8 Days til?

My friends the Chowan coaching staff continue to flounder in their first season. After berating the team for another bad performance, they announced that the offense would be running for the entirety of the practices this week. I find it odd with one week to go that they are trying to make a point and don't have a clue what that point is. If the point is that they are in control, I think that is lost in their 2 and 7 record. If it is that they want to run off the players they have left and start over, they will probably be successful. I want attack them on a personal level but as football coaches they leave a lot to be desired!

On to the political front, the GOP candidates are stuck on the socialism kick and once again, especially in Gov. Sarah "these clothes aren't mine, I am just trying them out before I send them back" Palin seems to have forgotten about her native Alaska. In are report from the New Yorker magazine (which I am posting a section of below) she is part of a plan that takes huge amounts of money from oil companies that have oil leases in Alaska and turns it over to her citizens. She calls this sharing, I call it redistributing or if you want to get down to it: socialism! Hello pot, my name is kettle! Or maybe she just forgot about this while she was gazing across the Bearing Sea to Russia.

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.