Required Reading

Like Frank Rich today, I'm beginning to think that the real story about this year's endless campaign is how completely incompetent HRC's handlers proved to be. It's like a no. 1 team losing to a no. 16 team because of lousy coaching.

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Out Like a Lamb? Hardly.

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Nature, Red in Tooth, etc.

I was out interviewing yesterday afternoon, but O and Paul were home to witness a hawk barreling out of the sky and nailing one of our chickens. Paul had let the flock out for the second time this spring, and I guess they just were too thrilled to be on high alert.

Right now, I'm watching a wild turkey with an injured foot pick his way across the lawn. Although he's quite a bit bigger than the hawks, I would say his days are numbered.

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The Selection

Choosing a supt is occupying much of my time, and I've been thinking about how similar the process is to choosing a candidate for office. How difficult it is to appeal to such a wide audience without damping down one's personality! How impossible it is really to know someone in such artificial circumstances! Yet we muddle through, and eventually a choice emerges from all the muddle, and then we all move on, having affected a few lives directly and from hundreds to millions indirectly.

I have to admit that my main thought throughout is "I'm glad I'm not the one on the hot seat." There's a lot of courage involved, I think, just to put oneself through this grueling process.

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Training the Deer

Paul went out with a bucket of corn for the chickens this afternoon, and the deer came running toward him over the hilltop. We were all rather surprised. They do love corn, although it's not particularly good for them.

I'm of the opinion that now they are pets and cannot be hunted.

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Required Reading

Frank Rich on why the Dems had dem-well better get their act together:

Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s or Mr. Obama’s inconsistencies about how to wind down the war, they are both models of coherence next to Mr. McCain. He keeps saying the surge is a “success,” but he can’t explain why that success keeps us trapped in Iraq indefinitely. He never says precisely what constitutes that “victory” he keeps seeing around the corner. His repeated declaration that he will only bring home the troops “with honor” is a Vietnam acid flashback recycled as a non sequitur.

But read the whole thing, because he's on to something important about the HRC campaign as well.

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Chickens + Deer = Cheer (or Dickens)

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