Our latest project

20s party

So, as I said- we went to a party this weekend that was super fun. Met lots of cool people that we want to hang out with again. I didn't take as many pictures as I thought I did, but I still got a few.



Jeff and Cameron

This guy, Josiah, threw the party

Me, Jeff, and John Tell

Cruise

So, as I stated below- the cruise that Casey and Shannon bought us was AMAZING. It's the best thing that we've done so far in the city. It leaves from Navy Pier (where we had also never been) and then goes out onto Lake Michigan and goes up and down the coast so that you get a great view of the skyline. It's so great. The videos won't be able to capture how beautiful it was, but they're pretty cool. There are two- one of the skyline and one of the skyline with fireworks. So pretty. Thanks Casey and Shannon.

Video--- Grandma and Poppy

Mom and Dad with Macy.

Video-- Marley channels Pollack

This one is Marley showing us her fingerpainting. Pay close attention to Cameron in the background telling her that he "can't tell what it is" so "unfortunately" he has to "give it an 'F'". Hilarious.

Quick update- great weekend!

I have more videos, but the uploading takes so long that I'm just going to post these pictures really quick.

We had a SUPER weekend this weekend. Friday we went on a Lake Michigan dinner cruise thanks to Casey and Shannon (Cam's brother and his wife) who bought us the cruise for Christmas last year. We didn't do it until now, but we are SO GLAD that we did. It was beautiful and hands down the best thing we've done since we moved here. It was so great. I wish you all could do it. Maybe we will again when you're here.
Then, last night we went to a board game bar with some friends in Wrigleyville. Wrigleyville was NUTS and TERRIBLE thanks to the Cubs clinching a playoff spot yesterday. The D-Bags were out in full force. But the bar is very cool- specifically for playing board games while you drink, and we hung out with my friend Daniel who I did my improv show with and his girlfriend and some new friends. Then we headed out to a 20s themed party at a friend of a friend's. We were with our friends Jeff and John Tell. It was AWESOME. We partied like we were young again and stayed out until, like, 4 a.m....which is a big deal for us. The people we met at the party were so cool, and we hope to hang out with them again. Fun times! Maybe I'll post some pics from last night.

For now, a few from Springfield, with videos promised.

Lins

More videos!

A couple more videos from the trip to Springfield.


The first is Mom playing with Marley and a balloon before bedtime

In the NY Times yesterday

Truthiness Stages a Comeback

By FRANK RICH

Published: September 20, 2008

NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.

Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.

For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.

But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.

This guy (The editor-in-chief of D Magazine, Wick Allison) kind of reminds me of Dad...except the whole switching-to-Obama thing...

A Conservative for Obama

My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.

Leading Off By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

For "Kate"

We took the train to Springfield this weekend to visit Andy, Amy, and the girls, and Mom and Dad drove up from Kansas. We had a nice visit despite our different political leanings and the harsh climate of the current election :)

I took a few pictures and videos that I will be posting. Some of them are a little uneventful, but Cameron encouraged me to take them because I have been getting very homesick for family lately. He figured I could watch them when I was feeling low. Also, I guess that we are getting a Webcam...

Anyway- this video is for Katie. Marley mentioned her completely unprompted by us, and said that she was talking to "Kate" on the phone. Very cute and I thought that Katie would like it..

Happy Birthday Greg!

Hope it's a good one.

Lins

Family Pic

So, today is my birthday. Saturday I worked, and apparently Cameron planned a surprise birthday party for me. However, my boss sent me home early because we were slow. And I NEVER go home early. I always volunteer to stay. But I left early on Saturday because it was my birthday night.

And of course- I ruined my surprise birthday party. Lame! But we still had a good time. Here's a family photo taken there--

Tour

So, I'm making it a point to use this camera video function, as I said in an earlier post. And, yesterday I whipped it out to show you guys a little part of the city (north downtown) that is very cute. Also, Corey (Hugo) was mentioning that he likes to go out in this area when he and his friends come to play in Chicago. They go to Hugo's Frog Bar, which I show in the video.

Just some little things

I don't know if you guys remember how much Jackie loves beer? Well, she loves it. We hadn't seen her do this in a while because we don't drink a lot of beer anymore. Our friend Jeff was over the other day having some beers and she was desperate for a taste...It's still hilarious after all these years.

So, here's a little taste of home:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

to my baby girl.....you have come a long way since your diaper days.

A Must-Watch

Short and poignant point about Sarah Palin. And hilarious.

Happy Birthday Katie!

We hope it's a good one.

Aunt Lins and Uncle Cam

Oprah!

So, Wednesday, downtown in Millenium Park, Oprah is shooting an episode of her show- with ALL OF THE OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALISTS FROM THE BEIJING OLYMPICS!

AND, it's supposed to be this first-come, first-serve on the yard thing. You come in the morning and try to get a seat (it's a huge open park) and you participate in the taping...if you get a seat. It's going to be nuts.

Well, my friend Tanya and I both weren't working tomorrow, so we were going to go and do it! I mean, how often will you have an opportunity like this, right?

Well, our plan has changed. Cameron called our friend Mark today (the one who works for Oprah) to ask about our tickets for October (we're going to a live taping of the show in October when Cameron's folks are here). And, Mark said that he had (drumroll):

WRISTBANDS FOR TOMORROW SO THAT WE GET A SEAT UP FRONT INSTEAD OF TRYING TO GET ONE ON THE YARD!


Basically, we're going to see Oprah and the gold medalists (ALL OF THEM) up close and personal tomorrow.

AMAZING!