I'm a pound down this week. At least I cleaned out the utensil cupboard. I didn't do much about the round robin, so the week is a pretty mixed bag.

There was a new cache out by the library where I used to take Casey, last year. We waited till the brunt of the storm, yes, from yesterday, finally passed and packed up to go try for a first to find. It turned out we were about a half-hour late. I left a book and took the travel bug, however.

Then Rich was looking for a new thermostat. The Home Depot in Citrus Heights didn't have it. We stopped near Fry's (where Rich had gone on Monday) and found another cache, then went to the big box mall on Truxel for a third. This one is cleverly hidden on one of the decorative towers. That Home Depot had the thermostat Rich wanted... but when we got home the current one decided to work. Just took a little threat to make it focus!

ObGoe: Rosie O'Donnell. He couldn't stand her, and this latest publicity stunt wouldn't have helped.

Heh. The news was fun to watch. In Chicago, they blew up the Bartman Ball. You could hope this would lift the curse. Of course, they were losing the series before Mr. Bartman made that sad catch.

I sat down and blacked in the squares on my ballot. As a Libertarian, I don't have some of the difficult choices, though there are three running for President. We also got gerrymandered out of the Ose district, so I don't think we're even running anyone against Matsui. The other district has three contenders and I'm to the "pox on all your houses" stage.

Rich has the Senate choice, who to run against Boxer. Oh my goodness. I like Bill Jones, and have since he was Secretary of State, but I wonder if Rosario Marin wouldn't have a better chance. Right now she's down in the polls, but as a Hispanic woman, she could deflect a lot of Boxer's mudslinging.

I know who I'd vote for for mayor if we were so unlucky as to live in the city. The race for County Stupidvisor is a little harder. I know one of the contenders from geocaching, and I don't much like his ideas. I'm going for the one that the Loretto grad, our district attorney, favors.

I'm ignoring the judge race (I still don't know whether these people are elected or appointed... it seems to be "both") and a couple of others. Then they are talking about reducing the water district board from 7 to 5, which I'm against. I think with 7 we're more apt to get a fair supervision.

I was sure of three of the four propositions, and only wondered about Proposition 55. On the one hand, we hardly need to add to our debt, but on the other hand , the schools are in bad shape physically as well as programwise, and the debt would be low-interest at this point. Of course, every year we pour more money into the black hole known as 'education' and have very little to show for it. In the end, I decided to vote against Prop 55 partly because Barbara Kerr favors it. She's the head of the Teacher's Union and has annoyed me excessively by her radio ads about the Southern California grocery workers' strike. She says "big corporations" like it's a Bad Thing, and she also treats the listeners like 3rd graders. And what are the teachers doing getting into the middle, anyway?

Prop 56 does have the nice sugar-coating of punishing the Lege if they piddle around with the budget, but it also has the poison pill of changing the percentage needed to raise taxes. No brainer! If they can raise taxes instead of, say, consolidating some of their silly jobs, of course they'll raise the taxes.

I want to give Ahnold the chance to fix things his way, so it's yes on 57 and 58 here. It's not perfect, but it's the best they could do, and he deserves a chance to try it. I just hope I'm not cussing myself out in 2006!

There's a cute pin we (poll workers) get to wear which says "don't punch the ballot". It'll be fun.

Vikingpundit points out that every news story about Kerry contains the line "Then he sought to clarify his position" or equivalent. At the New York Times they equate "inability to take a stand" with "intellectual depth." Real Clear Politics also says:

It's not surprising that the Times fawns over Kerry's tendency to be both long-winded and wonkish (can't you feel the nostalgia for Clinton?) but their effort to dress up his lack of conviction and history as a master equivocator as a desirable quality to be leader of the free world fails miserably.

Tim Blair explains: "If consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, John F. Kerry�s mind must be freaking enormous. (The F stands for Flip)." John Ellis calls him the "Brooding Botox-ed Brahmin."

Best of the Web compares Kerry to Bush as undergrads (guess which quote belongs to whom):

Not getting enough signatures suggest one of two things: either the chairman faced some unfortunate circumstances or he has some personality problems. According to Dominguez, [his] leadership caused his probation.
...
His Yale classmates claim that he knew everyone in their undergraduate class, and one can almost believe this was literally true. . . . He didn't know just the names--classmates marvel about how he could sum up each person's essence with great insight and humor.

Albright lied, people died. But she was a Democrat working for Clinton, so that's OK. There are many vets angry at Kerry. Sgt. Mom certainly won't vote for him:

It wasn�t enough to slime people like Charlie and other veterans with accusations of wall to wall atrocities, it wasn�t enough to render further assistance to South Vietnam politically untouchable after 1972, when it came to taking responsibility for the people whom their actions drove into the refugee camps (or the re-education camps, or the killing fields), they were nowhere to be seen. They had moved on, leaving other people to sort out the wreckage and the misery. People, you can make bad decisions--- god knows, I�ve made a few--- but the people I respect take responsibility when the bad decision has bad consequences.

On Kerry's military service. I suppose all this will really come out once it's too late for the Dems to change their minds. Not that they'll care.