"Bush and Cheney are so over," says Rover.
Good doggie, good doggie!


Blog for Iowa sinks to a new low,
but we can't help ourselves.
Lovely, patriotic doggie.

And speaking of signs . . .

Seems like there has been a rash of sign thefts lately.  The Iowa City crowd keeps getting their signs stolen from their lawns, and I hear that when Kerry spoke in the Des Moines area recently, Kerry signs went missing all over.  (They didn't take the other candidates' signs, just the Kerry signs. A selective group of thieves, as it were.)

Here in the boonies, the Thieman household had just made the trip to Sioux City to pick up an Art Small sign and a Joyce Schulte sign - an hour and a half drive for us - when the guy who mows our lawn, bags our leaves, and shovels our snow came over and failed to replace our signs when he was done mowing.

And he took the signs with him, apparently storing his equipment on top of them on his flatbed.  So, the next morning, I left a message on his answering machine and asked him to please put the signs back.  Eight hours later, at four in the afternoon, I called again and left a message with his son.  (This is a guy who, if you call him and tell him you have a check for him, will be there in five minutes flat.)  Three hours later, still no signs, so I called his wife.  That did the trick.  The next morning he returned the Joyce Schulte sign to our yard, although it was half-way shredded.  Apparently, the Art Small sign was completely shredded. 

So, we went to Dem HQ in Sioux City again and got ourselves a new Art Small sign and a new Joyce Schulte sign. 

Unfortunately, the new signs had only been up one day when the wind tunnel we live in grabbed the Schulte sign and blew it away.  We hope it landed upright in a Republican neighbor's yard.  I'm telling you, it is so windy here that if I had put a wind turbine on my front lawn a year ago, I'd be a millionaire by now.

The Art Small sign still stands, although it did get rather mowed down by the wind, too.  It's not quite as flat, however, as our Howard Dean sign after two feet of snow fell on it last January.

Then, last night, I got a call from the BV County Dems HQ and they told me that our absentee ballots had not been recorded as returned.  And we mailed those in 3 weeks ago!  We mailed them from the Storm Lake post office and they had to travel a full half mile to get to the courthouse.  So, now, I'll be chasing that down on Monday.  Either it just didn't get put up on the website that the Dems are using, or the Republican county auditor is losing a lot of Dem absentee ballots.

If you sent in your absentee ballot ages ago and keep getting panicked calls from national, state, and local Dems asking if you've returned it, take the hint and call your county auditor to see if your ballot has been received.  Monday is the last day.

Politicking is haaarrrrrrrdddddd!

Linda Thieman