Tobiasly’s Blog

Something tells me this whole “green” craze is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. I got an email today from Scott’s Lawn Care touting their new “Water Smart” fertilizer. Their “new Water Smart™ formula saves you thousands of gallons of water a year!”

Curious as to how exactly fertilizer can cut down on your water usage, I went to their website to find out more. Their site is very short on details, but the general gist is that a fertilized lawn will need less water to keep healthy than an unfertilized lawn. So their “Water Smart” fertilizer is just the same old stuff with a new, hip eco-friendly feel-good label!

Look, I’m all for taking common-sense steps to help the environment. Whether or not global warming turns out to be real, making the earth a better place can only be a good thing. But I guess it was inevitable that the whole thing would get commercialized ad nauseum.

So, thanks anyway Scotts, but I think I’ll have to pass on putting your corny Water Smart Pledge badge on my blog.

Jake, the Black Labrador who became a national hero after searching for survivors of the WTC attacks and Hurricane Katrina, died today. He was put to sleep by his owner after his battle with cancer took a turn for the worse.

Jake was one of fewer than 200 government-certified rescue dogs. He bravely searched through dangerous, white-hot debris to find survivors, and was welcomed as a hero in NYC and elsewhere. He also helped train other rescue dogs and their owners.

Good boy, Jake.

Here’s a stunning bit of information you’re not likely to see played out too much in the mainstream media. A recent public opinion poll found that by a margin of two to one, most Iraqis are still optimistic about their future and prefer life under the current government to life under Saddam:

One in four Iraqis has had a family member murdered… in Baghdad, the capital, one in four has had a relative kidnapped…. But when asked whether they preferred life under Saddam, the dictator who was executed last December, or under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, most replied that things were better for them today.

Amazing. This poll was conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a “respected British market research company that funded its own survey of 5,019 Iraqis over the age of 18.”

“We’ve been polling in Iraq since 2005 and the finding that most surprised us was how many Iraqis expressed support for the present government,” said Johnny Heald, managing director of ORB. “Given the level of violence in Iraq, it shows an unexpected level of optimism.”

Here’s a great YouTube video of the Twirl-A-Squirrel bird feeder, which aims to solve the age-old problem of squirrels stealing birdseed from feeders. The squirrel’s heavier weight sets the gadget in motion, which gently spins the little varmint off, leaving him just a little bit dizzy but none the worse for wear.

Double rebates, making the sales rep happy, getting out of a bad contract — here’s a great post on how to get Cingular to hose you a bit less.

I have finally made the switch from Nucleus to WordPress. Nucleus has served me very well over the years but it has fallen behind in its development lately. The conversion to Wordpress was very seamless, thanks to this wonderful Nucleus to Wordpress importer tool. With a bit of modification I was even able to get all my old Nucleus URLs to forward flawlessly.

I’m still working on getting the theme set up and everything looking the way it should, so please let me know if anything is still broken!

Just as the media disproportionately portray the progress we have made in most of Iraq, so too do they slant their reporting on the parents of soldiers who have been killed in battle. If you just listened to the major media outlets, you might think that anti-war zealots who are quick to turn their sons’ sacrifice into whatever media attention they can grab typify that group.

Here is a story about a different group of parents that I doubt you’ll be hearing much about in the news. After their son Justin was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, Jan and Joe Johnson decided to make a perilous trip to Iraq to bring some closure to their son’s death, to find out why he died and what purpose his sacrifice served.

They traveled with several other parents to Iraq as guests of the Kurdish government. Everywhere they went, they were treated as heroes and thanked for their sacrifice.

One mother, Debra Bastian, who handed out wallet-sized photos of her son was brought to tears when she handed the photo to an Iraqi woman whose two sons and husband were killed during Saddam’s rule. The woman took the photo, tucket it into a framed picture of her husband and sons, and said "now your son is my son."

Bastian said of the trip, "I needed to make that trip. All of us were very, very disappointed in the media coverage over the war. I had so many avenues that were telling me different, that there were good things happening in Iraq, that they were just reporting the bomb of the day."

Apparently it is possible for a party to win an election without having a plan. What yet remains to be seen is whether Nancy Pelosi is actually Speaker material… her first bungled attempt to instill her pal John Murtha as Majority Leader certainly doesn’t look good for her. Not only does it display a surprising amount of political naiveté (why on earth would she make such a high-profile gambit without first ensuring that her pick was at least within striking distance? Really… 149-86?) but, regardless of what she and Hoyer say, this will damage her ability to effectively rally her troops for quite a while.

What was surprising to me was how much the national anti-Republican mood hurt us locally at the county level. I know I’m biased, but for the first time in the history of Clark County, the Republican party had a slate full of good, quality, experienced candidates, and every one of us were way better than what the Democrats offered. And we did everything right, from door-to-door events all year long to phone calls to holding the local Democrats’ flagrant disregard of election law to the minimum amount possible.

By any measure, we should have won some county-wide seats this year. Every Republican and Democrat I spoke with leading up to the election talked about how this was the beginning of the end of Democrat control on this county. Looking at the numbers, if this were a usual non-presidential election year, we would have indeed had a great showing. But, this was no normal election year.

I can’t say that the punishment of the national Republican party was undeserved. We certainly got away from our core values of fiscal conservatism and small government. And it looks like the Democrats have picked it up and are running with it for all it’s worth. Hopefully Republicans across the country take this as a much needed wake-up call to get back to what brought us to power in the first place.

Today President Bush visited Clark County! It was the first time a sitting President has visited this district in over 40 years. As if that weren’t exciting enough, I was picked to drive one of the rental vans for the press corps in the motorcade!

That’s right, I got to drive 50 yards behind the leader of the free world, going 70 MPH down city streets, running red lights and stop signs while riding on the tail of the cop in front of me! It was certainly the experience of a lifetime. I’ve got some photos posted to my gallery.

A great quote from an article on Nancy Pelosi’s chances of becoming Speaker Of The House this November:

“Pelosi has done little to embolden Democrats with a winning agenda beyond the rhetoric of direct mail attacks on Republicans, leaving party candidates on their own to say anything relevant to the millions of nonpartisan voters who will decide control of Congress,” Craig Crawford, Congressional Quarterly columnist and author of “Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media,” wrote in June.

“Pelosi might be a skilled backroom operator, but compared to Newt Gingrich’s fiery crusade to GOP victory in 1994 — well, there is no comparison,” Crawford added. “It is as difficult to imagine Pelosi as speaker of the House as it is to envision (comedian) Adam Sandler as Superman.”

It’s no secret that the conditions are right for the Democrats to take control of the House this fall. If only they followed the GOP playbook from 2004, it would be theirs for the taking. Unfortunately for them, they are incapable of delivering a coherent agenda that they can all agree upon and which resonates with the American electorate, particularly moderates and independents, the way the Contract With America did in 2004.

There’s not a single issue which is important to Americans on which the Democrats can even come to a consensus, much less offer leadership. And in politics, in order for a challenger to win, it’s necessary to give the electorate a reason to fire the incumbent. The Democrats continue to fail to do so.

Six months ago, I was sure that by this point in the campaign season, the House Dems and their allies challenging GOP incumbents would have come up with such a plan by now and that it would spell certain doom for the GOP’s chances of keeping the House. Every time over the past decade when the Dems have suffered yet another humiliating defeat, they have vowed to come together as a party, reach out to moderates, and define a clear vision for the future. That has yet to happen, and it’s looking more and more like 2006 won’t be the year that it does.

I’m beginning to think that this will be yet another year when the Dems manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Senate Minority Leader Henry Reid put it best* in a recent article in The Onion when he said:

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

“We can lose this,” Reid added. “All it takes is a little lack of backbone.”

* A disclaimer on the (hopefully) obvious: Reid didn’t really say this. This quote was invented by The Onion, a satirical newspaper.