Know-It-All to Old-Fart Astonishment.
My late, great dad was the kind of Engineer educated to design really Big Stuff: Suspension bridges; industrial buildings; dams that could light up parts of several states. You'd think a Revelator's kid-hood's on Easy Street. Uh-uh. Black Thursday 1929 hit dad at age 26. Ton o' bricks like the other 120-million, minus Fat Cats of course. Being who dad was, his last few bucks bought him a second-class train-ticket outta Pittsburgh. He rode around the USA seeing the sights. Afterward he odd-jobbed with other proles in the Burgh, reluctantly took tide-him-over loans from my great Uncle Al [a Juke-Box concession gave Al "juice" with the mob] til FDR ended Prohibition so dad could work 60-hour weeks in a liquor store. Al, prescient and plain-folks, tried in vain to talk dad outta marrying Miriam. The bad news: Dad did anyway. The good news: I lived to tell the tale.
Today I thought of dad and big-ass dams when I read John Judis on Barack and the Teamster's Union http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=6e55fd8c-4774-4a3c-ae00-e2004369fbec . Judis' article [JJ's no friend of Billary and his genteel contempt for McCain is abundant] led me here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/politics/06teamsters.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. Say WHAT? Senator "Yes-We-Can!" cutting pre-nomination deals with the crime folks who cut a deal with Poppy Bush to violate the National Labor Relations Board and replace it with "RISE" [Respect. Integrity. Strength. Ethics.]? With a name like RISE a Hollywood mogul has gotta be thinking Remake! of 1951s "On The Waterfront" and Lee J. Cobb's labor boss John Friendly to whom Marlon Brando snarls: "You shoulda looked out for me!..I coulda been a contendah insteada a bum which I am!"
Hey, y'all know me! If the 2000 election didn't cure my idealism and penchant for PROTEST VOTING nothing will. Dad got blacklisted for No-Thing but not "Naming names." Lee J. Cobb wimped out but not my dad. When he got engineering work again it was for shit wages. They used his smarts to design a HUGE project without telling him it was the Germ Warfare installation at Fort Deitrich, MD. Dad was shamed. By then I was of age to blunt the shame some. http://greyfalcon.us/A%20History%20of%20Chemical.htm.
. Things being what they are, the idiot Electoral College makes my vote and most of y'all's individually irrelevant. So I'll vote Barack if I must and Hillo if any One of the Seven Plagues arrives. 
But I'll STILL know how the electorate screwed the pooch letting John Edwards' campaign, a legit hope IMO,die from neglect.
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