http://www.c-span.org/

scroll down just a bit

Lots of the classic “Obamaisms” but this one lays out a great balance between “inspiration” and “perspiration.” Head and shoulders above any presidential candidate in my memory, with the possible exception of Bobby Kennedy. Honestly, it’s been a long time but I don’t remember ever hearing anything from RFK that matched Obama’s skills.

As for “rabid persons”, I’ll leave any reader of this thread – or any other – to determine who gets the Gold. I’m confident it’s not even close.

re: posting under diff’t names: if a certain rabid person didn’t feel obliged to scream hysterically at the sight of certain names, maybe the content would get through — but it’s drowned out by his knee-jerk hysteria every time. As a “matter of form,” maybe he should just shut up or address the issues instead.

Re: Sandra’s commentaries: her best insights are about navigating the labyrinthine Magnet School system, with its points for race, being rejected from school of choice (each worth one pt.), and tips on how to accumulate points — e.g. applying when you know you’ll be rejected anyway, so that your kid accrues pts. and might actually get in some years down the road. I’ve never heard anything quite as honest. It all just underscores what a farce the whole system is.

I’m not charmed by Los Angeles at all and admit to loving both Chicago and New York, although I’m not tempted to live in either one again (glad I did and wish I had still had free room and board on visits to Chicago, as I do in Manhattan – was relegated to bunking at the Ambassador East last time and it’s not the same since Sinatra left us) – but whatever one’s personal pespective on the 3 greatest American urbs, putting any of them on a list of “most miserable cities” makes no sense at all. Especially when you have LA landing just a notch above Modesto on this incoherent scale. And the ratings didn’t even factor in basics like housing costs or quality of schools that ultimately determine “liveabilty” for most families – and which obviously mitigates against New York in particular but hardly makes the quality of life “miserable” for the folks who actually choose to live there or tney wouldn’t continue to flock to the city and stick out all of the downsides.

As for “We’ve listened to your endless rants on every subject because it’s clearly a form of therapy for you, not because you offer any illumination – shut up!!”, questions of both irony and self-awareness leap out at any reader who has followed these threads.

(Celeste, I wasn’t referring to your intro, much as I appreciate your regular reports from the trenches, or Sandra’s comments, which I’ve followed — she’s very pithy and amusing — but having fought the battles in the trenches ahead of her, I don’t need her one view of one part of L A to “inform” my views. Generalizing about elem. schools doing better is just that, a generalization — the fact that most people have no adverse effects from lipo didn’t do much to affect the outcome of Kanye West’s mother’s surgery. Yes there are a handful of decent elem. schools while literally no middle or high schools on the westside, Hollywood or Hollywood Hills fall into that category. When it comes to the Westside and Hollywood Hills etc., there are very different issues and realities from S LA or Sandra’s: the stuff you write about has no bearing on this area, which is generally aggressively ignored by the liberal activists who opine on and influence the policies of LAUSD. (That’s the ONLY reason I pipe up: everyone else in my area has given up trying to be a voice in the wilderness on this, watching the district and their taxes go down the black hole as they scramble to do what they can for their own kids: but as a writer, it’s my nature to observe reality, even if I have to endure the insect bites of the holier-than-thou know-nothing reg’s of society. — Who lives in Oakland, for pete’s sake. The idea of my devaluing the first-hand experiences of someone who’s fought the school battles in Oakland, is so incomprehensibly arrogant, it boggles the mind. That’s what you get when you have someone who totally devalues first-hand experience, travel and education because he has none.)

ric, as for the Forbes rankings: Listing NYC as the most miserable for the hoi polloi, doesn’t preclude it from being the city of choice for the wealthy — to the contrary, it’s the lack of affordability for the masses, high taxes, crime and traffic that put it on the list. But the wealthy don’t care about any of that — for them, it’s the mantra that “if it exists anywhere, it exists somewhere in New York, no matter the price,” that counts. NYC has always been a city of socioeconomic extremes, it’s just gotten worse. (Even closer to the “Blade Runner” version of the “future,” which is almost the present.) As a former NYorker who’s still bicoastal, I love the place anyway or despite all that — but Forbes is right when it comes to ranking the city in terms of liveability for the “average American family.’