Nothing But Words

Michiko (Maria’s mom) is visiting us for a couple weeks, and she’s helping us a lot with taking care of Eidan. The only trouble is she keeps calling him Elton – we’re not sure why (actually, I think it started when we were listening to Elton John in the car the other day…). She also has quite a talent for mixing metaphors – the title is from something she said at dinner last night. But she has yet to top my high school gym teacher, who I remember saying, in a moment of of attempted inspiration, “sometimes you gotta take the bull by the hand.”

Anyway, as you can see Elton…I mean Eidan, is fat and happy these days…

A couple weeks after Eidan was born, I posted a comment from a friend of mine who already had two kids. He said “…to deal with Child 1, you took all the slack out of your schedule. With Child 2, there is no blood left in the turnip. You either do less or sleep less.” Foolishly, we’ve tried to do more, which means we just don’t sleep much. But one of the things I had to give up was my political commentary. The timing is a bummer, as these are probably the most intense political times so far in my life (I was only 4 when Watergate happened, so I don’t count that…). With the start of the semester next week, things get even more hectic, as I’ll be taking a class again (but this one will be harder than last semester’s), and Maria will be teaching 3 classes instead of 2 (she’s teaching her usual classes at Villanova, and she’s teaching a class at Penn for a friend who’s on leave). So I probably won’t be writing about politics again until the summer, at the soonest.

But I’m still keeping up with everything, and I thought I’d share some of my favorite blogs, in case you’re looking for a substitute for my own ramblings.

• Unclaimed Territory: Glenn Greenwald, who is a 1st Amendment lawyer, has only been blogging for a few months, but he’s become my new blog hero. I like him because he takes an approach similar to mine, but does it much better: he doesn’t assume that you already agree with him, he does his homework, and he makes logical, persuasive, and insightful arguments. His posts tend to be long but are well worth reading. His recent posts on Bush’s wiretapping scandal are the best I’ve seen anywhere.
• Talking Points Memo: Josh Marshall’s blog is the flagship moderate-left blog. What makes his blog compelling is that he will intensely focus on just one or two stories at a time, and he’ll follow them for weeks or even months. You’ll find a depth of coverage on these stories that is head and shoulders above anything you’ll find in the mainstream media. Josh’s site is unique because it’s an interesting experiment in citizen journalism: he has a large readership, including some very well-placed people, who ferret out information he’s looking for and feed it back into the site. Over the past few months, his coverage of the Jack Abramoff scandal, and the Niger/Uranium document forgeries, have been second to none. He also regularly has high profile contributors, such as John Edwards and Russ Feingold, contributing to the companion site, TPMCafe.
• Informed Comment: Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, blogs almost exclusively about Iraq. He provides a daily news roundup that includes Arabic-language news sources (he provides summaries and partial translations). His deep knowledge of the Middle East allows him to provide analysis that you won’t find anywhere else. He’ll occasionally descend into shrillness when analyzing whatever the latest blunder is from the Bush Administration, which tends to put me off, but if I had dedicated as much of my life to the Middle East as he has, I suppose I’d be awfully angry too. One thing is for sure though: reading his blog will make you realize just how deeply misleading all the Fox News happy talk about Iraq is.
• The Washington Note and Political Animal (the Washington Monthly blog) are both good sources of moderate-left analyses of daily politics.
• DonkeyRising: political scientist Ruy Teixeira’s blog is a great source of poll data analysis, and information on where the country is headed politically. It can get wonky at times, but since studying voting behavior was one of my specialties in grad school, I can’t get enough of it.
• ArmsControlWonk: this is even more wonky than DonkeyRising, but I also can’t get enough since this was my other specialty in grad school. It stands out because of its sense of humor, and because of the depth of knowledge the authors bring to topics such as the negotiations with North Korea (and the Bush administration’s astonishing talent for screwing them up). Check out the video clip they posted the other day of Kim Jong Il’s bodyguards – it looks like something out of a Jackie Chan movie.

I’ve been looking for a decent center-right blog that I could recommend to you for balance, but I haven’t found one yet. The flagship right-wing blog, Powerline, is nothing more than a Bush administration propaganda mill, so I’m not even going to link to it (I’m still dumbfounded that Time Magazine found it worthy of a Blog of the Year award). RedState is sometimes interesting, but like it’s counterpart on the left, DailyKos, it all too often descends into self-righteous shrillness (both are also guilty of not fact-checking their contributors). A big part of what’s made it hard for me to find a good right-wing blog is how all the major ones march in lock-step with each other: they all pick up the same talking points and push them out into the blogosphere. In contrast, the blogs on the left tend to be all over the place, and spend as much time disagreeing with each other as anything else. I think this is one of the reasons the right is so much better at influencing the media than the left, but that’s a topic for another day…

So until I once again have the time and mental energy to start my political blogging again, I hope you find these sites to be good, if not better, substitutes.

If the title didn’t give it away already, I spent the holidays in my ancestral home state, Rhode Island. To be fair, folks in my home town of Newport don’t talk like that, but travel inland to a town like Warren and you’ll hear a variant of the New England accent that would make even a native Bostonian blush (if you don’t believe me, wicked pisser is in the Alternative English Dictionary).

Anyway, we decided to do the 6 hour drive north rather than fly, and Eidan handled his first road trip well (mercifully, by sleeping most of the way in both directions). We first stayed with one of my aunts in Boston for a couple of days, and we took Kai to see the Nutcracker. We were seated roughly in the middle of the theater, and within a radius of 10 rows of us, I spotted 3 Caucasian couples with Asian toddlers. Maria’s friend Yuka was with us (she’s from Japan, and is in Boston right now learning English), and she said that it’s the latest trend in Boston: well-to-do but older or infertile couples adopting Chinese babies, as orphanages in China are apparently overflowing with kids these days. Leaving the theater, Yuka commented that one of the dancers was Japanese, and you could tell because she was “all technique and no spirit.” Maria was sympathetic to the dancer though: “she was the sugar-plum fairy, that’s not much to work with!”

Our time in Newport mostly consisted of running the gauntlet of my relatives. I have a large and complicated family, involving halfs, steps, and ex-steps (including a brother and a sister who are my blood-relatives, but not each others). On a typical day we’d visit two or three different houses, and after a week we had managed to see everyone at least once. For Kai it just meant more love, and of course, more presents! Actually, it was a great trip, and we’re looking forward to going back in the summer, so Kai and Eidan can play with their cousins on the beach.

The only downside to the trip was that we came home to find that our 3rd floor toilet had leaked. There were water stains on the wall below it on the 2nd floor, the hallway floor warped, and the kitchen ceiling was water damaged as well. I stopped the leak simply by tightening the nut on the toilet’s incoming water line. I installed that toilet over the summer, and this was the first time the toilet had been in air below 55 degrees (since we turned the heat down while we were away), so my guess is the cold temperature caused a slight contraction in the seal, letting the water out.

Now I’m looking forward to a relaxing day at work .