That’s the witty that I wished I had been born with, but NOOOOO…..When God asked Witty? I thought he said Titty and after thinking a moment about it all I asked for a small one and now I just get to be tactless!
Ice Cream and CD trading? My daughter snarls to me about once a month right now, “When I leave this house I’m never speaking to you again!” Ice Cream and CD swap will be a big step up when we get there.
Well, let’s start out with SluggoJD’s excellent diary exposing an Internet troll seeking to discredit Black Box Voting (a group of vocal Diebold critics) to be a Diebold employee. I love it when geekery accomplishes something worthwhile.
Oh, and Jon Tester won and Francine Busby didn’t. But you all probably knew that anyway.
Ever since 1998, Democrats have tried and failed to oust Rep. Heather Wilson, a four-term Republican from New Mexico who has consistently been considered one of her party’s most vulnerable incumbents.
But Democrats say 2006 will be different. And the reason comes down to chromosomes.
This year, Democrats are putting a woman up against Wilson. New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid–who like Wilson faces no opposition in the June 6 primary contest–will be one of a potentially record-breaking number of women in races featuring female candidates from both major parties in the November midterm elections.
There are currently 27 congressional and gubernatorial races that could feature women as nominees for both the Democratic and Republican parties in the 2006 midterm elections, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, a research organization at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, N.J. That number is sure to decline as primaries winnow out female candidates, but it could nonetheless break the record that was set in 1998, when 14 races featured women representing both major parties.
Running a female challenger against a female incumbent is a strategy that has been used for years by the GOP, said Gilda Morales, a researcher at the Rutgers center.
This year, Morales said, Democrats are following suit by encouraging women to challenge Republican female incumbents in states such as New Mexico, Colorado, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Ohio and Texas. Republicans, meanwhile, are continuing to put up women against Democratic women in such states as California, Georgia, New York and Ohio.
The high number of races featuring two female candidates is a mixed blessing for women in the political arena: it gives female candidates experience and visibility but it also means that a victory will not contribute to an overall net gain among women in state or federal office.
He was the last in a long line of Grateful Dead keyboardists, several of whom died prematurely, leading some of the group’s fans to conclude that the position came with a curse.
He had replaced Brent Mydland, who died of a drug overdose in 1990. Mydland had succeeded Keith Godchaux, who died in a car crash shortly after leaving the band. Godchaux had replaced the band’s original keyboard player, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, a heavy drinker who died in 1973 at age 27.
McNally recalled that the legend of the curse took a lighthearted turn at Welnick’s first performance with the Grateful Dead.
“Just before he was to go on for the first time, one of the sound guys went over and sat down at Vince’s seat in front of the piano and it collapsed under him,” he said.
A divorce lawyer offers a warning for men feeling flattered by that pretty young woman at the office: appearances can be deceptive.
They are identifiable not by their short skirts or heavy make-up but by their unflinching devotion to their male bosses. They will work late for them, pick up their dry cleaning and even buy birthday presents for their relatives. They are single women who, stuck in their search for a personal partner, are ready to give their all to a professional one. What they want is a high-earning, high-flying, high-virility man – and one who they can drag to the altar. Welcome to the world of the “office piranha”…
It just gets worse from there…but Jill at Feministe does a wonderful takedown: Go read it instead.
BAGHDAD, Jun 7 (IPS) – Baghdad’s central morgue received more than a thousand bodies each month this year, a doctor has revealed. The body count here gives a more accurate picture of the story in Baghdad than any official statistics.
Before the war this morgue located at Bab al-Mu’atham near the city centre received only about 200 to 300 bodies a month, Dr Kais Hassan who has worked at the morgue said.
There are only three storage rooms, and two doctors at the centre. Today the morgue is overflowing. On some days more than 100 bodies are interred at the morgue.
(snip)
IPS was refused access to the morgue, and was told journalists are forbidden to report on the conditions inside.
“The last manager for this morgue, Faik Bakr, received death threats because he said there were more than 7,000 Iraqis killed by death squads in recent months,” an employee told IPS. “Most of the dead arrived with their hands tied behind their backs.”
The employee advised the IPS correspondent to leave immediately.
(snip)
Bodies arrive at the morgue in the custody of the police convoys many times throughout the day. While IPS was speaking with Ahmed, two police vehicles arrived, carrying many bodies.
After a few minutes of chaos, one man began shouting, “This is my son! He was tortured and killed, I lost him forever!” Many people gathered around to comfort him.
The body showed many holes. One of the eyes had been removed.
The father, Ali, spoke with IPS after the body was taken into the morgue. “He was a shopkeeper, his shop was in al-Rashid street, and three days ago he was arrested by police, and I find him here, killed.”
Ali believes his son was killed only because he is Sunni. He said his son was not wanted by the police for any crime. “He was loved by all his friends, and everyone liked him. He was innocent and he did nothing wrong.”
SEATTLE, Washington, Jun 6 (IPS) – Beneath the roar of enormous pro-immigrant rallies across the United States, and behind congressional debates over border walls and guest workers, lurks a knotty question: Who wins and who loses from illegal immigration?
(snip)
But the kindred issue of whether immigrant labour is undercutting wages and employment for some U.S.-born workers has provoked a serious debate on both the right and the left. Liberal columnists and Minuteman vigilantes alike have invoked the spectre of reduced wages and employment opportunities for those citizens who compete in the job market with undocumented workers.
(snip)
Testifying before Congress last year, Harry J. Holzer, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labour, concluded, “Most studies show that, over the longer term, immigrants have very modest negative effects on the employment of less-educated workers in the United States, but generate other benefits for the U.S. economy.”
“I think that the effects on American workers are fairly modest, and for most people they’re positive,” said Douglas Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University.
The economic issues are not clear theoretically or empirically, he told IPS, and answers are not overwhelmingly negative or positive. “But the evidence is consistent showing that whatever [the effects of immigration] are, they’re relatively small compared to the scale of the American economy,” he added.
You think you got trouble, Boobie? Well let me tell you:
They’re baaaack.
In a sequel to last summer’s aquatic uprising, a rowdy gang of sea lions has floated into Newport Harbor for “Attack of the Blubbered Beasts, Part 2.”
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Newport Beach joined the quest for a sea lion antidote last summer, after the animals sank a sailboat, tormented residents with nonstop barking and created “local pungent odor problems” with their penchant for vomiting.
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Sea lions are the Eddie Haskells of the ocean world: well-behaved and cuddly in trained-animal shows at SeaWorld, but conniving and menacing in the wild. Up and down the Pacific Coast, they’ve attacked swimmers, chomped bodyboards, raided fishing operations and occasionally yanked people off boats.
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Full article at LA Times
I just love their approach to dealing with the rowdy critters:
Oddly, sea lions dislike being sprayed with water, biologists say. The creatures must spend half their time out of the ocean to maintain proper body temperature, and being spritzed annoys them.
When Monterey was overrun by 1,500 sea lions a few years ago, town officials supplied giant squirt guns to criminals doing community service and had them roam the marina with orders to shoot to soak. The 24-hour patrols helped quell the mammal invasion.
I dunno, picturing the town drunks armed with SuperSoakers just cracks me up for some reason…
We get sea lions around here quite a bit. There was one particularly colorful individual people named “Herschel” who held court in the Ballard Locks in the middle of Seattle. I don’t know what happened to him, and I can’t look it up right now because I have another story to put up.
After hijacking an anti-gay-rights referendum from its evangelical backers, Tim Eyman ran it into the ground Tuesday.
Minutes before the filing deadline, the for-profit initiative promoter surprised many political experts by announcing in Olympia that he and other supporters failed — by a wide margin — to gather enough voter signatures to force a public vote on the state’s new gay civil rights law. It takes effect today.
If it sounds like the P-I stopped short of calling him a liar and a cheat, that’s only because of their restraint:
Eyman led news media to believe he had enough referendum signatures when he held a news conference in Olympia Monday, but he showed up dressed in a Darth Vader costume but with no petitions. He gloated later about how he had duped reporters.
And in the Imminent Apocalypse department, I never thought I would agree with anything coming out of the mouth of former state GOP chair Chris Vance:
“Now he’s coming in and hijacking issues and shoving his way into an issue because it’s become a business for him. It’s how he gets paid,” said Chris Vance, former chairman of the state Republican Party and now a consultant with The Gallatin Group in Seattle.
. . .
The former GOP chairman thinks Eyman is damaging “the legitimate perception of the initiative process. When you’ve got a clown out there in a Darth Vader suit lying to the press and things like that, it’s not good for the initiative and referendum process.”
By the way, Tim Eyman was once the subject of a voter’s initiative himself. Local blogger Goldy of horsesass.com once tried, and unfortunately failed, to get a measure on the ballot that would have allowed voters to vote to declare Eyman a horse’s ass.
Although creative-centrist books, conferences, and policy proposals have flourished since the new century began (see the contents of this website!), there’s been little in the way of organization-building that could challenge the two major political parties.
The protests and Shadow Conventions at the Democratic and Republican conventions (see HERE) led nowhere; the New America Foundation has its hands full just being the most pragmatic-and-visionary think tank on the planet (see HERE); and the Democracy in America Project has done little since holding its founding meeting two summers ago (see HERE) except hold more meetings, announce a series of high-minded goals and purposes, and adopt a mouthful of a name, “Reuniting America: A Transpartisan Campaign of Political Reconciliation.”
As of two days ago, that whole picture changed.
At last, there’s a creative-centrist political organization — Unity08 — with the savvy, resources, and determination to challenge for the Presidency in the year 2008.
Although the nomination process will be grassroots (or rather, netroots) to the core, two criteria are set in stone: (1) Unity08’s Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates must come from different major parties (or be independents running as a “unity team” with members of both parties), and (2) the candidates must agree to seriously address the most crucial issues of our time.
And you’ll get to help nominate them. If all goes well, “up to 20 million Americans” will choose the Unity 08 nominees during an online nominating convention in mid-2008.
I thought Kathy Griffin’s take on Ann Coulter on morning tv yesterday was a riot…
That’s the witty that I wished I had been born with, but NOOOOO…..When God asked Witty? I thought he said Titty and after thinking a moment about it all I asked for a small one and now I just get to be tactless!
You’ll just have to settle for cerebral instead.
n/t
Too bad they didn’t put the two of them on together.
That would’ve been great.
She came by with ice cream last night and we traded cds…she has the new Dixie Chicks, and I gave her my James Hunter. 🙂
Ice Cream and CD trading? My daughter snarls to me about once a month right now, “When I leave this house I’m never speaking to you again!” Ice Cream and CD swap will be a big step up when we get there.
Well, let’s start out with SluggoJD’s excellent diary exposing an Internet troll seeking to discredit Black Box Voting (a group of vocal Diebold critics) to be a Diebold employee. I love it when geekery accomplishes something worthwhile.
Oh, and Jon Tester won and Francine Busby didn’t. But you all probably knew that anyway.
Full Article at Women’s eNews
n/t
Vince Welnick (former keyboard player for the Dead and the Tubes) died last Friday.
Was that like the quietest GD-related death ever, or have I just been living in a vacuum this week?
I heard it from you.
But, then I quit seeing the Dead while Brent was still alive. I never saw Vince perform.
Nobody was ever able to replace Brent…the closest they came was having Welnick AND Hornsby play with the band together.
Puh-leeze: FT
It just gets worse from there…but Jill at Feministe does a wonderful takedown: Go read it instead.
From our reporter in Hell on Earth.
Morgue Tells the Updated Story
More than a thousand bodies a month. Another happy story of success in Iraq.</snark>
MIGRATION-US:
Statistics Reveal More “Winners” Than “Losers”
You think you got trouble, Boobie? Well let me tell you:
Couldn’t resist sharing this.
Enjoy
Peace
I just love their approach to dealing with the rowdy critters:
I dunno, picturing the town drunks armed with SuperSoakers just cracks me up for some reason…
We get sea lions around here quite a bit. There was one particularly colorful individual people named “Herschel” who held court in the Ballard Locks in the middle of Seattle. I don’t know what happened to him, and I can’t look it up right now because I have another story to put up.
Front #1: Washington voters turn their back on hatred.
Front #2: The biggest horses’s ass in the state has not only pissed off the voters, he’s pissed off the media as well.
Eyman Fails To Deliver:
If it sounds like the P-I stopped short of calling him a liar and a cheat, that’s only because of their restraint:
And in the Imminent Apocalypse department, I never thought I would agree with anything coming out of the mouth of former state GOP chair Chris Vance:
By the way, Tim Eyman was once the subject of a voter’s initiative himself. Local blogger Goldy of horsesass.com once tried, and unfortunately failed, to get a measure on the ballot that would have allowed voters to vote to declare Eyman a horse’s ass.
Unity08: The most promising political initiative of our time!
at Radical Middle Political Newsletter