Sherry Chandler

from Armando at Docudharma:

As citizens and activists, our allegiances have to be to the issues we believe in. I am a partisan Democrat it is true. But the reason I am is because I know who we can pressure to do the right thing some of the times. Republicans aren’t them. But that does not mean we accept the failings of our Democrats. There is nothing more important that we can do, as citizens, activists or bloggers than fight to pressure DEMOCRATS to do the right thing on OUR issues.

And this is true in every context I think. Be it pressing the Speaker or the Senate majority leader, or the new hope running for President. There is nothing more important we can do. Nothing. It’s more important BY FAR than “fighting” for your favorite pol because your favorite pol will ALWAYS, I mean ALWAYS, disappoint you.

In the middle of primary fights, citizens, activists and bloggers like to think their guy or woman is different. They are going to change the way politics works. They are going to not disappoint. In short, they are not going to be pols. That is, in a word, idiotic.

Yes, they are all pols. And they do what they do. Do not fight for pols. Fight for the issues you care about. That often means fighting for a pol of course. But remember, you are fighting for the issues. Not the pols.

and from Lance Mannion:

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

And they do this so that they don’t have to chip in on gas.

from Jane Smiley

The underlying question of this primary and this election and the next four years is this — was it the Clintons themselves who aroused the ire of the rightwing to such an extent that the administration they formed was unmercifully harassed from before the inauguration of 1992 to after the 2000 election, or were the Clintons simply the Democrats who happened to be there when the rightwing decided to take over? Everything the rightwing (and the media) latched onto about the Clintons, from Travelgate to the runway haircut to Monica Lewinsky seemed to me at the time to be merely a gambit in a slow-moving coup d’etat that was crowned in 2000 with the Supreme Court selection of the unelected George W, Bush. The one virtue of the Bush administration has been that their policies are so bankrupt and their members so incompetent that all but a few Americans can now understand the emptiness of the Republicans and their avid desire to destroy the U.S. in the pursuit of corporate power. The real danger of the next four years, as I see it, is that the election of any Democrat will trigger the rightwing deathsquads in all their different guises — the media deathsquad, that hounds the president with nonsensical stories of scandal and distracts him from his business; the survivalist NRA deathsquads that pull off home-grown terrorist attacks, like the Oklahoma bombing; the lobbyist deathsquads, that gut all socially conscious or beneficial legislation, such as universal healthcare; the religious deathsquads, that harass and torment anyone who doesn’t conform to a narrow and authoritarian social model; the thinktank deathsquads that propound deadly theories about the perfection of the “free market” or the horrors of “islamofacism” or the non-existence of climate change. It would actually be nice if the Fellow Wehner is telling the truth, that it is the Clintons personally that are the problem, because then the election of Obama would indeed signal a change. But if the goal of the corporatocracy is what it has seemed to be — the permanent replacement of American democracy with a global imperialist empire and oligarchy of wealth, then Obama doesn’t have a chance — he will either be corrupted or destroyed.

All links via The Sideshow.

Update and fifth, I think it is by now, thoughts: I think my real problem with this primary has been that Clinton hasn’t been allowed to win or lose on the merits. The Clinton haters haven’t given her a fair shake, nor have they been as harsh with Obama, and it offends my sense of fair play. See Jane Hamsher.

I’ve reached the blog’s third anniversary, which I suppose brands me now as an incorrigible. As I have done before, I’ve marked the day with some redecorating. I hope you all like this new look. If you have any trouble with it, please tell me.

If you like it, then thanks go to the designer Benedikt Rieke-Benninghaus and I encourage you to give him praise.

My thanks, too, to my generous host at The Daily Troll.

I’m not big on blog stats and noticing numbers but there are currently 2,020 posts on the blog to which I’ve had 2,186 comments (and of course thousands of spam comments). I’ve had about 200,000 page views since I opened for business, and of those people about half have stayed to read a while. I find these pretty comfortable numbers for an obscure regional poet such as I.

My thanks to those of you who have been reading here from the beginning and to those who have joined along the way. My special thanks to those of you who’ve commented and kept a conversation going. I get lonely hearing only the sound of my own voice.

In a post about his blogroll yesterday (and a phenomenon called Blog Amnesty Day), Lance Mannion commented that a sidebar soon becomes invisible, and I think that is very much the case. So I have tried to streamline mine a bit. I’ve collapsed my archive into a drop-down list and reduced my reading lists at Good Reads to an icon. But I’ve kept the recent comments list because I want you all to talk to each other as well as to me.

You will find my pages now off the horizontal navigation bar up top. Please visit to find links to my books and poems and also links to information on many Kentucky writers and presses.

I read a lot of blogs in a day but I have tried to keep my own list of links — I won’t call it a blogroll because a lot of the links aren’t blogs — short, useful, and focussed on local writers and artists and other poets with whom I have a personal connection. I invite you to explore that list.

But I also echo Lance in saying that just because you’re not on my blogroll doesn’t mean that I don’t read your blog and appreciate your blogging. Most of the traffic is in links in the posts and the comments. I try to be generous in linking and sharing. I invite you, too, to leave intelligent comments with links back to your own work.

Not much point my being out here if my place is not of use in developing a community.

So here we go, into a fourth year. Tempus fugit. Good luck to us all.