July 08 2008 part I

Workout notes There are thunderstorms out there, so probably some treadmill combination walking, plus yoga and leg weights.

Update 3 miles prior to yoga class: 7:10 first half mile, 13:52 first mile (felt bad), 11:59 next mile (easy 200, harder 200), 10:36 last mile (5:18 each half).

Then yoga with Ms. V. I talked to a guy who rode a bicycle on a 7 week California to Massachusetts ride.

Then I tried to do a 50 minute XC program on the treadmill. The first treadmill up and quit on me 1.34 miles into it, so I did a 40 minute version of the same course at 4.8 mph (12:30 pace). So I got in a total of just over 7 miles for the day of halfway decent walking.

While I was on the track and doing my 10:36 walking mile some obese guy was running and attempted to catch me and stay up. He lasted all of 100 meters. I wanted to tell him “relax; I’ve been there; you should just be concerned with moving forward at this point” but I kept my mouth shut.

Who knows; maybe 6 months from now he’ll be able to stay with me.

Humor/Politics

So how are Crocs doing?

The idea behind the clip is self-evident and, on the surface, seems like just another effort in the litany of attempts to tie together the two Republicans. But for a McCain campaign that is trying to re-foot itself, these missteps end up being more politically irritating. They are distractions that take away from the Senator’s focus on a coherent economic message.

Update: Chris Beam, over at Slate, has highlighted, perhaps, a more telling problem with McCain’s use of Croc: the company has “blown up in the last several months.”

Have a look at Croc’s stock price. (Symbol: CROX.) It peaked at $75 back in late October, but since then has plummeted to one-tenth of that. It last traded at $6.91. Whereas footwear like Uggs managed to outlive its initial hype and become a footwear mainstay, Crocs appear to be what its investors most feared: a fad.

Patriotic Bikinis

More here.

Back to Evening Yoga

I’ve returned to doing the evening yoga class with Ms. Vickie. The reason is that it was a good excuse to get Olivia to do some exercise.

From around the world of politics and snark:

John McCain: really like Bush:

In McCain’s open to the public townhall meeting, a 61 year-old woman was arrested cited for trespassing on orders from the McCain security detail for carrying a sign that read McCain=Bush. Carol Kreck received a ticket and her court date is set for July 23.

Gee, McCain is a Republican, right? (Republican, just as Jesse Helms was). Well Republicans just love Bush, so what is wrong with a McCain = Bush sign?

John McCain: plays fast and loose with economics. As Robert Reich points out:

George W. Bush took the largest budget surplus in history and transformed it into a giant deficit. McCain’s economic plan, announced today, will to even worse. McCain says he’s going to balance the budget by the end of his first term (actually, he didn’t literally say that – he just “demanded” it – implying that a Democratically-controlled Congress would be ultimately responsible if it didn’t happen). And then McCain came up with numbers that will blow the deficit into the stratosphere.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the budget deficit will be $443 billion in 2013, the end of the next president’s first term, if Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent (which McCain pledges to do). So start with this $443 billion hole. Now add in McCain’s promise to cut corporate taxes by a hundred billion a year ($4 billion of this for American oil companies, more than a billion for Exxon-Mobile alone). Then add in McCain’s promise to get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax, designed to ensure that the very rich pay at least a minimum percent of their income in tax. Obama would properly index it to inflation but McCain will let the rich pay as little as they can get away with. Non-partisan tax experts put the ten year cost of this at $1 trillion. All told, McCain promises more than $650 billion of new tax cuts per year. (That doesn’t even include McCain’s promise to allow corporations to immediately expense all their investments – which, he asserts, would add nothing to the budget deficit at all!)

Who gets all these cuts? Mostly, the very rich and big corporations. [...]

Supply-side economics is one of those unfortunate half-brained theories actually to have been tried in practice, and failed miserably.

Religion: The Flying Spaghetti Monster has been sighted at various fireworks displays:

Here is one sighting

Hey, if other deities can be found in cheese sandwiches, French fries and screen doors, why not our deity?

Speaking of my deity:

Larger.

Hat tip: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.