Bob Ehrlich for Governor!

It's official. Bob Ehrlich has finally thrown his hat in the ring for Governor. Everyone knew that he was going to run, but no one knew if he was going to run.

I think the sentiment in Maryland, and across the country for that matter, is very anti-establishment, just like it was 4 years ago when the Republicans were in office. This time it's the Democrats. However, since a good chunk of Maryland is such an anti-Christian Socialist-leaning state, especially down in Montgomery County, I'm still not sure if he can win.

I do think, however, that his chances this time are better than they were during the last election when America had had enough of the Republicans, the war, and the economy and booted the bumbs out. I'm all in favor of booting the bumbs out. As I've mentioned many times there needs to be higher turnover in politics and I would love to see term-limits.

This time, the economy still sucks. Maryland's unemployment is still hovering around 10% and Martin O'Malley should not be rewarded for that.

The Democrats in Congress have passed massive legislation committing trillions of dollars to a new health insurance program. Not we have to figure out how pay for it. Obama said it will be paid for by eliminating middle-men and streamlining operations. For anyone that has ever owned a business you know that this is mostly bullpoop. So now we really have to figure out how to pay for it. And since Martin O'Malley is a Democrat, he is guilty by association and should not be rewarded for bankrupting our children's future.

Martin O'Malley said that he was going to stop BIG utility companies from raising their rates. He lied. He let them raise their rates. Not once. But several times. And in exchange for raising rates, he got Constellation Energy to give away millions of dollars. Having Martin O'Malley in the pockets of BIG utilities is no different than Republicans being in the pockets of BIG utilities, so since Martin O'Malley lied, he should not be rewarded with another term.

Another thing to consider is that while Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1 in Maryland, that statistic is misleading. Many people are registered as Democrats because the Republican party is so small in Maryland. Take my parents, for example. Both are registered Democrats because they know that voting in the Republican primaries is not going to have much of an impact, so if they can choose the most moderate Democrat, they can pull the political thought closer to the middle where most Americans really stand.

So here is my prediction - if Republicans come out in force and ALL vote for Ehrlich and a bunch of Democrats also vote for him and Democrats are disillusioned or over-confident and don't show up at the polls, he has a chance to win. However, if O'Malley's hypnotising babbling rhetoric convinces people that he's a political god, then Ehrlich will lose.

Let's hope that I'm not confident enough in my predictions.

Vintage Lingerie Ads: Part 46

Third spotlight on Elizabeth Young ... 'No Exit Always Means an Exit' (1998) *

* This post is thanks to the suggestion, great effort, and kind help of Puella Aeterna




'Elizabeth Young was the great, British, counter-cultural author and literary critic, who we had - but didn't really deserve; whose elegance, sang-froid, erudition and love of the bizarre were yoked to a rare ability to fully enter into - and even inhabit - the imagined worlds of other writers. Young was a fearless champion of fearless writing, a merciless opponent of cant, convention and hypocrisy, whose prose could progress effortlessly from the painfully direct, to the gnomic, to the discursive, to the outright quirky. She despised sentiment - she didn't know what whimsy was.

'In the last years of her life Young wrote a number of long, scrupulously researched and deeply felt articles on the issues surrounding illegal drug use. She was an implacable opponent of the "War on Drugs", and her own experience of addiction led her to endorse the traditional British model of harm minimisation. It is to be hoped that, in view of her own premature death, and those of many thousands of others, that her brave, lucid voice - utterly devoid of self-pity - will continue to be heard.' -- Will Self

*

'It would be easy to (mis)represent Liz as a punk (or Goth) version of the Wildean aesthete. Somehow she emerged from the wreckage of the New Wave music scene in west London as an author, critic and commentator armed with a knack of mischievous paradox, a staggering depth of literary knowledge, and a taste for the far reaches of the counter-culture - the dark (but merciful) angel of the Westway. But the Wilde analogy holds only if it stresses that, like Oscar, Liz was just as much a moralist as well. In the florid margins of literature and art she found a diagnosis of the malaise hidden in the dull, dead centre of consumer society: "the affectlessness, boredom and spiritual poverty of privilege".' -- Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

*

'Despite coming from a very privileged background, Young also moved in what might quaintly be described as “low-life” circles for the whole of her adult life, and partly as a result of this she wrote from a liberal position that was on the whole to the left of her broadsheet colleagues. Liz had a difficult existence and hard drugs, as well as books, were her retreat from the world. It was typical of Young that if something didn’t interest someone, she’d try to keep the subject out of her interchanges with them, no matter how important the matter was to her. While I agree with much of what Liz wrote about the persecution of heroin users, I have never found drug rushes very enthralling. Once Young realised this, she rarely spoke to me about narcotics. That said, I do think it was direct experience of repressive drug laws that served as one of the well-springs of Liz’s instinctive sympathy for those she perceived as dispossessed and persecuted.' -- Stewart Home



Elizabeth Young @ Wikipedia
Buy Elizabeth Young's 'Pandora's Handbag'
Buy Elizabeth Young & Graham Caveney's 'Shopping in Space'
Elizabeth Young's obituary @ The Guardian
Elizabeth Young's obituary @ The New Statesman
Stewart Home on Elizabeth Young
'Pandora's Handbag' reviewed @ The Barcelona Review






'Some of (Elizabeth Young's) best pieces are not reviews - they are essays about cats, or fragments of memoir, or authoritative accounts of the state of the short story. Liz simply wrote well - her handful of short stories were excellent and there are years worth of journals sitting in a box somewhere.' -- Roz Kaveney, Glamorous Rags

'No Exit Always Means an Exit' was originally published in the anthology Intoxication: an anthology of stimulant base writing, edited by Toni Davidson (Serpents Tail, 1998)



















----