Daniel Farrell

I provided the video coverage for RVANews for the last 2 Mayoral Forums but on by Style Weekly. The videos from the Arts and Culture Forum that happened a couple weeks are all in one place on RVANews.com. I’m working on getting the video clips of tonight’s Living and Working in Richmond Forum up as quickly as possible. They will be on RVANews’ Vimeo page as they go up. I’ll also amend this post with a link when they get their own page. This time I got to do cool stuff like patch into the sound system and since I decided to leave the liveblogging to others I actually did some work to make the video turn out better. Good learning experience for covering future events. I hope you enjoy getting to know the candidates!

Update 1: The videos are all up on the RVANews Vimeo page. They will get their own post on RVANews soon.

Update 2: The page got up on RVANews this morning. Enjoy!

I’ve had a couple conversations recently about politics with people more conservative than I am and all of the reasons given about why they supported John McCain had to do with fear of an Obama presidency. The amount of fear(most based on misinformation) should be a cause of concern, but that that fear is people’s primary reason for making a decision is very sad to me. There are many reasons to support a John McCain presidency. Maybe his ideology and worldview line up with yours more than Barack Obama’s do. Maybe you think we need someone with a lot of experience at this point. Maybe you think we need someone with a military background. Maybe you are a one issue voter and he is with you on that issue. Those are valid reasons. Fear is not. Fear is not a valid reason to make any decision. Luckily John McCain himself has spoken out about this a couple times recently. Senator McCain said “I want to be president of the United States and obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be, but I have to tell you — I have to tell you — he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.” And I would hope we can all say the same about Senator McCain. There is no reason to be scared this election season. These are both decent men who we don’t need to be afraid of.

I suggest 2 good blog posts(first and second) that tell what the reaction to his speaking out has been. The first one also talks about the smear campaign John McCain endured in the South Carolina primary 8 years ago. Interesting read.

So, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog… we’ve gone through some crap over the years. One thing that helped me get through some rough times has been my love of beer. There was nothing like a high quality beer to help take the edge off or to help me relax, etc. But I noticed a couple months back that it wasn’t helping anymore. The options seem to be 1) try more of it and maybe that will help, or 2) stop drinking. Well, I tried #1 a couple times and all that gave me was a slight hangover the next day. So a number of weeks back I decided to try #2. That has helped a lot actually. I do miss the taste of beer, but I am feeling much better.

That got me thinking about all the things in life that we do that helped at first but aren’t helping anymore… and yet we just keep doing them. We may justify it by saying “at least it’s not drugs” about our shopping addiction, but we still need to realize the point when our relationship to it changes. So, before life becomes a wreck of addiction or compulsion we should examine what we are doing with ourselves. Is it still helping? If not, stop doing it!

Just an FYI to those who care. I’ll be filling in for the pastor of First Mennonite Church here in Richmond this Sunday. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to talk at a traditional church service, should be a good experience. I’ll put up some sermon notes afterwards.