First Condi, today Hillary. Tickets were gone in a flash, so roomie and I watched the former First Lady on the Princeton cable network. The topic was the Middle East (which was Ms Rice's topic as well), and the two speeches couldn't have been much more different. Rice staunchly defended a specific, though internally-inconsistent, philosophy, while Clinton spoke in generalities and only rarely went negative on Bush. (To paraphrase, she accused Bush of "outsourcing" US diplomacy on Iran and North Korea. I don't know about you, but to me "outsourcing" is very 2004.)
I must give Clinton credit: she looked very Presidential. And it does seem that she has almost perfected the art of giving a policy speech without pissing anyone off (all "plantation" comments notwithstanding). She also stood by her vote for the Iraq war, and struck an optomistic chord on the future of our former colony--a tenor you don't hear from many Democrats nowadays.
On the topic of political speeches, I went to a Christine Todd Whitman address last week. She seemed certain that Rice would be the VP nominee for the Republicans in '08, a proposition which I'm willing to publically bet against right now.
And in other news: my TiVo is sick. The fan is spinning constantly (though it isn't disk-seeking continuously) and I'm getting "prebuffering pause" errors. As a result, MythTV is unable to change the channel (though I can change the channel through manual software) and playback is choppy. I don't think it's the video card since I can cat the output of /dev/video0 and that plays back just fine. Perhaps after finals I'll open it up and do a little surgery.
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