Truly Random Thoughts

Today's Most Unsettling Headline: Mukasey Pledges Vigilance on Elections. The dude is a scary Skeletor (okay, so its not exactly Separated At Birth) and the word "vigilance", in the wake of Mugabe's recent "get out the vote efforts", is not what you want to hear from one of Bush's henchmen.

In other news, I have nothing else to report in the way of random thoughts. What's on my mind lately is not random at all. In In increasing order of time spent thinking about each topic, I am preoccupied with:
1. what I should blog about;
2. my car;
3. the Presidential election;
4. my budget;
5. why we have no beer in the house other than Miller High Life and should I have a scotch instead?;
6. my job.

I have these things to say about these topics, respectively:
1. It's evident from this post that I have nothing to blog about.
2. My car is fine now.
3. I really don't have a big problem with Barack Obama's faith-based initiative stuff, and I will explain later why this is, and its not just because I am big sucka for everything BO does and says.
4. It continues to require my participation on the "income" side. As long as that happens, there is nothing to worry about.
5. It's left over from the NASCAR trip, and we ran out of drinkable beer, so yes, probably.
6. It breaks a rule of mine to blog about this topic.

Let me elaborate:
1. Yes, I do.

2. There's a pump that pumps coolant to the hybrid battery and it broke, but they replaced it so now the car won't think its overheating unless it actually is.

3. Obama's faith-based initiatives are not rooted, unlike Bush's, in a desire to end government and spread Christianity. I think he has very explicitly described why his plans do not infringe on separation of church and state, and I think he will be good about enforcing that (dare I say, he'll be vigilant?). The Saul Alinsky model of community organizing encourages the organizer to make coalitions with all willing allies, even if it's just issue-based. In Chicago, churches, mosques and synagogues play a prominent role in alliances for political change, social justice and social services. Obama's ideas grow out of that tradition, not out of the missionary tradition of the evangelical church that Bush paid lip service to. An important component of Obama's program is not that its faith-based, but that it wants to support community organizations. This leads to. . .

My second reason for being interested in his approach - and I will be referring to The Wire in a moment - is that the existing frameworks for delivering services and making social change either don't work anymore or never worked. In The Wire, Bunny Colvin helps implement this school-within-a-school at Tilghman Middle School, where they take the worst kids out of the classes and give them intensive instruction. It helps the wild kids and it helps the other kids to have the disruptive children out of the classroom. But when Bunny and the professor plan to go to the mayor to pitch it on a broader scale, they get shot down by the school district woman and left out in the cold by the mayor's staff, who file their report in the circular file cabinet. If small projects work, why not fund them and let them work? We don't need to make them national. They don't need to be made into their own bureaucracy. Just fund them and see how far they can get on their own steam. Contrast Bunny's project with the No Child Left Behind/teach to the test model implemented in the rest of Tilghman and you will see where the real progress happened. To be corny about it, maybe we don't need a social security blanket, we need a social security patchwork quilt.

6. Knight of Nothing recently asked, "Why do bloggers abandon a post?" It's a good question. (He also inspired me to write the above on Obama). In response, I articulated some rules I have about this blog:

The main reason I abandon a piece is that I have written something that violates a rule of mine, and I can't figure out how to say what I want to say without violating the rule. The rules are things like, speaking ill of someone who can be identified to others, talking about work, talking about my husband or kids in too much detail (so that they could be identified to a casual reader). I also abandon when I have forgotten my point or am failing to make one.

As you can see from the present post, I don't always abandon a post when I tread on a rule. Arguably, this post has violated nearly every rule I have, especially that last one.