Mitch Gann’s

“It’s decision day for Democrats” (CNN):

Bleary-eyed Democrats failed to reach consensus early Saturday on how to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, setting up a potentially explosive hearing later in the morning.

Comment: good grief.

(Source: Reuters/NASA)

Astronauts aboard the NASA space shuttle Discovery will be carrying an extra piece of cargo when they launch on Saturday — a new toilet pump.

Crew members aboard the International Space Station have been fumbling with plastic bags since their zero-gravity toilet . . . made “a loud noise” and stopped working properly last week (Reuters).

Let’s hope what goes into orbit, stays in orbit.

Cathy AJ, who is barely a boomer having come into the world the year that JFK checked out of it (that would be 1963 but if I have to tell you that, you are no kind of boomer), notes that she only meets two of the 25 Signs that You are Getting Old: she has a car with a built-in compass and she can read the newspaper without arm-extenders.

Given her relative youth, I am shocked — shocked, I say — that Cathy meets even these two criteria of emergent decrepitude. I don’t have a compass in my car, though somebody gave me one once. I have it here somewhere . . . . And I can read the paper fine with the arms I have. I just need to take off my glasses and hold the paper against my nose. Maybe a little closer.

“Jokes for Baby Boomers” is a “lense” at Squidoo whose name says it all. Well, mostly all. There is a little more to the site than just jokes for boomers; there are also links to other Boomer lenses, ads aimed at Boomers, and comments by appreciative Boomer readers. But mostly it has jokes and funny lists like You are getting old when . . . (”You and your teeth don’t sleep together”) or 25 signs that you are getting old (#5. “You are proud of your lawn mower”). There are apparently several Boomer lenses on Squidoo, which is a site where anyone can create a nicely structured, well-focused and useful page for free. They call those pages “lenses.” You can even make money with them.

Just for the record, my teeth and I still sleep together and I am constantly embarrassed by my lawn mower. I can’t take it anywhere.

WordPress, the world-class and totally free blogging software used by this site and a billion others (give or take) is turning five years-old today.

Enjoy your day, WordPress, and many happy returns!

Did I mention it’s free?

Hillary Clinton is getting heat from the news media pundits and the Obama campaign for having noted that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the month of June (“Clinton sorry for Kennedy remark” BBC News).

Although I have already stated here that Clinton should quit, I am on her side in this silly flap. In the context of her remarks, it is clear that her point was simply that Kennedy was still campaigning for his party’s nomination in June. She had just previously noted that her husband did not wrap up the nomination until the California Primary in June 1992. Kennedy was killed the night that he won the California Primary in June 1968. But Obama’s people want us to think she was wishing him ill. The news media lap it up like obedient puppies.

So much for new politics. It tastes like the same sour milk.

What Happened the Year You Were Born is a website that answers its title question only for those of us lucky enough to be born between 1946 and 1964. Baby Boomers, in other words. Take 1952. This was the year that Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine. Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea. Richard Nixon defended himself on national TV with his “Checkers” speech. The U.S. exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb and Great Britain developed an atomic bomb. The Korean War dragged on. Ike was liked enough to be elected to his first-term as President. Somewhere in that muddle of the good, the bad and the highly explosive, I was born.

Ronni Bennett, on her Time Goes By blog, has this to say about money and politics:

. . . it has been said that should Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination, there is precedent for him to hold a fund raiser to help refill Senator Clinton’s personal coffers. This is disgusting – moreso in a time of $4/gallon gasoline, 47 million people without health coverage and skyrocketing food prices. If there are going to be fundraisers, certainly there are more deserving beneficiaries than rich presidential candidates.

I won’t be contributing to Mr. Obama’s fund-raiser on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, should it ever occur. However, I can’t see singling it out as a bad example when presidential campaign spending is setting records and we are still six months from a decision. (Six months! Can it really be that long to go? The horror, the horror . . . .) It’s all a huge waste of resources. 

Yes, I have been known to make a political contribution, and will do so in the future.  But Big Money Politics is one of the things dragging this country down.

One of the things.