Mixed Bag of Thoughts for 2007

:

1) I am ashamed it has taken this long for someone to say it here, but RIP Gerald Ford. I wish you had given that rebel peanut farmer a good whopping in '76 and admire your balls for asking Ronald Reagan to serve in a co-presidency with you in '80 when you were going to be his running mate.

2) I received both Obama's The Audacity of Hope and Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (Version 2.0) for Christmas this year. Thus far, Friedman is changing my views on globalization greatly and Obama has written little convince me he's ready to be President of the United States.

3) I read a good op-ed in the Bangor Daily News this week here. The introduction is great: "The coulda-shoulda-woulda chorus just added a new soprano. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War if she’d known then what she knows now."

4) Edwards just declared for the Presidency, and at the moment he remains my favorite of the Democratic front runners. Edwards-Obama would absolutely rape the Republican party of any minority vote it had been hoping to get in 2008 between a southern candidate and a minority running mate. On the Republican side, I'm getting a bit bored with the slow pace of the primary thus far. This does not surprise me, as it is typically the opposition party who mobilizes first.

5) I'm pretty sure I like Sen. Susan Collins.

6) I promise this is the last time I will mention this on Across the Aisle, but I finished Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt this week and I would like to say that it and its sequel (which I read first), Theodore Rex, should both be required readings for anyone who has interest in American history and government. It is an overlooked time period which served to form the modern era of American history.

I hope this blog fires back up as the majority of bloggers re-enter studies next month and have a new semester's worth of classes to ignore in favor of this site. In its first month and a half of existence, we're approaching 60 posts and even more comments, which is great.

Happy New Year, all. Let's hope our nation doesn't go down the tubes next year... we managed to stay afloat in this one.