Considerations

My sewing is progressing amazingly. I have maybe 6 or 7 hours of cross-stitching on my southwestern themed one that I'm working on and then some backstitching and I have another project done. Then it's time to finish the back stitching on one I started a year ago and never finished. Hmmmm.

So I have some more thoughts about politics, because we're basically being pounded daily with political stuff. The absolutely perfect ticket for the Republicans to run would probably be something like McCain-Lieberman. Why? Because two moderates, an independent Democrat and a sort of renegade Republican make the perfect ticket to attract all of the independent voters. Between something like Obama-Edwards or Clinton-Edwards and McCain-Lieberman, the choices are actually pretty easy for moderates. Even though McCain is not an evangelical Christian and Lieberman a Jew, their support for an improving war in Iraq (best conditions pretty much since the invasion in 2003), their position as an alternative to two strong liberals, and their position in key states could be really important. Plus, they look like two honest and sincere men, which in the end for evangelicals, is probably enough, especially as an alternative to two heavy liberals.

Arizona is going to be one of those really contentious states this year, and McCain would have a natural upper-hand because he's from there. If you look at Clinton and Obama, they're both from pretty solid Democratic states (New York and Illinois), and so they have little persuasiveness in a swing state. Bringing someone like Lieberman or Giuliani onto the ballot would put Democrats on the defensive in states like New York, Connecticut, or New Jersey.

With all this political talk, one might think that I should be a politics major, but I actually don't care that much for it. It's important to me that we don't put a really right of the line person or a really left of the line person in the White House. The Congress I'm even less focused on, because local parties have so much say in the nomination process for a house seat or a senate seat that common folks actually don't have as much of a say as they do in presidential nomination processes.

Take my district for example. I have a terrible representative (Lamborn is actually quite smarmy), who should be voted out. There's going to be a contentious race here in the 5th CO district, between two Republicans on who can be more conservative. Kind of sad.

Anyways, I was thinking today that I'm actually kind of ready for school to start again. To get things going and to finally get some of those things I long for most-grades-to come in. When you only have like 39 hours left until you're graduated, you kind of want things to go more quickly than they are going now, I suppose.

I decided that this summer I'm going to start language #4, for which I'm trending towards Japanese. I really want to learn an East Asian language, andi think it might actually have more use in the sciences than otherwise.

For a scientist, the best languages to learn are probably (in order) English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, and Spanish. Mainly because they're the only places interested in science. I would love to know more languages. Arg. I wish I could absorb languages like a sponge.

So Masterpiece Theatre is going on this Jane Austin MARATHON over the next four months, I think, and they did all 5 of her novels and a biopic. I'm excited for it, because it'll basically be my first experience into her work.

Time to go back to sewing.