Shaun Kenney

My business now goes to Wawa or Quiznos.

There are 80 million Gen Y to about 30 million Gen Xers, and it would appear that it is the overwhelming opinion of Gen X that their younger counterparts are… well… stupid, lazy, and weak. A generation just waiting to be told what to do, just to watch them do it poorly.

I rest firmly in that middle ground — Gen XY, the MTV Generation, you-name-it. Gen X in our mindset and approach, we are solidly familiar with everything Gen Y does and “speak the language” (spk teh lgng?) to a point. It’s the generation born between 1976 and 1982 that spans the gap.

What makes Gen XY so unique? We’re the folks who watched Soviet Communism fall. We drank in heavy doses of MTV. We watched fought the War on Terrorism when it was Cobra Commander and Destro threatening the world. We have seen the future of hidden technology — not RFIDs, but TransFormers and Voltron. We made the transition from Atari to Nintendo to PC with effortless ease. We programmed our own C64 games. We grew up with Ronald Reagan. We watched Reagan and Gorbachev hold summit after summit.

Overwhelmingly, we rock.

Gen Y may have it’s problems, but I wonder how much of that is because Gen X is so buttoned down and professional? True, straddling the fence has it’s advantages, but that is what makes the Gen XY/MTV Generation so uniquely positioned to take advantage of the best of both worlds.

Is this like the unassisted triple play of boxing (or UFC, as it were)? The monster slam? The Hail Mary pass? I dunno… but it looks brutal.

Bob Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Richard Viguerie headline the Libertarian Party Convention? Is the LP losing it’s libertarian moorings?

Not so, says McQ over at QandO:

No kidding. In fact it appears a conservative attempt at takeover of the good old non-factor LP.

But don’t worry James – the guardians of the “real” LP won’t let it happen – trust me on that.

Joyner doesn’t seem convinced… but it does seems as if the LP is about to have a crisis of conscience between it’s purists and the disaffected legions of the GOP.

There are some who might argue the converse — that elements of Grover Norquist’s “Leave Me Alone” coalition are reforming around the Libertarian Party. If so, stalwarts in the LP are going to have to come to a decision as to how to absorb the majority (and it will be a majority) of fiscal conservatives flocking to their banner.

Is it going to happen? I doubt it seriously. Libertarians are not conservatives for a reason… try arguing the pro-life, pro-drug war schtick within the hallowed walls of the LP and see what happens to you!

When I got started in 2007, one of the first things I asked for was an overhaul of the website… a piece of junk the Republican Party of Virginia was being charged someone’s salary (yes — it was that much) to “maintain” with an antiquated CMS and terrible graphics. It was unworkable, unnavigable, and unresponsive… at best.

Of course, there’s politics behind why that is. Some folks on Executive Committee at the time didn’t trust (and still don’t understand) the blogosphere. There were some hurt feelings from some higher-ups about letting the previous web providers go. Above all, static content and message control was the mantra, whereas surrendering the site to bloggers, activists or others was tantamount to heresy.

In a nutshell, that’s why we could never get the RPV site into a true blog. Nevertheless, baby steps are being taken to make sure the site gets to where it needs to go (functionality at this point has trumped style, but this is good in the long haul). Commonwealth Conversations — RPV’s revamp of “The Red Stater” newsletter — is a solid step in that direction.

The new RPV website will indeed rock. That’s a promise, not a forecast.

But back to topic….

Those consultants that RPV fired? The ones influencing some key folks at RPV not to engage the blogosphere? Unfortunately, they’re the same people running John McCain’s website, who pretty much just ripped the Obama site and made it McCain-ier.

I will give the McCain team some credit. They are trying. But this website looks as if it was made for the “silver surfer” (65 years or older) rather than the social networking crowd. It’s a damned mess, lacking originality and completely unfocused.

In case folks were wondering why I had not blogged in the last few days, I was on a business trip to St. Louis this week. All and all, not bad.

I love a good business trip, don’t you?! Even though you’re still required to work for the most part, at least you get the opportunity to travel to a completely new place. Or you could be returning to a place that you haven’t been to for ages. For me, it was St. Louis. For my friend, it was to an amazing country abroad. So, yes. You could say that I’m a little bit jealous. His company are always taking trips abroad, and they always have events planned for when they get there. So, he’s always telling me about a place like Smart Works, who are also a Destination Management Company, (https://www.smartworksevents.com/what-is-dmc-and-why-you-need-one-for-your-next-business-trip/) who help them with things like their accommodation and logistics. He said they don’t know what they’d do without them because they are able to just get everything in place for when you go. It’s amazing really.
Honestly, we have been travelling back and forth for business for quite a long time now. And though we could visit new places, it sometimes becomes stressful for us to travel when we are at the mercy of commercial flights. Especially, for super-busy professionals like us, every minute counts. From the time spent by the flight on the ground to navigating the complicated maze of traffic, that is time wasted. For our trip to St. Louis, we already had a rough idea of where and what we were looking for, so we were able to plan everything by ourselves. Our priorities were clear – hassle-free boarding, personalized service, and convenient travel with minimal wastage of time. So, we decided to go for private jet charters. There were many travel and itinerary planning options on the Internet, but only a select few provided good information on affordable private jets, travel expenses and other add-on services. Thankfully, our private air journey was relaxing, and trip was memorable.
We had a good time, but I just hope that we get to travel somewhere further next time. Now that I’m back, I can catch up on everything that I’ve missed whilst I was gone.

Of course, I return to all sorts of happenings in the blogosphere. Gilmore hearts amnesty, the Jeffersoniad Blog Alliance has a hospitality suite for the RPV Convention, Hillary hearts assassinations, and lo and behold — to make up for it all — I give you the greatest baseball pitch ever:

Not bad…

… it’s conservatives who aren’t conservative , as author Victor Davis Hanson explains.

(h/t to From On High)

A simple yet modest proposal from the editors of the Washington Times:

Rather than raise taxes, the state should reapportion its laughable transportation funding allocation away from politically influential but underpopulated parts of the state.

Heh.

With no duplicate IPs and one vote per 24 hours, Cuccinelli has a commanding lead over Brownlee for the Republican AG nomination.

Readers here can vote on the far right, whereas other Jeffersoniad bloggers have posted the poll in various conspicuous places. Poll will remain open… online polls tend to reflect a combination of numbers plus enthusiasm, so in that sense alone they are useful.

Go vote!

And rightly so over the editing of President Bush’s interview with NBC regarding Iran:

Bush aides were angered by how the president’s answer was portrayed when Engel questioned him about his condemnation of ‘the false comfort of appeasement’ in an address last week to the Israeli Knesset. NBC stood by its treatment of the interview Monday.

Bush had mentioned the president of Iran in his speech, and said: ‘Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.’

Obama’s campaign considered that statement an attack on him, which the White House has denied.

Engel asked Bush if he was referring to Obama in his speech.

As it appeared on ‘Nightly News’ Sunday and the ‘Today’ show Monday, Bush’s response was: ‘You know, my policies haven’t changed, but evidently the political calendar has … And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you’ve got to take those words seriously.’

But the White House said NBC edited out these words that Bush said between those two sentences: ‘People need to read the speech. You didn’t get it exactly right, either. What I said was that we need to take the words of people seriously.’

Bush counsel Ed Gillespie, in a letter to NBC News President Steve Capus, said that ‘this deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible.’ He asked that the network air Bush’s response in full on the two programs.
NBC countered by saying the unedited interview has been available since Sunday on the network’s Web site, and that the reporting accurately reflects the interview.

Interpretation: NBC knows what President Bush intended to say, so they edited his remarks until they got what they wanted?

Of course, rumors are swirling that the United States is preparing to attack Iran before the end of President Bush’s term, a move welcomed by the Israelis but cautioned against by SecDef Gates and SecState Rice back in Washington.

You would have missed this if one relied entirely on NBC for “facts” and ethical reporting.

UPDATE: The Hill has more from the Gillespie memo:

Gillespie used the opportunity to also inquire whether NBC News still believes that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. In November 2006, the network decided to label the infighting in the country a “civil war.”

“I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a ‘civil war,’ ” Gillespie wrote. “Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?”

Don’t you just love it when the media tries to create facts that just aren’t true? Of course, it certainly makes one shudder that 75,000 people in Oregon rallied to a candidate whose prime issue — failure in Iraq — is by and large manufactured (yes, manufactured) by the MSM… that’s 75,000 Obama supporters willing to be lied to in order to relive the ’60s.

Go get ’em, Ed.