Aloha, Eli…!

Jesse Ventura has an ego, but he also has a brain and a conscience — and when he doesn’t let his ego smother his brain or his conscience, he verges upon greatness. All he’d need would be a touch more empathy, particularly for people not in his immediate circle of kith and kin.

Michele Bachmann has no conscience that I can discern.

Aloha, CTut…!

Yeah,I thought Rosen’s choice of “outrageous quotes” from Ventura were rather telling in themselves. If those are the most outrageous examples Rosen could think of…

…shooting a guy in the face…

Eccentric would be the word I would use, unless he was just, you know, going after lawyers on general principle.

IOKIYAR.

Just sayin’

I saw Jessie on Larry King with Oliver Stone. He was wonderful.

I liked Jesse. He had a tendency to just blurt out what he really thought. How refreshing.

Yeah, it’s in my tags…

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Six-term Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) resigned yesterday amid reports that he had sent sexually explicit Internet messages to at least one underage male former page.

Sonofabitch, he was supposed to be in the post. I even remember typing it. Will have to fix that…

Forgot to say hi, Eli. Nice post.

Recently in Washington State, we have seen former Spokane Mayor Jim West outted for cruising for gay men on a Web site and offering them high paying jobs with the city of Spokane. Jobs like Personnel Director, the Director of the Human Rights Commission and Aquatics Director for swimming pools for the city of Spokane. Before he was elected Mayor of Spokane, Jim West, a longtime Republican lawmaker and Boy Scout executive, campaigned heavily to pass anti-gay marriage laws in Washington State.

Okay, better now. Thanks for the heads up!

Well, mayors aren’t really significant enough political figures to be included on this sort of list. Oh, wait.

Do you remember the name of the Republican here in Florida who was arrested at a rest area after soliciting a (male) state trooper for sex? He was McCain’s campaign manager in Florida. Not elected but still hilarious.

…well, probably half of the Republican caucus.

Probably…? ;-)

Just came inside. Any Friday data dump, or SCOTUS descision that I missed?

Bob Allen.

In an audiotaped interview with Titusville Police, Allen says he was intimidated after a man offered a sex act for money. He says he went along with the conversation, because he was afraid of becoming another crime statistic.

On the audiotape, Allen said, “Listen. A public park. I got my name on the damn building. I’m not gonna do that. You know, maybe I said it in the wrong order, but this was a pretty stocky black guy, and there were a lot of other black guys around in the park, and, you know…”

So yeah, it was all black people’s fault for being scary and criminal-looking.

Giuliani’s affairs/marriages, etc. don’t make the list?

Jesse’s thing is that his ability to put himself in others’ shoes is limited. He has to have direct experience of something before he knows what to feel about it. He wasn’t for mass transit until he rode the DC Metro; then he became a huge advocate. He’s generally very much into limiting government spending, except for certain childhood illnesses such as those suffered by his daughter Jade.

If he had a bit more ability to emphasize, a bit less greed, and a whole lot less of a tendency to let his ego trump his brain and his better instincts, he’d still not only be governor, he’d have been right up there with Floyd Olson and Wendy Anderson for Best Governor Ever.

What a disgusting thing that people blame the unknown “black guy.” This happens far too often and innocent people end up in jail because of it.

I’m not sure Rudy could even crack an All-Republican Top-10 List.

Not to mention Al D’Amato’s!

I think Eli, unlike Rosen (who was going back into ancient history to dig up naughty Dems), was being fair and sticking with relatively recent malefactors. Otherwise Rudy, Al, and Helen Chenoweth would have to be on the list. Along with Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, and Dan Burton. And of course Newt.

And really, being an Illinois native, if he wants to bring up Blagojevich he should mention that since 1964 three Illinois governors have spent time in jail, including Republicans Otto Kerner and George Ryan, Blagojevich’s predecessor, who still is in jail.

Har har har.

Oops. Missed that.

He was not only going back into ancient history, he was also stretching his own “eccentric” criterion to the breaking point. The Edwards, Spitzer and Kilpatrick scandals are completely pedestrian, and Jefferson’s is only *slightly* eccentric because he put his money in the freezer. Big whoop.

No biggie, I don’t usually look at them either…

I was so sure Jack Ryan was a governor too, good thing I looked it up first. It’s a pity, “Governor Seven-Of-Sexclub” sounds so much better.

Crap, I forgot to include Mark Souder too, but my paragraphs are already too big…

I wonder if he told his wife when he was pimping her out that “resistance is futile.”

If you could keep all of this crap in your head, you wouldn’t have the brain-space to remember to breathe.

Seven out of Nine times, he probably did…

Not aware of D’Amato’s peccadillos. However, one of the most interesting hours I ever spent was sitting next to him on the shuttle between D.C. & NYC. We had an hour long conversation on everything from medical care to voter preferences to the wine industry in NYS & California to tropical fish, courtesy of the passenger on the other side of me. D’Amato knew much more & was much more thoughtful than you would ever have given him credit for. Seldom, if ever, does anyone get to spend an hour in nonconfrontational conversation with a sitting U.S. senator.

I’d also suspect that since that trip, probably 15 years ago, there is not a single sitting U.S. senator today who would have a candid conversation like the one I had with D’Amato. (I drew him in by having some of my Wall ST. research in my lap, which probably lulled him into thinking I was a supporter. I was careful not to disabuse him, but did challenge him politely & express my own candid POV during the conversation.)

I had it! I wrote it down! But nothing ever stays put, bits and pieces are always trickling out.

(Although I should at least be able to remember to look at my fricking notes. Jeez.)

Scandal and corruption are religious sacraments for Republicans and as such are exempt from outside scrutiny or prosecution.

ELI!

(Good reminder – {{{hugs me own notes}}} for conf call coming up!)

Ryan was such a bastard, it’s (likely) his fault we’re stuck with this abysmal president and his legions of Borg-like Obots.

KELLY!

My note-taking (and, apparently, note-reading) skills have really fallen off appallingly.

Keep a timeline notebook, i.e., put all your notes into one book, no matter what the subject. Then at least you know where they are. And, surprisingly, you can usually remember the approximate date when you noted the subject, more than any other characteristic, even the subject. So it is easier to find. You could do this on the computer, but it fails if you go to a lecture & do hand-written notes.

You are suffering from an old condition called “Notus Overloadius”.

I’ve sometimes made that recommendation to others but never been clever enough to do it myself. :)

And, surprisingly, you can usually remember the approximate date when you noted the subject, more than any other characteristic, even the subject.

That’s actually what I’m the worst at. My timesense is completely unreliable.

I have one. Don’t use it much anymore, but used it relentlessly when I worked and had many meetings with handwritten notes. There was no other way to keep track.

ELI!
Republicans blocked UI benefits funding and Scyphozoa Reid adjourned the Senate anyway so I have zero income. I can’t get worked up by sordid affairs or the hypocritical right wing media.

Oh well… Mine is good enough to find what I vaguely remember. There’s also highlighters, and, inside the front & back covers, subject indexes, that don’t take much additional effort to note.

I’ve NEVER understood 3×5 cards. Seems like 52-pickup to me, even though that’s what I was taught in the dark ages in school.

I’ve considered creating a ledger to keep track of the specific locations of all my important documents but have never gotten around to it, probably because I’m too lazy to conduct the requisite initial inventory.

Democrats are wackier because they don’t love unnecessary wars waged against defenseless countries and the looting of our treasury for no reason quite as much as Republicans.

THese days, I talk into the “record message” function in my phone, much like dictation in past years. It saves as a file into my Journal.

Problem is, I actually have to listen to the damn thing, and have no idea what’s in contents unless I transcribe – so I only transcribe the hot and the “hairy” topics.

MARGARET!

I’m so sorry. I still think we’re better off with Angle in the Senate if we can have a real Majority Leader for once. Whether we would actually get one is another matter…

Been in suspended animation the past few years, have you? “g”

I had a friend in college who swore by index cards for writing research papers. He said that once he had the index cards done, the paper practically wrote itself. I tried it, and it sucked. My preferred method was just to scribble stuff from the sources into a notebook, and then draw a bunch of lines between connected stuff, and that worked for me.

More generally speaking, my process is usually to gather a bunch of data together in a great big pile, and then jump up and down on it until something useful comes out.

The only thing in my life that is completely documented is my physical book library. It’s all on Microsoft Access, some 1895 books. That will tell you how deep my bibliomania is.

Heh. Sounds like a PUAC topic for Sat morning!

Nice. I have a spreadsheet for my movie collection, but it’s incomplete and terribly out of date.

Heh – sure does!

Have to sit on that call for 15-20 minutes or so. Back soon-ish.

Unfortunately it would probably be Schumer. I don’t think that would make much of a difference.

My report writing method is to overprepare, i.e., do so much research & thinking that it is totally clear in my mind before I do the first written draft. Recently, my book salon intro on 4/11 tested that method after many years of not having written anything coherent. Worked like a charm. First draft required very few changes.

One of the many publications I did at work was on the day of the govt release of U.S. foreign trade data. It was joint with a colleague, and we alternated months. One month, I’d do the data analysis and he’d do the mini-research project writeup, the next month we’d switch. On the deadline date, I could not only write up my research project without much revision, but it also fit the page & one-half space constraint. Just shows ya how you develop skills & how some of them stick over the years.

KELLY! ((smooch))

Anything longer than a comment is always a struggle for me. I actually kind of hate writing – pretty much always have. How I ended up as a blogger, I have no idea.

That sounds like my method of packing when I’m rushing to catch a plane: frantically throw stuff from the closet at the open suitcase; whatever lands in it, I consider “packed”.

My new strategy is to have the bag out and open a week beforehand, and just keep throwing stuff into it as it occurs to me.

How does that work?

After the time I forgot my watch, I created a packing list. I usually pretty much pack, then consult the list and that gets the things I wasn’t thinking about rounded up.

I used to keep a bag packed with what I was likely to wear and just put in the consumables just before I left. In fact, I still do, though I’m not sure why.

I’m working on a series on what economics markets really are, why they fail, and why economists fail to come to grips. It’s not complex, but is multifaceted and there’s a lot of economic history I don’t know because I’m mostly self-educated. So I’m doing a lot of background reading, which will take time, but I can already tell that it’s gelling in my brain. Thus when I come to write it up as a 3-4 diary series, it will go seemlessly & turn out well. Just the way it works for me.

You know how you get to Carnegie Hall (old joke)?

Practice, practice.

The way my brain works is that it remembers almost everything, but never all at the same time. So this method works pretty well for me, leveraging my strengths and minimizing my weaknesses.

I’m envious. I usually end up more or less where I’m trying to go, but it’s never easy, especially when I’m not 100% sure what I plan to *do* with the data I’m collecting.

I had my music collection cataloged 27 years ago when it was comprised mainly of 800+ vinyl lps. Now that it is likely over 5000 titles in a variety of formats I consider it a lost cause.

Heh. There was a time when I was overprepared for my European biz trips, literally 10 countries in 5 days, including back & forth between U.K. & continent, an hour time diff. I even had color coordinated watches. So one morning I was jogging in Glasgow before meetings, got back to the wonderful, luxurious B&B I was staying at, to see a car service waiting outside. I had a moment of sheer panic, thinking I had put on a watch with continental time from the day before & would be VERY late for my breakfast meeting. Turns out it was someone else’s car service, & my watch had the correct time zone, but it was the last time I did more than one watch for those trips.

That is over 200 days of music if it is played 24 hours a day.

GO!

I started doing my CD collection, but decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. So what if I bought the same CD twice. As for books, the same so what, but I care about them more so put the effort into it.

In my fantasy world, I’ll wake up tomorrow to seeing an honest news story about the disaster in the Gulf. That, of course, implies that Obama will have developed courage and that BP’s machinations will have been exposed by the force of the law. My other fantasy is that the Republicans and Democrats will have gone away and we’ll have sane adults who care about the earth and its people running the show. Just about any one of us here at the lake would do a better job.

I don’t know that much and I’m not all that smart, but I could easily choose Dawn Johnsen, Bill Black and Joseph Stiglitz to replace some of the repugnant ones in situ now.

Okay, I’ll be back in 200 days… “g”

It’s those little things that can trip you up or make you crazy….

If you don’t start from the premise that corporate interests have to be protected before anyone else’s, you suddenly have a whole lot more positive options.

Speaking of Dawn Johnson, she apparently does not yet recognize that it was O, not the Rs, who torpedoed her.

Make me crazy? Me????

We have a local used music store that’s been in business over 30 years. I go 3 or 4 times a year and when I do I always try to buy something to help them out because I can’t fathom how they stay afloat. There have been several instances when I have brought something home to realize I already owned it. Oh well, CDs make good impromptu gifts.

If she’s that slow on the uptake she probably wasn’t as good a candidate as many believed.

More likely misguided party loyalty, which seems to power many of the Obots.

That’s why I started cataloging my books, because of the tendency to buy them more than once (not to mention, not looking at the amazon warnings until I’d done a duplicate order). But as you say, they make a great gift…

I’m caught up in watching her speech that link you provided. be back in a little bit.

Yes, it seems naivete on her part, not a talking points thing. Plus the whole way she handled it, in the sense of not realizing that O was playing her to keep the position vacant as long as possible. BTW, it’s still vacant, is it not?

I will somtimes buy the same book if I can’t figure out where I put the first copy I bought.

Then she must buy into the whole left/right dichotomy or she knows how to maintain the narrative.

Not when you’re already there, eCAHN…! ;-)

I’m pretty certain it’s still vacant, although I’m not as attuned to goings on at OLC as many here.

Really? I must have close to a thousand and while I can’t remember every single one I have, I think I’ve only accidentally duplicated once. I have been known to read a book to death though and sometimes I can find a replacement and other times I can’t.

Preserve me from partisans! That whole R vs D thing is going to sink this nation. Mark my words.

I just saw Stewart’s take on Obama’s speech

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-16-2010/an-energy-independent-future

and wonder if we wouldn’t be better off with Nixon as Pres and LBJ as SML. Sad.

Divided and conquered are we.

I miss Jon Stewart. Comedy Central caving in with South Park and Muhammad though was too much for me. There have to be consequences for cowardice though or they’ll just keep on.

Divided and conquered are we.

Yep. Welcome to conservaworld.

I return, bruised, yet unbloodied.

What have I missed? [back in a mo' after reading the intervening comments...]

The havoc has been wrought already…!

“That thing could totally tow that boat I don’t have up that mountain I don’t live near.”

Yep.

Hmm, I agree with your principle, but am not a fan of those guys at South Park or their show, very much libertarian. I lived in Denver for 12 years and CO is that way but just not my cup of tea.

OK, time’s up for me. Sleep well everyone!

Dang it, Margaret. If I had a million dollars, I’d give you some.

I did not even take my bag out of the car this week, just pretty much turned around and around. Packing, already done.

I have the week off next week from this routine, but will be packing and driving about a thousand miles between Thursday or Friday and Sunday next week. That’s “time off.” It’s for a wedding, so that will be nice.

You missed a big smooch from me! :-)

Swopa upstairs!

Understood. That just happened to be the straw that broke my particular camel’s back. There have been other and more egregious offenses made by Comedy Central. The entire series “Tosh.0″ in fact is one.

That sounds like my method of packing when I’m rushing to catch a plane: frantically throw stuff from the closet at the open suitcase; whatever lands in it, I consider “packed”.

Interestingly enough, that is how BP chooses elements for its safety program.

SMOOCHBACK!

OK, on the Dawn J thing, I think she’s just staying in the game, playing to stay ONLY as marginalized as she has been made to be, and not to be further marginalized. Just my opinion.

She said egregious. I had to speak up.

Good evening Eli!

What’s the D Senate race looking like there flat?

Evening, egreg!

Romanoff ahead damn near 2:1- Bennet behind, as it goddamn well SHOULD be! But the end isn’t possible to know until August.

WooHoo! I was hoping for that. No, I’m aware that it will be August but I hadn’t seen any polling.

Well I didn’t mean you but I’m glad you came. Now I know how to summon you. :-)

here have been other and more egregious offenses made by Comedy Central. The entire series “Tosh.0″ in fact is one.

Exactly, I think South Park has some of the same non-humor as Tosh.0, all the NAMBLA skits and so forth, in bad taste in my opinion.

State delegate count has Romanoff up by 27%.

There will be fuckery, no doubt. Saw it firsthand as I’ve said ad nauseam when Mitch Stewart came to town and then the whole Bennet-is-a-fake-PO-supporter thing. Trying to figure out where/how to be effective prior to the August vote.

M’eh. South Park was a cartoon so I gave it a bit more latitude. I even gave Ms. Garrison a pass though I admit that one was hard to take.

Any indication how Romanoff will fare against his Repug rival?

I voted for Nighthorse Campbell (when he was a Dem) and Salazar for that seat, sad, evil of two lessers.

Well, sorry, I live here in Denver, and Southpark is HILARIOUS!

They’re nothing but snark, no sacred cows, and if you’ve ever been to Casa Bonita, which they’ve named their production company after, you’d get it.

Right now, 6 points better than Bennet.

Really? I lived across from DU on University for 11 years and I didn’t like it even then. I actually have been to Casa Bonita, it’s off Colfax somewhere as I recall, haven’t been there in decades though. My favorite Mex place is near where Speer crosses Broadway, 4th avenue I think, Bennie’s maybe?

No doubt that won’t make the establishment Dems support him though…

Did you ever see Santa vs. Jesus? Got to see it while I was working at Pixar long ago, may be the funniest thing they’ve ever done and possibly the funniest cartoon in the history of ever. Possible exception Team America: World Police.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/176600

If you can’t laugh at this HAVING BEEN TO CASA BONITA, well….

Brilliant, if you thought it. May I quote it on Facebook?

Hmm, well the part about going to skid row to get there rings a bell- somewhere off Larimer, right? I just remember it being a dirty little place on a busy street.

Having grown up in MN I can tell you Jesse was a helluva lot better than what we’re stuck with now. Also, if it weren’t for his insistence, we still wouldn’t have light rail here, which has turned out to be wildly successful.