blogging his training as he gears up to torture his middle-aged carcass. I know it's right after Christmas and all, but we can all give up a couple of Starbucks for a week or two.

Besides, it'll be worth a donation just to watch him sweat his 40-year-old ass off!

Take things out of the iRack!

Thanks, Ana, for this! It's excellent!

Debate-Day hilarity

I almost feel bad recommending anyone read this piece from The Onion.

Almost.

Except it's hilarious in the same way the SNL skit making fun of Jimmy Stewart's book of poetry was funny. Shocking and funny and wrong, but somehow so very right.

But I will warn you, it is NOT for anyone who's REMOTELY offended by obscenity.

SF in the MB

By "SF" I mean Stomach Flu. I wish my typing could convey my completely pathetic whinyness. Actually, no one wants to hear that.

I forgot to do the Bear of Friday, but it's Knut, and he's worth waiting for. Plus, this is kind of how I've felt for the past two days. Ugh. I remember lying on the couch like that yesterday. Not with an audience, of course.

Things I'm thankful for when I'm sick: the crazy-soft socks Jen sent me for my birthday (yay, Jen!), my soft-to-the-tenth throw-for-two from Bed, Bath and Beyond, diet 7-up, fresh air.

McGovern's editorial in the WashPo

By George McGovern
Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration.

But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush.

Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son.

When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act.

Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal
with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.