Civil Service hours

So I have to rack up 10 civic service hours for one of my classes this semester. One of the three areas that I need to have hours for is "partisan" hours. In otherwords, I need to spend time at an official Republican or Democrat party function. Well, there's a Deomcrat meeting tonight at the local Sizzlers. I could totally fulfill my requirement by sitting in a steakhouse and listening to them bad-mouth republicans, the President, etc. I'm still deciding if I'll go...I'm really busy right now and that's three hours that I won't be able to be with my family...and three hours of listening to bunk. I listen to the Liberal "Air America" just to make sure I know what the other side is thinking--shouldn't that count?

Speaking of Air America, I was listening the other day and Randi Rhodes was talking. She's easily the stupidest person on their station, but there is some entertainment value. She's so off target, that you can't help but listen to her tripe. For example...last week she was talking with a guest caller (who was also empty-headed) and this caller, who was a democrat, was trying to explain the problems with the party. He was saying that Bill Clinton and the Democrat's continued attachment to Bill Clinton was the reason the Dems were in the position they are in today (no majority in either house, no President, and soon very few Supreme Justices). The intelligent person would, out of necessity admit that there must be SOMETHING wrong with their strategy if they continued to lose EVERY major battle in the world of politics, values, and ideas. But not Miss Rhodes. No--somehow the failure of her party only reflected the underhanded cunning of the Republican right--and the Deomcratic left was trying to win out against those power-hungry conservatives for the sake of the faceless, voiceless, nameless disenfranchized "majority". I have a hard time wanting to correct her--her train of thought is only going to ensure that the Dems continue to lose. Their appointing of Howard Dean makes it painfully clear that they learned nothing from the last election. Instead of trying to appeal to the middle ground by embracing values of any meaningful kind, they have embraced as the symbolic head of their party a man who represents only the extreme left. I find it laughable that Dean has to assure people he won't run again--as if there were enough people who were pressuring him for a repeat of the circus that happened last year. No--the Dems will embrace Hillary, and stake their bid on the hope that the leftists on this nation have enough votes to make them seem right.

The best plan I have heard recently to stop them in this was to make sure that Hillary loses in 2006. If she can't get re-elected to the Senate, that take the wind from her sails right before she needs to gear up for the presidential campaign in 2008. I don't know if its possible, but I'd really enjoy the show it it did happen.