Carnaval tá chegando, meu...

OK, so my first year down here is going down as a wash in many respects, at least on paper. I just have to accept it. I may have survived the transition in terms of the permanent visa, bank account, apartment living, absorbing the bureaucracy and the cultural divides with the U.S., but on some really key aspects of becoming Brazilian, I've been taking a powder.

Case in point: the all-important Carnaval begins this weekend, and I'm fleeing to New York with Vini.

It's something I have cherished in the past -- Carnaval in New York -- for a number of reasons. First of all, it's a week when Vini could get time off from work and school and come north to visit me. It's frigidly cold on the East Coast as a general rule in February, and Vini adores the cold. Since I was stuck with it in D.C., a change of scenery was also welcome. Plus, if you're ever going to visit New York as a tourist, that's the month to do it as nobody else seems too interested in doing so, and the hotels are cheaper, the Broadway seats more plentiful, and the streets quieter and more gentle at night. I can visit with family. We can also go skating in Rockefeller Plaza, and bundle up against each other as we walk down Fifth Avenue. That's always a pleasure.

But I live here now, and while I am excited about the coming trip, I also feel a bit disappointed, too. I'm feeling more of a pull towards being more Brazilian in my everyday life, so I feel a strange connection to soccer, TV Globo, and eating dinner at 10pm. I'm more at peace with life here. It feels like home. So, missing out on Carnaval seems almost like a missed opportunity to go deeper into the spirit and psyche of my strange home. My whole life has been a journey to go deeper in all respects, and so my natural inclinations are tugging me away from the trip back home.

Granted, I get all sorts of guff from my gay friends. "Oh, you're married anyway, so Carnaval doesn't make sense." Well, not so. I do realize that the carnality of Carnaval is one of its key aspects (much like I recall from my last one I spent here, in 1985). But carnal pleasures need not be adulterous ones, should they? Just cuz everyone's drinking the vodka punch doesn't mean I can't have a glass of champagne. The Brazilians I see all around here are so at ease with a festive, physical atmosphere. I don't have the least bit of an urge to screw around, but I need not flee to the other side of the planet to prove it. It seems the stereotypically jealous Latino syndrome is less a cultural phenomenon as it is a sign of desperate insecurity among people (of any background) who have work to do on their self-esteem. Gay or straight. If you trust your partner's sincerity when he says he loves you, then you have nothing to fear from him. The fear you still harbor must be coming from somewhere else, and it's your problem, dearie.

Vini gets it. My friends here don't seem to. But alas, most of them are early 20-somethings. So I need not go further. It won't matter.

So, as much as we've talked about New York every Carnaval being a tradition for our little household, I'm not so sure about next year. I think I really want to get into this thing, and feel that I'm going to have to if I really want to be Brazilian.

Tuesday A/V: Bill Has a "Dream"

In today's selection, Bill Clinton shows us all just how tired he really is. :-)

My favorite bits - how he nods through his snoozing, pretending he has any idea where he even is. And then there is the glance at the watch at the end. Reminds me of 1992.

Every tired old horse has his day eventually.

Turning on the Motoboys

The number of attacks on motorists in São Paulo by armed assailants on motorcycles has become somewhat legend not only around Brazil, but elsewhere. I've spoken to many foreigners on business travel in and out of this city, and to a person every one of them came with guidance from their company that they should only travel the city in armored cars and/or with armed security personnel. It might seem to be overkill, but your average commuter in São Paulo might disagree.

"Motoboys" are ubiquitous in this city. They race around, weaving through gridlocked car traffic, to deliver packages, documents, money and food orders all over town throughout the day and night. They are highly integrated into the city's economic fabric, and much of our commerce would grind to a halt without them. (They also, sadly, account for 2/3 of the traffic accident deaths in São Paulo, since they drive so frenetically and often far too fast.)

However, according to a recent report, as much as 60% of all armed attacks on motorists here are perpetrated by criminals on motorcycles - often a pair on one bike working in tandem, with one driving the vehicle while the other pulls out the gun. It's logical, since motorists in stopped traffic are sitting ducks, and the cyclists can easily escape the scene.

One recent case has drawn the polemical line on the issue. An assistant prosecutor shot and killed a motorcyclist on January 5, after he said the dead man and a second assailant rode up on a motorcycle, pulled a gun on him in his car and demanded money. He produced his own weapon and opened fire. He said the second man took the dead man's gun and fled. The dead man's family claims he was not a criminal. Police found several stolen watches on his person, and multiple automobile documents. The assistant prosecutor, it turns out, was using an unregistered gun. The dead man's angry and poor family said the alleged victim should "not be able to keep earning R$10,000 a month and should go to jail."

The story is a messy symbol of all sides of this issue, and yet commuters I talk to, many of whom support gun bans, have confessed to me they got a perverse joy out of hearing of someone fighting back and killing a moto-assailant.

I can attest to their fears personally -- before we got a bulletproofed car last year, it was very nerve-wracking to think of Vini commuting on the freeway to Berrini, the often-gridlocked freeway exit for which is also home to a violent favela. He witnessed an assault on a taxi one afternoon, and it was the deciding factor for us. But not everyone can afford blindagem. And no level of fear can ever justify celebrating a man's death, no matter what he is guilty of.

Political leaders in Rio and São Paulo can sense the level of anger, fear and frustration among commuting motorists in the face of the rise in this type of crime, as well as the level of violence and death being wrought on victims. The Rio and São Paulo state and local governments are moving to ban multiple passengers on motorcycles, limiting them to one-person/one bike. This, some argue, with vastly reduce the level of such crimes but not eliminate them. São Paulo is moving to limit motorcycles on freeways to their own box along the right side of the road, rather than allow them to weave around cars in the middle of lanes, astride the driver-side windows where assaults take place.

Of course, taking out these crimes on the honest, law-abiding motoboys will hurt a segment of the cities' working classes, and build more class resentment. The motoboys, in their reaction, are not doing themselves any favors. They have organized protests where they block traffic on main commuter routes, only further enraging the political forces arraying against them. They've started to claim that the "real agression" is by panicky motorists against them. They are sorely in need of good counsel -- the messenger companies and trade unions should be mobilizing to cooperate with investigations against the criminals who perpetrate these crimes. And they should be crowing about such cooperation, once it begins. It's unclear to me whether they have some kind of cultural honor code to not take on the criminals more aggressively, especially in defense of their own industry. Some on the motorist side of the argument whisper that it's because most of the criminals are from the ranks of the motoboys themselves, and that organized crime syndicates have infiltrated the industry. It wouldn't surprise me if true, but it can't be true of all of them.

So we'll see what comes of this. It is another issue that will rise to the fore in next year's mayoral elections here.

Kill the Fags

We were lucky enough to spend New Year's Eve in Paris again this year, but as the French would have it, we were denied the pleasure of experiencing a smoke-free celebration, since we left too soon.

A smoking ban went into effect in France on January 1, following similar bans around Western Europe, and across the pond in Washington, D.C., New York City and the State of California, among many other U.S. locales. But alas, they decided not to enforce it until January 2 because the French would be so busy reveling all night and into the morning that it would be silly to turn the hoses on the smokers precisely at midnight.

And no, it wasn't a sign that Paris, or France for that matter, would be resisting an end to the café society cliché of billowing smoke from filter-less Galoises with every espresso. Yes, there are some smokers grousing about the ban, but for most of the French it's a welcome change. As one ex-pat American who lives in Paris very astutely put it, this linking of cigarettes and France in our minds is a relatively new thing, and becoming a dated one.

"The French culture associated with smoking is a 20th-century thing, but we won't forget the experience," ex-smoker Lisa Zane, a Chicago-born singer who lives in Paris, said at Le Fumoir (The Smoking Den) restaurant and bar behind the Louvre.

"Smoking seems insane now; we have to adapt."

The Health Ministry says one in two regular smokers here dies of smoking-related illness, and about 5,000 nonsmokers die each year of passive smoking. About a quarter of France's 60 million people are smokers.

Now, I may be a libertarian and all, but on this one I surrender. When the smoking ban went into effect in New York, the clubbing experience changed dramatically -- for the better. You didn't come home stinking of smoke after a good night (which was not exactly a turn-on for a non-smoker seeking some after-hours fun), and there wasn't that sensation of someone wearing cleats and standing on your chest afterwards either. Then, when it (finally!) arrived in D.C., it made the whole gay experience ten times better, not to mention dining out.

Hence, Latin America is way behind on this issue. Uruguay has a very tough smoking ban -- but who among us does that help? Buenos Aires city adopted a lame pseudo-ban last October that, much like the majority of laws in Argentina, is full of holes and easy to violate.

In São Paulo, however, it might just take the declaration of martial law to enforce a smoking ban. I mean, I can't count the number of times I ride down the elevator in my apartment building just after a smoker has been enjoying himself in there -- sans ashtray, mind you. Clubbing is fun here, but the price you pay for a full night (and morning) out is a stench in your clothes, your hair, your facial stubble, your eyelashes that is so saturated that you need an industrial cleanser to get it out.

No smoking ban on the horizon here. Not sure what I can do about that. But the first hint of one that I see, I'm jumping on it.

Guest-Blogging on Citizen Crain

Well, some of you have been polite enough to mention in emails that the political rants on here have been less than gratifying to read, at least the ones on matters American.

In the words of any garden-variety lefty, let me respond with: "I feel your pain."

I still think that Club Whirled has a niche to cover what's going on down here and around Latin America. That's much more tied into its core purpose. But I have the honor of being a guest blogger from now on over at Citizen Crain, the opinion portal started by my friend and fellow 'love exile' here in Brazil, Chris Crain. So I expect I'll save much of my U.S. politics material for that site. It's more in sync with the audience over there. And since Chris was dumb enough to invite me, I might as well park all my self-important punditry on his front stoop from now on and spare you all.

And that means CW will retain its more personal connection with you, much like you've wished it would. Thanks for continuing to read this blog, however few of you there are out there. You mean a lot to me. We've been through a lot together, haven't we? :-)

Building Something

Even though everything inside the apartment has long since changed and become more like home, there is a constant reminder right outside the guest room window of what those first few months after I arrived in São Paulo -- those jours du agoniste when I spent nearly all my time in a state of anger and fear.

It seemed that the exact week that Vini and I moved into our apartment last March, a massive construction crew broke ground on a smallish new apartment building across the way. I said to him one morning, as the sound of multiple jackhammers tearing at concrete literally began to rattle my glass of orange juice on the counter, that I didn't quite remember that deafening sound when I swept into the place for the first time a month earlier and said that this was the place. "Somehow I would have remembered this," I said through a clenched jaw. (I think his reply was, "What was that??")

And for the first two or three months, beginning at 7:30am every morning (even some Saturdays, and one Sunday), the jackhammers would begin. They were going at the foundation of the previous building in the same way you'd clean the toilets of the Empire State Building with a toothbrush. Leaning out the window and watching them do this gave me a sense of awe and hopelessness at the same time, not believing the primitive machinery and approach they were using. And since we were in an empty apartment, a large and empty apartment, the sound was impossible to escape from. It shook every single wall, floor and window. All day. With an hour for lunch. (The only saving grace was that, like clockwork, it would end at 4:59pm on the dot every day.)

It got so that I couldn't do my work, or talk on the phone, or even think. I often headed down to take advantage of the free wi-fi at Suplicy, which had already been my 'remote office' back in the days I was lodging at Emiliano and merely visiting the city on business or pleasure. But being at Suplicy meant I would invariably have to battle loud, chatty customers around me and the roar of the espresso machines and the giant bean roaster in the back being loaded and emptied -- all while conducting conference calls with the U.S., Argentina, Jamaica, Mexico or Guatemala on my little cell phone. It wasn't working out so well.

Then, one day, almost like that pivotal scene in Rosemary's Baby when Mia Farrow is going to reach for the phone to call off the pregnancy, and I, in turn, was ready to hurl myself out the window --- it stopped. The jackhammers stopped. And a great big cement truck arrived, one so large it couldn't fit inside the walls of the site.

And then they took a week or two off.

It still took them forever to build the foundation and the underground garage. They also began laying out the inevitable maze of PVC tubing for the electrical grid, as it would be the first thing assembled for each level, subsequently entombed in concrete.

"You'll see," Vini said many times, "once they get all that done at the bottom, it'll go up fast."

Well, not quite so fast. More fits and starts. An occasional hint of labor troubles now and then, featuring a union van with a sound system mounted on top, spouting propaganda to the men (and handing out pasteis). And they'd abandon the site at the first droplet of rain.

When my parents visited, my Dad mentioned how odd it was that they had so many men, who seemed to be working so hard, and so little was getting done.

"It's the Brazilian way," Natalia quipped. "We like to do things our way."

There's a great deal of building going on all over São Paulo. No subprime crisis here, no sireebob. There isn't even much of a mortgage system, with consumer loan interest rates soaring into triple digits for those without a massive down-payment on hand. And yet, there are cranes and cement mixers and hard hats all over the landscape -- in Jardins, in Moema, in Morumbi, all over. Lots of new apartments coming onto the market, and from what I read in the local press, far fewer than the market demands. That's wealth, baby. Or it's quite a society of savers.

And so now, the construction site has slowly been absorbed into our daily lives as almost a fixture. With so little progress to see from day to day, how could it not? One of Clancy's two preferred peeing spots is against the utility pole right on the corner of the site. The workers are all the same guys from the beginning, and I'm almost getting to know their faces. One of them gets dropped off every morning by a broken down VW bus that literally looks like it's going to disintegrate at the next bump in the road. One day last week, since they're now on their fourth storey, I can occasionally hear one of them telling a dirty joke, or another practicing a song that is probably this year's Carnaval song for his neighborhood escola de samba.

I got used to it. The banging, the clattering, the sound of what seems like a metal saw against metal, the hollering and the hammering. Just like the sound of the traffic at rush hour under our front windows.

I'm starting to realize that I'm approaching the one-year mark here in Brazil. It's just over two months away. It'll be the day after my 40th birthday. A whole delegation is coming down from Washington and Paris to celebrate with me in staggered weeks throughout March. So naturally, I'm thinking about where I've come from, where I stand on this new project of mine.

I really am building something new. It's taking a very long time, probably with equally primitive tools despite my experience in life. The noise (as Vini can attest) is sometimes unbearable. But if you just look around you in this city of 18 million people, just like the blogrolls that interconnect from this site outward, I'm not the only person who is currently under construction. I feel much more a part of everything this way, and have no idea quite what it's all going to look like when it's done. But so far, the structure seems solid.

It'll come together, in it's own time.

Hillary Jumps From the Coffin

With all the media and much of the blogosphere decidedly turning against her cold and uninspiring machine, as late as 8:30pm ET on Tuesday they were still saying New Hampshire would be a blowout for Barack Obama.

The size of the crowds across the Granite State for the Illinois insurgent was unmistakable, and the fervent energy was in clear evidence. When word came of an historic increase in voter turnout overall, it seemed automatically to favor him. And the exit polls seemed to be the nail in Hillary's coffin: Obama 35, Clinton 30.

And then she leaped out of the coffin, gasped a gigantic breath, and won the New Hampshire primary last night.

And I, too, gasped when I saw the raw vote totals, saw the trend myself and realized how wrong everyone was, me included. Perhaps it was the hope that the old way would indeed get the rejection that it's due and the call to dump the machine approach to politics would win the day in scrappy New Hampshire. I was elated that John McCain -- the man I fervently backed in the New Hampshire primary in 2000 -- sailed to victory against the wooden, lying, reprehensible Mitt Romney. And I love how Rudy Giuliani is lurking out there, waiting to try and show that the South Carolina Christian Right clown circus matters so much less than it used to.

But I have to admit that my heart was in seeing Barack Obama kick Hillary Clinton's ass last night. Not because I particularly care about who the Democrats nominate. But because the showdown between these two gigantic figures in American politics is truly a proxy fight for the soul of the gay political movement.

And not just a battle between David Geffen and Hilary Rosen. Not even a battle between two parts of the gay Democratic world. It's a fight between a wide open, inspiring movement based on winning arguments by winning over our opponents - and a movement of shameless hacks who have no ideas, no vision and no loyalty to anything but power.

A fight between a movement typified by the slavishly pro-Clinton Human Rights Campaign -- which I've already called the most useless civil rights organization to ever own a building in the District of Columbia -- and one which could find its voice anew with gay Democrats, independents and even some fairly prominent gay Republicans joining forces to say ideas matter more than the eternal, frustrating and pointless game of chinese checkers that gay politics has become.

Obama may not have actually ended up being the right leader for such a movement. (I say this despite the fact that his concession speech was just as electrifying to watch as his victory speech in Iowa.) Indeed, Obama might leave the stage before the end of the month. But the energy around his sweeping campaign was the same kind of energy that bristles in so many concerned and engaged gay and lesbian Americans today, many of them veteran activists from all political stripes. Me included. We are so incredibly sick of the garbage that both HRCs just shovel out at us day after day -- the droning, meaningless bullet points and the clanking, over-packaged gloss -- with a kind of disrespect and arrogance that is so insular, so cold and so selfish that it is almost nauseating. It's frankly what turned me to Log Cabinism in the late 1980's, and keeps me far from gay activism today. HRC leads a self-sustaining movement simply by how much oxygen it sucks out of everyone else - nothing more.

But alas, Senator HRC's machine cranked out two essential tactical moves -- a negative mailer on Obama and abortion that worked with women voters, and faux tears before the cameras in Portsmouth, designed to telegraph that there is a human being somewhere underneath the circuitry. Her tactics won the day. (No sign of an actual idea or vision on the horizon.)

Watching Hillary's victory speech was chilling. There was elation at the start on her face, and in that room, that you could feel in your bones as a spectator, and that nascent hope that you'd be seeing something memorable in just a moment. This was, after all, a gigantic comeback for her campaign, and for her personally. And then her speech began. The teenagers piled up behind her immediately started looking away and chattering, and Hillary was back to her droning, bulleted, crashingly dull self. (Indeed - the shiver-moment: the teens wake up at hearing themselves mentioned and stupidly cheer with glee at Hillary's dead-panned line about "young people who can't afford to go to college and pursue their dreams.").

Vindicated, and back to work being Hillary -- right down to the expressions of thanks to her daughter, husband and mother that were about as full of human warmth as office stationery.

Meanwhile, the other HRC and the world it represents, will simply get up today, turn itself on, boot up and go back to its empty clicking and whirring. No lessons. I mean, they fumbled ENDA and hate crimes, shifting and changing their positions even more shamelessly than Mitt Romney, and have nothing to show for more than a year of Democratic rule in Congress. Why should they draw any lessons from their beloved Hillary Clinton's amazing scare? The Clinton machine won -- the unions, seniors, lower income voters, and a negative mailer to scare women. Message: machines win, and it's all about tactics.

So for those of us left to wonder when this showdown can actually have its day, I'll quote perhaps Obama's best gaffe of the weekend: "The time for come has changed."

The Borg Rejoices

Clinton's New Hampshire HQ, Last Night

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

'Oh-Shit' Moment Looms for HRC

As expected, Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign has only in the last 48 hours truly absorbed the body blow of the defeat in Iowa. And rather than launching a fiery broadside of ideas and substance, they've gone negative.

And the state of New Hampshire is not responding well.

Every poll out this morning puts Hillary between 2 and 10 points behind Barack Obama in the Granite State's primary tomorrow. The wild factor of independent voters may further erode her standing. It seems they might even split their votes between John McCain in the GOP primary and Obama on the Democratic side. But taking the pulse of the crowds that are showing up, and the fact that tomorrow's weather is expected to be dry and mild, it seems the momentum is entirely with Obama as of this writing, and he might just amass a truly big victory there.

Today's New York Times ran a picture (below right) of a wan ex-President Bill Clinton addressing a crowd, beside a woman who can barely keep her head up and a girl stifling a yawn. According to the Times' Mark Leibovich, Bill is drawing "sleepy and sometimes smallish crowds" in New Hampshire, and at the University of New Hampshire on Friday, much of his audience "filed out mid-speech, and the room was largely quiet as he spoke, with few interruptions for laughter or applause." Meanwhile, the Washington Post on Sunday reported that as Hillary delivered yet another droning, uninspired stump speech in the state earlier in the day, he "scanned the crowd as his wife spoke, biting his nails."

With this kind of shift apparent on the ground, and the looming match in African-American-rich South Carolina, a true "oh-shit" moment is hanging off in the visible distance, closing fast, on the Clinton campaign. If she loses New Hampshire by more than 5 points, and goes on to lose Nevada and South Carolina by similar or worse margins, the panic among the hack-heavy base of the Clinton campaign -- as preternaturally disloyal and two-faced as it is when the chips are down -- will explode and they will migrate in droves to the one who truly looks like the winner. If no other reason than to cut their losses and still have a chance for some kind of place in the new order.

So the open question remains -- will she finally grasp the reality that the floor boards are flying up and the ground is shaking because the primary voters, especially the flood of new voters, don't want what she's tirelessly pushing, and will she then finally start delivering on ideas, passion and fire? Or will she go the old route (so successful for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004) and decide to annihilate Obama personally?

Those are the only two routes left for Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination. The other route is to a stunningly early oblivion.

**UPDATE**12:44pm ET/3:44pm Bz

ABC News' Kate Snow blogs at Political Radar a few minutes ago (12:30pm ET) that, like her nail-biting husband, reality might be setting in on Hillary, too:

Clinton was sitting at a big table in Cafe Espresso in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with 16 undecided voters.

The Senator from New York was methodically, warmly and calmly taking questions from the voters.

She bored the rest of the table answering for ten minutes one realtor's question about real estate insurance. ... A woman asked Clinton how she does it? And who does her hair?

Clinton made a light joke about getting help and then she got emotional, her voice breaking and with tears in her eyes, she spoke about how she is passionate about this election and passionate about the country.

Tears of passion? I've seen the video and wasn't convinced. Tears of realization? We'll see soon.

HRC Gets Clocked...

...and I mean both of them.

The results from Iowa were quite the vindication for those who have said time and again that the robotic and empty machine approach to real change in America will never catch fire, and will never have a glorious day of its own.

Senator Hillary Clinton began this race with as much promise and tangible assets as her brilliant and fatally flawed husband had throughout his failed presidency. She has the highest name-ID of any presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan, and perhaps the biggest, best-funded and most formidable national organization ever mounted by a Democrat ahead of the first primaries. Several people have argued to me -- and I agree with them -- that it is hard to imagine someone launching a presidential campaign in recent memory with more de facto experience in brass-knuckled national politics than Hillary brought. And no one can question her intellectual strengths - she is far smarter than her husband, and thousands of times more disciplined than he ever was on his best days.

And she blew it in Iowa. She blew it worse than even she probably imagined, and there is no question that her campaign inner circle is either in a crisis, or in denial, this morning. I heard from several people I know in Des Moines that her precinct captains often didn't know how to articulate what she stands for, while the victorious Obama forces were wild-eyed with raving praise and highly creative with their sales jobs to the "non-viable" caucusers who unwrapped from losing candidates and moved to his camp. Indeed, from the Hillary side it was all the classic windy, empty, bullet-point sheet nonsense full of "ready" and "lead" and "experience" but no fire of ideas, no imagination to inspire fervent loyalty, and almost no relevance to the lives of the people who showed up to caucus. It seemed the only passion was from hacks who long ago measured the drapes in various mid-level agency offices around Washington throughout 2007.

And then there is the other HRC, who quite garrulously showed up in Iowa with their "candidate neutral" troops that were so howlingly backing Clinton in every way, shape and form. This organization also arrived at the 2008 election campaign with the same over-spillage of promise as their eponymous object of slavish devotion: huge amounts of money, large staff capacity, unquestioned media positioning at the top, and what former leader Elizabeth Birch used to prattle on about endlessly -- their "muscle."

Alas, the most useless civil rights organization that has ever owned a building in the District of Columbia also fell flat on its face in Iowa last night. The fig leaf of "neutrality" will, of course, give them the illusion of not having failed at their obvious task of mobilizing support for Hillary Clinton. But ask any gay Obama supporter in the top ranks if the Human Rights Campaign's ridiculous claims of neutrality will hold water should the Illinois Senator somehow end up winning the nomination. You'll get, perhaps, the straightest talk from a gay Democrat in modern history.

But both HRCs have been here before. Both of them have gotten their teeth knocked in plenty of times, and like robots of sci-fi yore they always manage to clamber back onto their feet and march steely forward again. Don't count either of them out. There is always the well-worn machine tactic of personal destruction that establishment players never fear to pull out when a flicker of newness and fresh energy dares to challenge their primacy.

And I guess there's always hope as well. Hope that Hillary Rodham Clinton will indeed unleash a fiery, clear-headed and passionate vision for changing America for the better, one that vindicates her entire life. Hope that the Human Rights Campaign will mobilize its resources behind an inspiring platform of ideas. Insert comment about holding one's breath here.

No matter who comes out alive in all this, it doesn't change the facts. It's hard to believe this is still the party of John F. Kennedy that both HRCs dwell within the upper echelons, in that so much has been given, so much is expected, and so little is delivered in return. Year after year after year.