Guest Plant Week: Bridal Wreath

Guest plant week continues, and today we look to the Northeast, where Penny has a beautiful Bridal Wreath (Spirea x vanhouttei.) It takes me back to Grandma LaBelle's house, where there's a long line of Bridal Wreaths running along the side of the yard. That conjurs up a simpler time where I spent my childhood/

I came across an editorial from the Monteray (CA) County Herald that puts forth an idea that could take the presidential election back to a simpler time, one with a lot less hype.

"...the Democratic presidential nomination apparently is over. And that's when it hit us—a fantasy that produced the first politics-related grin we have experienced in some time.
It's simply this. What if we could cancel the next five months of painfully predictable campaigning and move up the presidential vote to, say, next week?

The issues are complicated, but we already know the candidates' views. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes Barack Obama's running mate, she will already have been vetted to an extreme. In these days of 24-hour news cycles, John McCain's VP choice is likely to be a well-scrutinized youngster capable of being torn down and built back up in days, not months.

Special attention could be provided to the undecided voters, who surely can't number more than a couple of dozen or so. In the interest of speed, private briefings could be arranged with James Carville and Patrick Buchanan. At the moment, the choices seem so clear cut that it looks to be one election that will not be decided by undecided voters.

Here's what we would lose.

We'd be spared months of political coverage focusing on gaffes real and imagined, and misstatements by the candidates and their advisers, mostly people we have never heard of.
We wouldn't have to bear months of smirky commentators winking and rolling their eyes.

We wouldn't have to sit back and let every special interest imaginable throw money at the candidates to buy good government, which really means access and campaign advertising. As it stands now, McCain and Obama have reasonably manageable lists of old friends and campaign contributors who will require thanks and payback after next January. In the crush of a general campaign, with so much money sliding through the party structures and political action committees, only the candidates' advisers will know for sure who placed winning bets. If the campaign ended in a week, there still might be a little place at the table for our own not-so-special interests.

We'd be able to stop worrying about the difference between superdelegates and half delegates.
We would have to hear only a few more times about how inappropriate it is to challenge or criticize a war hero, no matter what he says or does. We would have to hear only a few more political conversations starting with, "I've got nothing against blacks, but ..." We'd have to bear only a week of Hillary saying she didn't mean any of those things she said over the past six months.

Why stop with moving up primaries? Let's get this one over with."

I'm ready to cast my ballot, are you?