Long Road Back

Workout notes I walked my house to the gooseloop course (one gooseloop lap plus the marina dam) in about 2:16 (no stopwatch; left at 9:13 and returned at 11:29). This is just over 10 miles and my time included traffic stops, rock in the shoe stop, etc.

I am not 100%; not even close but aside from that “behind the eyes hot flash” I still get and mild drainage, I am feeling better. Still, my pace should have felt a bit easier. I am still not ready for full blown training, but I don’t want a 6 week relapse that I had toward the end of 2001.

I am almost through with the third week, and today’s walk was the longest in three weeks; still it was enough to make my legs somewhat sore.

My long term goal was the FANS 24 Hour Walk on June 7 and I had hoped to be ready to hit 100 miles by then.

So, assuming it takes me two more weeks to get up to speed (that is, recover enough to train hard) I’ll have time for nine hard weeks plus a two week taper. I’d prefer 15 weeks, but hey, life is not perfect nor should it be. Besides, it isn’t as if I am starting from scratch; I had a good January and will have had a nice 50 mile race (and maybe a 50K) prior to the big one.

Politics (what else?)

Daily Kos Diaries: I’ve posted a couple of more of them; one of them shows my “Obama shrine” photos and briefly mentions my new reading list:
Dreams From my Father, Worth Fighting For, Obama and I wish to reread Audacity of Hope and Woman in Charge (I’ve listened to the abridged audio version).

The Books/Spoof diary

The “Jumping the Shark” diary (where I explain the term “jumping the shark”).

Illinois US Congressional Races:

IL-14: we eggheads are downright giddy that one of our own got elected; Bill Foster defeated a Republican multi-millionaire Jim Oberweis to obtain Dennis Hastert’s old IL-14 seat.

Note: these two will face off again in the November election. Note also that Obama campaigned for Foster. Read the crowing from Democrats here and here. Note: Bill Foster is now a superdelegate.

Think that he might be inclined to vote for Obama?

IL-18. Peoria Pundit has written some nice articles (here and here) about our Democratic candidate for the IL-18 race. We didn’t run anyone in the primary but instead drafted someone after the primary was over. Aaron Schock, the young rising star of Illinois politics will be a very difficult opponent to beat. He is currently my state representative, though I campaigned for his opponent twice. I even took part in a scheme where I sent a letter to every early voter stating that Schock had voted against an early voting bill (straight party line vote); some of the response I got was ok but one return call lead to a heated exchange.

But back to this race: I said this on the Peoria Pundit article:

About Callahan: I was at the Peoria Democratic Dinner (President’s Day) and she was going around shaking hands, and she had a campaign official trying to sign people up.

I asked for Callahan’s stance on *any* issue and got no response; Callahan’s blurb mentioned that she had been here a long time and knows agriculture. Period.

Frankly, I am not going to waste my time; they have been “oh, she is an attractive, well spoken person” and that has been about it.

I sure hope she comes out with a position paper or two; right now I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that she has thought long and hard about the issues. This is her professional website.

But if she does nothing more that say: vote for me because I speak well, know about agriculture and am attractive, we are in for a massive blow-out this fall. I can’t tell you if she is pro choice, pro Iraq war, what she thinks about FISA, the Patriot Act, etc.

Democratic Presidential Primary Race

I did my part; I made 20 calls to Mississippi today. I actually got to talk to one Obama supporter! It is no surprise that the most productive calls I made were those to my neighbors in Illinois; many campaigns give the most promising numbers to the locals (as they should).

So I’ve done 6 phone banking sessions and 2 door to door canvasses. That is good spring training for the fall. So, even if you support (shudder) Clinton, do the national phone banking anyway. You won’t get tons of supporters (unless you are calling locally) but if your candidate wins, you’ll feel as if you have a tiny piece of the victory. And if they lose, you know that you would have done your part.

So I’ve called Illinois (win), Wisconsin (win), Texas thrice (once with MoveOn) which was a primary loss (thanks Rush Limbaugh! ) but a caucus and delegate win, Wyoming (win) and Mississippi (where we lead, but things can change).

More False Clinton Hype: Family Leave Act

This is from the Hillary Clinton Website

As First Lady, she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act

(fourth paragraph under “Ready To Lead”).

But is this true? Actually, Bill Clinton did sign this into law, on his sixteenth day in office! Wow, she helped pass this act only 16 days into Bill Clinton’s FIRST TERM? How is that possible?

Here is how: actually, this act had made it through Congress under the first President Bush, only to get vetoed, twice!

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (Pub.L. 103-3, enacted February 5, 1993) is a United States labor law allowing an employee to take unpaid leave due to a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform his job or to care for a sick family member or to care for a new son or daughter (including by birth, adoption or foster care). The bill, authored by Chris Dodd,[1] was among the first signed into law by President Bill Clinton in his first term, fulfilling a campaign promise.

(psst: Dodd has endorsed Obama!)

See about 44 seconds into it.

Link to the Senate Vote.

About the Bush vetos:

By ADAM CLYMER,
Published: January 6, 1993

The 103d Congress convened today and Democratic leaders promptly set about establishing legislative priorities to demonstrate that they can work with a Democratic President by re-passing bills President Bush vetoed. [...]
A bill requiring employers to grant workers unpaid leaves for family and medical emergencies emerged at the top of the list. Both Houses scheduled early action on it, and President-elect Bill Clinton’s choice as chief of staff, Thomas F. McLarty 3d, called for action “as early in the session as possible.”

She had little to do with it getting passed, aside from helping Bill get elected. Major hat tip to maineiac who helped vet this bit of revisionist history.

You know, Clinton wouldn’t get criticized so much if she didn’t attempt to mislead so much. Politics as usual.

From the other side Former Clinton Campaign Official says that this race is over. Ok, it is Dick Morris and his departure with the Clintons was rather acrimonious. But still, this man knows politics:

The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won. It’s that she didn’t win by enough.

The race is over.

The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the superdelegates do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year.

John McCain’s nomination guarantees that the superdelegates wouldn’t dare. A perfectly acceptable alternative for most Democrats, McCain would harvest so large a proportion of Obama’s votes if Hillary steals the nomination that he would probably win. Even putting Obama on the ticket would not allay the anger of his supporters; it would just make him complicit in the robbery.

Will Hillary win Pennsylvania? Who cares? Even if she were to sweep the remaining primaries and caucuses by 10 points, she would move just 60 votes closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates. And she won’t sweep them all. [...]

The rest of the article is pretty good. As to what happened to Morris:

If Hillary Clinton has experience in anything, it’s in fighting when cornered. When Bill Clinton lost his governorship, it was Hillary Clinton who commissioned Dick Morris to advise the Clintons on a no-holds-barred campaign to retake the governor’s mansion. At the start of 1995, when Newt Gingrich and company took over Congress and the Clinton administration looked in danger of becoming irrelevant, it was Hillary Clinton who installed Dick Morris in the White House, along with his sidekick Mark Penn, to “triangulate” by distancing Bill Clinton from the Democratic Party and moving the Administration rightward. (When Morris was subsequently discovered to have a penchant for the toes of prostitutes the White House dumped him but kept Penn on.) And now Mark Penn is the “chief strategist” of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

But this isn’t all the author if this article has to say:

The sad news is that whether the Clinton scorched-earth strategy ultimately succeeds or fails, it will have caused great harm. In the unlikely event it succeeds, the result will be a shame and not a little ironic. Barack Obama has breathed life into the Democratic Party, and into American politics, for the first time in forty years. Not since Robert Kennedy ran for president has America been so starkly summoned to its ideals; not since then has America — including, especially, the nation’s youth — been so inspired.

The Clintons would prefer to write off Obamania as a passing fad, but the reality is that idealism and inspiration are necessary preconditions for positive social change. Nothing happens in Washington unless Americans are energized and mobilized to make it happen. Hillary Clinton’s tactics are the old politics the nation is recoiling from — internal division and national fear. This only serves to deepen Americans’ cynicism about politics, and makes social change all the harder to achieve.

So who is this author? Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary!