Who knew?

While perusing my usual round of political websites, I came across a link to...Halliburton. Consider these statements:

Our Vision, Mission and Core Beliefs

Vision
People unleashing energy for a better life.

Mission
Creating sustainable value by delivering outstanding service that helps our customers succeed.

Motto
Done Right

Core Beliefs
We believe in doing things right by our employees, our customers and our investors.

Excuse my profanity; what a fucking crock of double-talking bullshit!

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Oh yeah, “soaking up” the ”mini-glut” of crude

Election’s over. Gas prices are rising again. Salon says, “After dropping 84 cents between Aug. 11 and Nov. 3, gas prices are up five cents in the first Lundberg Survey released after the Nov. 7 election.

“Trilby Lundberg tells CNN that the reversal in the 12-week pre-election slide shows that the market has ‘soaked up’ a ‘mini-glut’ of crude oil from August, causing a ‘normalization’ of supply and demand.”

Now that’s crude. See what you get when your president is in bed with oil companies?

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A little Friday Foley fun

While getting my daily dose of news at The Huffington Post, I came across this delightful little game. You use your arrow keys to send Congressman Foley through the halls of Congress to capture young pages who are trying to run away from him.

Enjoy.

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Can we measure the drapes now?

I want to be magnanimous in victory, I really do. I don’t want to be smug, or adopt an “I told you so” attitude with my Republican friends and family. Still.

We Democrats have endured years of demonization by the likes of Bush, Limbaugh, Coulter, Cheney, Inghram, O’Reilly, and their ilk. By last week, they had come to equate being a Democrat with supporting Osama bin Laden. For most of the Bush years, we’ve endured humiliation from Fox News on a nightly basis. Unpatriotic. Deranged. Immoral. Being a Democrat began to feel like it might have been to be a Jew in the early days of Nazi Germany, or black in the South.

Yesterday I felt like I had been liberated. Democrats went from being the devil’s spawn to being seen as the saviors of democracy.

And I want to be generous and kind-hearted after the way we were treated during the years in the wilderness. Still.

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GOTV in SEMO

I've worked for Democratic candidates in about every election cycle since George McGovern ran in 1972. I have memories of knocking on doors in Chicago, San Francisco, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia in countless cold November GOTV (get out the vote) efforts.

I was tempted to sit this one out, because I had come to believe that no matter how hard we worked, the Republicans would steal the election. Besides, I now live in an area where Dems are the norm. Our House representative, Jerry Costello ran unopposed, and our governor was so far ahead in the polls he couldn’t lose.

Yesterday morning I headed to my polling place, the nearby Bible Baptist Church, marked my ballot, and watched dubiously as it was sucked in to a big machine with “Diebold” emblazoned across the top. The judge ladies were talking amongst themselves about how remarkable it was: “We don’t even have to count the votes when it’s over; the machine does it automatically.” I didn’t want to rain on their parade, but I told them I had zero trust in that voting machine, and hoped by the next election it would be in a trash heap somewhere.

I had decided to become a carpetbagger of sorts, to go to the next door state of Missouri, where Claire McCaskill was in a tight Senate race. So I spent the day knocking on doors in Cape Girardeau, Rush Limbaugh’s hometown. The registered Dems are so scarce in SEMO (Southeast Missouri) that sometimes there’d only be one or two on an entire block. When I knocked on their doors, they gave me enthusiastic thumbs up.

Looks like Claire won. Take that, Rush.

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One Breath

This one kind of speaks for itself.

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Several of my interests...

...are served by the above YouTube video.

First, there’s my interest in telling a good story. This little clip contains quite a plot in its one minute and fourteen seconds.

Secondly, it’s about using software like Photoshop—which I do a lot.

Then, I actually know the guy who started the Dove Real Beauty campaign. It’s Brian Collins of Ogilvy & Mather in New York. I’ve taken him to lunch more than once in an attempt to get him to share his branding brilliance in a book.

Finally, there’s the instantaneous suspiscion the corporate culture breeds. One of the first comments on the YouTube site: “Now you will only be beautiful if you get DOVE brand "self-esteem" and DOVE brand "real beauty" what do they take us for consumer drones. We don't need DOVE brand self-esteem thank you very much. Nor do we need your corporate viral videos.”

Gotta love it all.

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