Day: January 9, 2008

A couple of things:

1) The best part about all this 4th Edition license hullaballoo: Watching people who obviously have no idea what the hell they’re talking about “debate” issues of copyright, licensing and publishing. Even better: Publishers publicly committing to the license (and the 5K fee), without having seen the terms of said license yet. Fucking PRICELESS.

2) Best line about the primaries that I’ve seen all day: “As the exit polls have shown, the Democratic primary is turning into a battle between the people that pay for Social Security and those that collect it. “

I forgot to mention yesterday — Zoe, our dog, managed to get into a tupperware container while nobody was looking. Said container had what was left of my Christmas magic cookie bars.

Said bars containing a fairly high amount of semi-sweet chocolate.

She ate them all.

Dumbass.

took her to the vet, who induced vomiting and then tried (only partially successfully) to get her to eat activated charcoal to counteract the theobromine toxicity. We pointed out that if the vet had put the charcoal in a tupperware container, or the garbage, or told her NO…..she would have eaten it without a problem.

She came home last night, and generally moped, and had the….ahem….digestive troubles we were expecting.

At about 5:00 am, though, she threw up a bunch of the charcoal, and threw up again later in the morning. She’s gone back to the vet, where they’ve given her an injection to settle her stomach, and are keeping her under observation. The vet thinks that the charcoal did the majority of its job, but that she might have gotten a low-dose poisoning nonetheless. Hopefully, nothing worse develops.

*Sigh*

As Maureen Dowd points out in her column in today’s Times:

“…. in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press.”

…and by doing so, managed to convince a small percentage of voters that it was worth forgetting her votes to authorize the Iraq war, and her vote to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a ‘terrorist organization’, thereby setting up the next Bush war, already playing out in today’s headlines.

And that small percentage, coupled with the independents who saw Obama’s 10-point lead, decided that he was therefore a foregone conclusion, so they could instead vote for McCain, was enough to give her the state.

The thing that disgusts me about this process? The delegates. Obama’s won IA, and Clinton’s won NH, but she’s got a huge lead in delegates, because of the “super-delegates”: People who have delegate status because of their position or appointment….nearly all of whom were put there by the Clintons. She’s got 183, to Obama’s 78.

And the press isn’t reporting on that, because that would shatter the illusion of the story, and just might make voters realize that they’re being duped into turning this country’s government into a back-and-forth dynasty between the Clintons and the Bushes.