Yes we did.
Everyone has stumbled off to the further recesses of this small town, the book launch was a success, and now I will spend the next 24 hours cleaning.
It was a lot of fun, though.
I’ve not posted for a while. I read the Corner or David Brooks’ column or Nooners’ latest drivel about how things were much better back when Ronald Reagan was getting shot and, while I want to make fun of it, I really just find it all too depressing for words.
Thank heavens for Texts from Dog, which restores my faith in humanity each and every day.
Thanks to Larkspur for sending me there in the first place.
I grew up in Berkeley, California. I’ve watched the Golden Gate Bay Bridge* in every season, in every weather. I have never seen anything like this. (Copyrighted photo at the link. Well worth a click, even if, horribile dictu,**it leads to the Daily Mail.)
Perhaps an open thread might gratify?
*I actually do know the difference. I could see the Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate, from the house in which I grew up in Claremont Canyon. But +3 (bourbon *2 plus Cotes du Rhone), one’s fingers can do the talking with no help from the brain. Apologies all….
**Absolve me, Magistra Small. The sins I’ve committed through crap Latiny are none of your doing, oh greatest of my high school teachers.)
Bonus pic:
Image: Yoshitsuya Ichieisai, The Lightning Bolt, c. 1865.
Atrios has announced the 3rd runner up for Wanker Of The Decade, and it’s none other than Joe Kline.
Which is about right.
Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, “Love and Hate” (1988)
I pulled this out of a slush pile once. I like it a lot, but is it reggae? Discuss, or throw up some of your own faves. (Also too, a nice live performance of the beautiful Merle Haggard song, “Diana,” which grew on me all week.)
(Pardon me for not being able to give adequate credit to the creator; I found this via one of those endless Facebook share chains where it’s impossible to find out who actually made it.)
So it’s all over the news and twitter that Santorum has dropped out. I’m going to leave it to you fine people to discuss what happened when Santorum dropped out, what Santorum dropped on, what we use to clean up the mess from a Santorum drop, and how Romney caused Santorum to drop out.
Also, open thread.
Edit: As someone on twitter pointed out, now everyone who claimed that God told them to run for President has failed and dropped out. So God has either one hell of a sense of humor, or s/he has a real mean streak.
UPDATE: Jennifer at 87 wins with “I would have gone with “Romney squeezes out Santorum.”
It’s a lot of work following Americans Elect, because one has to delve deep into the weeds of the rules to get any real sense of what the hell is going on there. Don’t do that. Instead, just read the dedicated and self-sacrificing people who follow their every move. This is from AE Transparency, which is only one of the sites that track AE:
We Pay Attention To Americans Elect Corporation So You Won’t Have To
in a surprising new development this week, undeclared ‘draft’ candidate David Walker skyrocketed out of nowhere (OK, out of 25th place) last week to break into our Top 20 candidate list this week in 17th place, leapfrogging all but three declared candidates. This surprise move had nothing to do with actually winning voter support (Walker gained only a lamentable 8 qualifying votes this week, anemic even by Americans Elect’s standards) and had everything to do with back-room funny business.How can just 8 votes (out of AECorp’s membership of 400,000+) significantly propel a candidate toward success in the Americans Elect beauty pageant? They can’t, of course. But moving the goal-posts sure can, and that is what transpired this week while you weren’t looking, as AECorp insiders quietly upgraded Walker’s ticket to ride.
Americans Elect’s Candidate Certification Committee apparently originally classified Walker as a “contingently qualified” candidate, requiring him to net 50,000 qualifying votes to advance to the next round of balloting. Yet sometime during the past week (in the dark of night, perhaps, while we were all asleep?) Walker’s candidacy status on his Americans Elect web page appears to have been quietly changed to “Former Head of a Federal Agency” without any announcement, and his qualifying vote requirement was accordingly reduced from 50,000 to just 10,000. In other words, AECorp generously upgraded Walker’s ticket from coach to first class. Thus Walker (with only 94 qualifying votes) thereby automatically leapt from 25th place – behindcontingently qualified declared candidates Michealene Risley (454 qualifying votes) and TJ Ohara (141 qualifying votes) to 17th place (ahead of them both). And with just 11 more votes Walker will surpass contingently qualified declared candidate Laurence Kotlikoff (524 qualifying votes), as well.
[UPDATE: Tip of the hat to Irregular Times’ Jim Cook for independently verifying Walker’s Easter Week Ascension (He is Risen!), with an able assist from Bing’s cache. Thanks, Jim!]
All this would be much ado about nothing, but for the fact that David Walker, who has long lobbied for massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other safety-net programs, is an Americans Elect Board of Advisors member (i.e., an AECorp insider himself), as well as for the existence of numerous signals over the past few weeks that Walker is a particular favorite of his fellow AECorp insiders. As Jim Cook of Irregular Times has carefully documented, AE insiders Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Mark McKinnon (George W. Bush’s former campaign manager) have both sung Walker’s praise as a potential presidential candidate lately, as has apparent AE auxiliary, “No Labels”. AE itself has issued a gushing press release extolling Walker’s virtues, and AE’s cheerleader on the New York Times op-ed page, Thomas Friedman, published a shamelessly flattering column in the Times in February imagining the glories of a Walker presidency. This represents a lot of serious firepower being brought to bear in support of a candidate who has, as yet, persuaded only 94 Americans to give him their qualifying votes at Americans Elect. Strange indeed.
‘Kremlin watchers’ here at AE Transparency (that is, the more paranoid among us) suggest that AECorp’s odd move this week…moving David Walker’s goal-posts by re-defining the term ‘Federal agency’...signals a growing impatience within the Americans Elect penthouse with Buddy Roemer’s now clearly established inability to draw votes (one of the major reasons for AE’s embarrassingly unsuccessful ballot thus far). Casting about for another potential draw (or so the theory goes), insiders have set their last desperate hopes on Walker. All that is required in order to save AE’s disastrous first-round balloting would be for humble, self-sacrificing Walker to officially declare his candidacy, for AE to once more rev up its powerful publicity machine in his favor (with reliable support from the Times’ Friedman), and – if absolutely necessary – to ever-so-slightly re-jigger the rules just one more time to, say, automatically advance the top three declared candidates (which could soon easily include Walker) to the next round of balloting, whatever their vote totals might be.
Right now, it’s just a theory. But our hawk-eyed election monitors will be closely observing AECorp’s moves in these final weeks of its first-round ballot, looking for further Walker-promoting skullduggery. Maybe you should, too. After all, “Ninety-Four-Vote Dave” Walker might just be the next leader of the free world, if that’s what Ackerman Elects.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone would ask Tom Friedman just how much he understands about this process he’s endorsed and promoted? Ask him a question. “How does AE work, Tom, specifically?”
h/t Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog
Some of you might have wondered where I’ve been. Most of you probably didn’t notice or care, but for the two that did, thanks!
I’ve been exceedingly busy of late. Prepping for some certification tests and taking some on line classes to prepare for a new job for which I’m going to apply. Also doing a lot of yard work. Getting ready to build a pergola in my back yard. My porch faces west so in the summer evenings it get extremely hot out there. You can’t do anything really, so I’d like to bring some shade into the mix and create a usable outdoor room kind of thing at the same time. We have DIY network and HGTV both in HD here, after all. The two shade trees my dad helped my wife plant when I was in Afghanistan are about twice the size they started at five years ago, but still too small to actually be useful for shade just yet. I hope that I don’t screw myself to the lumber again. Maybe I should ask for help this time.
Hippiehaus, “Galaxy” (2002)
This is kind of pretty. I really used to go for some of those Hotel Costes anthologies. What sounded good to folks this week?
I’m going to run this give away just like Anne Laurie ran hers. Post here in this thread with a valid email address in the email address block, and all posts from now, 8:00 PM Central time to 8:00 PM Central tomorrow will be eligible. Unlike AL, I don’t have a problem with long threads loading so I don’t anticipate needing another thread. Enter only once. I will use the random number generator at http://www.random.org to pick the winner.
Good Luck!
UPDATE: Post #410 is the last post.
Mighty Diamonds, “Go Seek Your Rights” (1976)
This came up a few times this week and sounded so good. Talk about your own songs of the week, or treat as an open thread.
FORT WORTH — Police are trying to identify the man who entered the West 7th office of State Sen. Wendy Davis Tuesday afternoon and threw two firebombs just outside the door.Two staffers were in the third floor office when the attack occurred around 4 o’clock. One of them had to leap over the flames to escape, then went to the break room, grabbed an extinguisher and put out the fire.
Investigators said Sen. Davis was not in the office at the time of the incident, but was at her law office closer to downtown Fort Worth.A staffer told News 8 the Democratic lawmaker was alerted about what happened and that security at Davis’ other local office was tightened as a result.
No one was hurt, but the lawmaker’s office was damaged by the fire.
This is just getting out of hand:
Personally I’d like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a “surgical procedure”. If it’s not a life it shouldn’t matter, if it doesn’t harm a woman then she shouldn’t care, and don’t we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else.Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain – I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living – I will be voting YES.”
By the way, the quotes de sarcasm are a nice touch, Terri.
I can’t even.
(h/t Little Green Footballs)
[cross-posted at ABLC]
[I]f you’re not fully convinced yet that Alaska is the next front in the GOP’s war on women, you just have to listen to State Rep. Alan Dick. He said that he doesn’t believe that when a woman is pregnant, it’s really “her pregnancy.” As a matter of fact, he would advocate for criminalizing women who have an abortion without the permission via written signature from the man who impregnated her. He stated, “If I thought that the man’s signature was required… required, in order for a woman to have an abortion, I’d have a little more peace about it…”
Also, no word on what women who become pregnant as a result of rape are supposed to do in Dick’s perfect world. Maybe women should carry waiver forms on them at all times. You know—just in case.
When are Republicans going to drop the charade and just start building breeding farms for wayward women? You know how we get. So emotional and sensitive. So dumb and naive. We’re liable to abort our babies by accident if there’s not a man around telling us what’s what.
We need the dicks of the world to lend us a helping hand.
[via RH Reality Check]
[cross-posted at ABLC]
