Rainy Day not so Blues

While I hesitate to say it, the garden could use a good rain.  The last time I expressed this opinion the NCR got a 3 week deluge that most gardeners and farmers with heavy soil have still not recovered from.  So while I welcome a rainy day, I hope it is more limited in scope than last time.  I hustled home last night and put in some spinach, turnips, daikon and beets.  The beets are probably wishful thinking, although a mild fall could help them mature before the inevitable freeze.  I can hardly wait for the first meeting of "Gardeners Anonymous" next spring.  Hopefully it will keep me from diving headfirst into another season of disappointment.

It's the Obama--Stupid

The biggest hurdle the eventual Republican candidate will face is how to portray the last 8 years as a failure of policy.  All the "can't miss" issues, the economy, obamacare, foreign policy, have all been successes to some degree.  So, aside from the 25-30% who believe Obama is the antichrist, what have the occupants of the clown car got.  At the recent debate, attacks on Donald Trump obscured the fact that aside from god, guns and gays, most of the candidates were more interested in attacking Hillary than the president.  The scenario is looking more and more like the 1988 election where the elder Bush succeeded Reagan by if not running on St. Ronnie's record at least not running away from it.  That would seem to be a wise choice for the eventual Democratic nominee.

Comings and goings

Jon Stewart signed off last night with a parting salute from the Boss.   Going out to the strains of "Born to Run", Stewart left us with a parting sermon on the detection of Bullshit in America.  Any organization which uses titles like "Americans for Patriotic Freedom Family Values and Economics" is sniff worthy.   Of course, he could have been talking about the Republican Freak Show on Fox last night.  The odor of bull by-products was detectable all the way from Cleveland as the Chris Wallace, Megyn Kelly and Bret Bair did their best to undermine The Donald to the advantage of the rest of the Clown Car.  It remains to be seen if their efforts will show up in the next set of polls.  Trump remained defiant amid some audience booing when he refused to pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee.    I hope Stewart remains a public figure during the rest of the run-up to the 2016 elections.   We need his brand of wise satire as an antidote to the BS which will be pitched by both parties.

The Clown Car Follies

For those with cast iron stomachs and a taste for irony, tonight should be amusing, to say the least.   At 9 p.m. after the JV game, the "heavyweights" of the republican presidential field will square off for a softball game with Faux News.  Immediately following that broadcast, Jon Stewart will make his farewell to the Daily Show on the Comedy Channel.  He couldn't have possibly planned the laugh-fest with the Fox News debate in mind....  Oh well, I'll have to try and stay awake long enough to get Stewart's take on the highs and lows of the 3 ring circus he will be following.  As a lifelong Democrat who sometimes veers to the left of Bernie Sanders, watching the debate tonight will be like trying to decipher some sort of alien code.  How any rational being with even a smidgeon of compassion for his fellow man can buy into any of the nonsense being peddled by this collection of candidates is way beyond me.  The guiding philosophy of the 2015 Republican party seems to be to use what's left of the government to shovel benefits to the 1% while telling the rest of us this wholesale theft is in our best interests.  At least the Roman Empire provided bread and circuses for the plebes in the capital city.   I hope Jon Stewart remains a gadfly during this election cycle.  We need a few intentional laughs during the next 16 months.

Marketing in the depths of summer

As we approach the home stretch of summer, the living may be easy, but the selling is not.  This year, the run up to Labor Day is one long slog as growers and brokers try to keep crops moving in an orderly fashion.   While there are a few hot items in the produce fields, most of the veg is moving with glacial slowness.  Over many years I have heard just about every excuse for the August swoon.  Everyone is on vacation, it is too hot, the economy is down, everyone is spending on back to school.  It's the dog ate my homework syndrome.  Personally, I have always felt it is a combination of the above, plus the glut of local produce running into the established year round distribution system from California and foreign sources.  If anything, people use more produce this time of year, but the cornucopia available overwhelms our ability to eat it all.   That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Coming to terms with climate change

The President is tackling the climate issue via regulation, since he expects to get no help from Congress in this regard.  Even the most virulent critics of the science behind the changing weather are not directly questioning the theory of human induced change.  They have just decided to fight any tactic used by the government to combat the change.   It is amazing to me that the men behind this obstruction, fathers and grandfathers all can't seem to look beyond the fight at the moment and realize the horrific legacy they are bequeathing their children and grandchildren.  I guess they believe the 1% will be able to ride out the worst of the effects in gated communities protected from the elements as the rest of the population is left to fend for themselves.  Floods, drought, fires and increasingly violent storms will certainly exert a Darwinian influence on billions of people in coming generations.   What will future historians, if there are any, think of the men and women who are leading the obstructionists.

Blissful ignorance

I spent the weekend in the same position as seemingly 90% of the US population; totally ignorant of political trends.  Most of Saturday and a good bit of Sunday I caught up on transplanting, fertilizing, weeding and mowing with time off to babysit granddaughters and pick the produce for a family dinner on Sunday evening.  Five minutes into listening to Morning Joe on the radio and I began to see why most people are turned off by politics, at least the way it is practiced by Washington and NY pundits.  As always, any news is good news for Republicans and bad news for Democrats.  Obama can do nothing right and the culture wars are dissected ad nauseum with the right winning on every issue.  It's enough to make me want to listen to the nice polite republicans on NPR.  At least they have to wear the fig leaf of impartiality.