Neil Haugerud’s main claim to fame nowadays is as the author of Jailhouse Stories, a collection of tales chronicling his eight years as sheriff of Fillmore County, Minnesota. But now he’s got a new book out, a novel called Holiday Forever, which is also his first foray into the e-book world.

Boo!

What’s the best Halloween you’ve ever had?

Zero Mostel – Fears of Zero, from episode 202 of The Muppet Show.

With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

Pending home sales fell again in September, yet another of the bad signals coming out of a broken housing market, one of the biggest challenges for economic growth. Residential investment as a share of GDP is now shockingly low, below any point in the past 60 years.

For the Romney campaign, the best thing is for Obama to be weak enough that he can be defeated, but strong enough that it seems only Romney can beat him. Obama with a job approval in the mid-40s is right about in the sweet spot for Romney.

But Obama doesn’t appear as weak as he did at the beginning of the month.

Why does Bieber even know who Amy Klobuchar is, let alone this animosity? It’s about S.978, the so-called “Protect IP Act,” and the House version, known as the “Stop Online Piracy Act.” Among other things, these bills would make Web streaming of copyrighted work a felony, with a 5-year jail sentence. Because the Beebs got his start by posting his renditions of other people’s songs on YouTube, activists have used him as a rallying point, creating the site FreeBieber.org. Bieber’s lawyers have filed a cease and desist order against the site, incidentally, so Bieber isn’t ALL that committed to Internet freedom.

The correct term for the struggle same-sex couples are fighting for, the recognition of their intimate unions by the state on the same terms, entirely, of the relationships of opposite-sex couples is “Marriage Equality.” There’s actually no such thing as “Gay Marriage,” which is the preferred term of American homobigots, sometimes accompanied by the disparaging prefix so-called.

On Tuesday, our permit for “Camp Coyote” at the University of New Mexico, where our Occupation has been located, was not renewed by the President of UNM. When I read that the camp would be closed down at 10 PM, I knew I would be in jail by the end of the day.

We held our GA, as scheduled, on Tuesday at 6 PM. I had watched the Livestream of Chicago arrests (thank you, FDL!) on Saturday night, and I proposed that we follow their model of resisters (those willing to risk arrest) in the center with supporters surrounding us or on the sidewalk. We came to consensus on this, and afterward, we broke into groups to plan our actions

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted last week to implement recommendations from the Near-Term Task Force Review of Insights from the Fukushima Daiichi Accident (PDF), and to do so “without delay.” Coming over seven months after the earthquake and tsunami that started the crisis in Japan, and over four months after the Near-Term Task Force (NTTF) issued its report, the move highlights what might be accomplished when attention is paid, but also illustrates systemic flaws in the US nuclear regulatory regime.