Hillary Clinton gives me the creeps some times. She doesn’t always connect with a crowd. She can have that bossy presence that can make you feel like you should be looking busier than you really are. Some people say she’s a bitch and that she sounds like she’s angling for a fight in every policy discussion.

But you know what? “Bitches get stuff done.”* The more I think of it, the more I think I like that about Hillary.

In 2000 and 2004, America listened carefully to Gore, Kerry and Bush and decided against the boring, patrician policy wonks. A slight majority of Americans fell in love with Bush’s rhetoric and grew to despise the straw men it defeated. That’s how rhetoric works, and we’ll all pay that bill on top of the mortgage for another 20 to 30 years.

One of the lasting images I have of Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election was his repetitive sighing in response to George W. Bush’s rhetorical responses to Gore’s policy proposals. ”He’s using fuzzy math,” Bush loved to say to the delight of crowds. We now know that’s Bush’s special way of describing real math, just like saying someone is doing a “heck of a job” is his special warning that someone is about to screw things up so bad that a lot of Americans will die.

Each of Al Gore’s sighs was to me a white flag of intellectual defeat to the kind of rhetoric America was desperate to hear. If Gore wouldn’t fight in a debate for what he believed, would he fight for it as President of the United States? America said, “no.” In 2004, John Kerry and John McCain’s herosim was swift boated by George Bush’s something or another. Whatever it was, about half of America that bothered to vote loved it.

But that’s all water under the bridge.

In the past few days, a different side of Hillary Clinton started flickering through the news channel above. In Thursday’s debate, Clinton continued to focus on health care differences between the candidates to the dismay of moderators and showed an emotional side when she spoke of what motivates her to fight. Yesterday, Clinton sought to publicly shame Obama for a mailer she said was “blatantly false.”

“Today in the crowd I was given two mailings that Senator Obama’s campaign is mailing out, and I have to express my deep disappointment that he is continuing to send false and discredited mailings with information that is not true to the voters of Ohio. He says one thing in speeches, and then he turns around and does this. And we have consistently called him on it. It has been discredited. It is blatantly false, yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. That is not the new politics that the speeches are about. It is not hopeful. It is destructive. Particularly for a Democrat to be discrediting universal healthcare by waging a false campaign against my plan.”
[Hillary Clinton - Obama mailing is ‘desctructive’ - 02-23-08]

* This Saturday was SNL’s first return to live TV after the writers’ strike. Comedian and writer Tina Fey pretty much sums up what seems to be a different mood in the days leading up to primaries in TX, OH and RI: ”Bitch is the new black.”

Mimi and Trudy watch me tweet on the Twittertubes.

At the end of tonight’s Democratic presidential debate at the University of Texas in Austin, both candidates were presented with the following by CNN’s Campbell Brown:

“A leader’s judgment is most tested at times of crisis. I’m wondering if both of you will describe what was the moment that tested you the most, that moment of crisis.”

Watch this video as Senator Barack Obama focuses on his personal challenges as a child of a single mother and later as an adult taking responsibility for the choices he made. Hillary Clinton’s response draws a standing ovation as she almost tears up placing the focus not on her own life challenges, but on the American heros who are giving their life and limb to serve our country.

Who is ready to lead?

The vet warned us that they’ll start loosing their baby teeth. This morning, Vince found Mimi and Trudy licking at the carpet and found this tooth! We’re not sure whose it is, but Vince thinks it’s Mimi’s.

I just set up a Flickr account and promise to put up more photos of the girls. I’m debating on upgrading the account. Anyone have advice on using Flickr? Is it worth upgrading? What I love about it is how very widget and RSS friendly they are. They even have geo-feeds for geo-mapping photos.

I spent a couple of hours Saturday cleaning up the road leading into our neighborhood while Vince was at work. I filled seven large 55 gallon trash bags full of about seven months worth of other people’s garbage. I say seven months worth because that’s about when Vince and I last cleaned it up.

We’re doers.

A lot of people stopped to thank me, which was awesome. One guy took the trash bags away. Awesome. Another guy stopped and said he had “hoped” him and his son could get out there and do it when it got warm enough. One guy thanked me and told me he had “hoped” the county would do more to keep it clean. It got me thinking a lot about hope and how little people’s hope gets things done. If you think about it, you see the most desperate expressions of hope in some of the worst neighborhoods where I guess everyone is collectively hoping that someone else will get things done and make things better. And hope never gets it done.

Besides the abundance of Marlboro cigarette packs, McDonalds and Taco Bell trash, and various beer bottles, the most common items were numerous 16 oz. plastic bottles of Mt. Dew and Chick-fil-A garbage. What kind of person tosses their garbage out of their car window in their own neighborhood?

I got my answer. Hopers.

Scattered along the road were various pieces of mail that all went back to one man who lives several houses down from us. After I was done, I drove by the address to see who it was, and I was shocked to see it was the guy who thanked me and talked to me about hoping the county government would do its job.

Between the Mt. Dew, Chick-fil-A garbage and this guy’s personal trash, I don’t think our neighborhood could handle seven more months of hope. In the end, it took a doer to clean up this mess.

Here are some photos I took in the yard today.

Here’s a look at some from September 24, 2006 | July 09, 2006 | March 8, 2006.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond speaks out against Obama’s effort to put party rules ahead of counting the votes of 2.3 million Democratic votes in Florida and Michigan.

“The Obama campaign miscalculated on this issue and should have stood with Michigan and Florida given their strong African American populations. Had Obama won these states, I am sure many people would be supporting this change in the rules.”
[NAACP Chairman Julian Bond - 02-14-08]