Summer Waning Strawberry Moon
Night. A couple of nights ago I went down the driveway to the mailbox. As I came back up, I looked up as I often do and saw an object scooting from SSE to NNW. At first I thought it was a plane. Without my glasses distance observing for me turns into a game of analyzing tantalizing bits of information rather than direct scrutiny. As it came overhead though, I could see what I thought were lights were blurs owed to my faulty peepers. No, it was a satellite. It was bright and moving fast.
At heavens-above.com I tried to look it up, but the tables for satellite passes only look forward, not backward. I don’t know what it was, but I know it was man-made. Whether it was a communications satellite of the International Space Station, it’s still something up there because humans put it there. An amazing and still almost science fiction notion to this boy of the 1950’s. I remember Sputnik. Well.
Kate’s a day away from her surgery. The vicodin she has to take now makes her dull, “stupid” as she puts it. She doesn’t like that feeling and looks forward to the time post-op when she can return to her NSAID.
Obama. As a political leftist, I find things wrong with Obama’s record. He supported off-shore drilling, he’s ramped up the war in Afghanistan and he’s accepted weakened regulatory legislation and weakened health-care legislation. The Gulf oil disaster and McChrystal give an air of chaos to his administration, though neither one is his fault. Here’s my prediction. A year from now Obama will look very good in all the areas in which he looks very bad right now. Her’s pulling troops out of Iraq as promised. The economy will improve. The public will get clear about the Obama administration’s role in the Gulf oil disaster to his credit and his firing of McChrystal will be seen as what it is, a necessary assertion of civilian authority.
He’s working as a politician, not an ideologue, a necessary ambit if he wishes to govern, which he does. Bush was a right wing ideologue and no matter how charming or gritty he appeared it was clear his decision making was in thrall to the neo-con view of the world. Ideology puts blinkers on the best of us and Obama seems to govern without ideology, though he’s clearly a left-liberal. Kudo’s to him.