The Seventh Sense

What I Did For Love

An anonymous patron who recently saw the production of Sordid Lives that I am a part of:

I just want to tell you how much we enjoyed the play.
 
I learned recently that my hours at work are being cut and am losing my health insurance (at almost 62 years old) & have been in bummed mode lately. I bought the tickets thinking that I may get a laugh or 2, especially after having enjoyed "Plaid Tidings" so, so much.
 
Well, I just want you to know how much we enjoyed "Sordid Lives," and how much it brought my head up. It was the best $25 bucks I ever spent. The whole cast was terrific. Gray Smith is a joy. He made me laugh, he made me cry. The play just lifted my spirits. Thank you all so much for helping me to feel better.
 
By the way, I'm the woman who danced with that very gorgeous young woman at intermission.
 
Can't wait for for "The Great American Trailer Park Musical."
 
Thank you, thank you!!!

Tonight is the last night of our four(!) weeks of performing this show.  We're all a little tired, but we're all ready to move on....

Basic Skills

The Best Article Every Day recently a list of the 14 Basic Skills All Men Should Possess.

How do you rank?

I've evaluated myself....

14 Basic Skills All Men Should Know:

1. Drive a stick-shift - It's been a while, but I think I can
2. Hook up an entertainment center - You bet 
3. Fix a toilet - Depends on what's wrong with it
4. Navigate a map and use GPS - Oh, yeah 
5. Change the oil - I can in a pinch.
6. Balance a checkbook - Yes
7. Cook the perfect steak - "Perfect"?  I don't know.  Maybe.
8. Swim the breaststroke - Very good breaststroker 
9. Write effectively - Effectively?  Yes.
10. Dress for the occasion - Oh, I possess this skill; Don't always choose to do it though.
11. Sew a button - Sure
12. Do laundry properly - Yes, I think so.
13. Handle roadside emergencies - Yup
14. Build a fire - Of course. 

J-Walk Blog decided to do a list of 14 Basic Skills All Women Should Know.  I micht as well evaluate myself on that, too.

1. Know which devices are controlled by each remote control - Yes
2. Start a gas-powered lawnmower - Yes
3. Crochet a hat - Not at all
4. Create a frequency distribution in Excel by using a pivot table - No, but I'm, sure I could figure it out quick
5. Prepare huevos rancheros - No
6. Speak a few sentences in French - Oui
7. Reinstall Windows without losing everything - No
8. Give a good backrub - Sure
9. Use all the features on their digital camera - Yes
10. Parallel park - Yes
11. Create a custom ringtone and upload it to your their phone - Yes
12. Hang pictures on the wall - Yes
13. Use Google efficiently - Yes
14. Cut hair - No

The Badly-Titled USA Today Story Has Legs

Background here.  Basically, USA Today printed an article which (from the headline) made it seem that Obama was sterring stimulus money to counties that voted for him, while steering it away from counties that voted for McCain.

From the article itself, one can glean that this simply isn't true, and that poorer counties (the ones most in need of stimulus spending) tend to vote Democratic.  One of those correlation-not-causation things.

Even Adam Hughes, the director of federal fiscal policy for the non-profit OMB Watch, explained that “it would be almost inconceivable for [the spending imbalance] to be the result of political tinkering.”

That didn't stop some right-wing blogs from misprepresenting the article.

Nor did it stop Fox News:

Of course, Fox News selectively quoted from the USA Today article, leaving out the parts which showed that the Obama-voting counties traditionally receive more federal aid historically, including many years prior to the election.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum weighs in:

I just got around to reading the piece, and aside from the factual statement in the lead, it doesn't insinuate that the money is being unfairly distributed.  In fact, every single paragraph after the lead quotes people saying that there's nothing dubious going on and the money is just being distributed by formula.  The piece doesn't quote a single person, not even Sarah Palin, suggesting that there's any monkey business going on here.

But if there's no hanky panky, why bother publishing the story in the first place?  My guess: it's the old problem of reporters not being willing to spike a story when it doesn't pan out.  Brad Heath spent a bunch of time analyzing stimulus spending, but when everyone he called told him there was nothing amiss he just hated the idea of spending all that time and not getting anything out of it.  So he wrote it up anyway, ending up with a nonsensical piece that basically rebuts its own reason for existing.  Dumb.

Yup.

WSJ Takes On The Palin Myths

Ouch.  This one actually hurts, in part because its from the conservative Wall Street Journal, which is none to sad to see Sarah go. [UPDATE:  I didn't see it the first time -- it's a Peggy Noonan editorial; Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter, was once caught in an unguarded moment (the mikes were live) complaining on MSNBC that the choice of Palin as VP was "political bullshit"]

I've highlighted the Palin-supporter myths in bold

Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News and World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

The conservative reaction to this will be fun to watch....

The article ends with some sound advice for the GOP:

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

We're No. 25!

Allstate released its Fifth Annual ''Allstate America's Best Drivers Report(TM)" which ranks which cities in the country have the safest drivers.

The safest is Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The least safe is Washington, DC.

Winston-Salem ranked a remarkable 25th.

Well, not that remarkable when you think about it.  The people here drive at an average speed of 30 mph.

Christopher Walken Impersonations

I might make this a recurring feature.  I love a good CW impersonation.

Let's start off with Walken as a nursery school teacher:

Now a bunch of asians doing rather good Walkens:

Kevin Pollack does a good Walken:

And Kevin Spacey does Walken (among others):

Palin Poll

A new Public Policy Polling survey found that 55 percent of Americans think Sarah Palin is not fit to be president. Thirty-seven percent think she would be able to do the job.  That's remarkable.  Note that the question was not one of preference, but simply a question of whether she was fit to be president.

What accounts for the negative results?

Well, obviously, David Letterman.

RELATED:  Slate's negative column on Palin may seem mean, but it's correct:

But Palin's act of explaining her resignation to us in a torrent of unconnected sentence fragments left everyone wondering, What was the point of Sarah Palin? If she cannot even communicate a simple idea ("I'm quitting because …"), why should we care that she's quitting?

That's why the strangest part of the Sarah Palin saga will always be her loathing of the media. She never failed to remind us that she didn't like being "filtered." She only wanted to talk directly to us, her listeners. Yet the reason Sarah Palin continues to have any kind of political force at all in this country is because of the media "filter." The media helped refine and define her Dada statements and arguments into something that briefly sounded like a coherent worldview. Yesterday morning, Gov. Palin excoriated Andrea Mitchell for "not listening to me" in an NBC interview. You have to go back and watch the clip before you can apprehend that Mitchell was indeed listening. It was Palin who was speaking in half-expressed thoughts and internal contradictions.

***

Think of an American visiting France who believes that if he just speaks louder, he will be speaking French. Palin has done everything in her power to explain herself to us, and still we fail to appreciate what she is all about. I'd be frustrated, too, if I thought I was offering up straight talk and nobody was getting the message. Especially if I held a degree in communications.

Once you understand that Palin's only actual message is the importance of loving and understanding Palin, it becomes easier to understand why she quit. The more Palin tries to explain herself, the more we all fail to get her. Every time she goes off script, she makes less sense. No wonder she didn't want to do debate prep or be coached by the McCain communications team. Instead of thanking those who packaged, explained, and spun her, Palin resents them. And because she believes she has been crystal clear all along, she's come to resent us, too. The enduring political lesson of Sarah Palin may simply be that for most of her political career she's been lost in translation, without fully appreciating that only in translation was she ever, briefly found.

Yup. 

Landlord Of The Flies

It's rare that a blog is worth reading from start to finish, but this one is the exception.  Less than two months old, the blog Stranger Than Eviction, tells the account of one man's recent struggle with his landlord.

It's a quick read, and an amusing one.  Start from the first post (at the end) and go forward.

A Beauty Pageant Queen I Can ... Uh... Get Behind

What with Miss South Carolina trying to answer a question about "US Americans" lack of geographic knowledge, and Miss "I forgot I posed naked" California's getting all "gays are ungodly" in our face, I've done a fair share of beauty-pageant-winner bashing on this blog.

So I'm more than happy to read (and report) this:

After winning the Miss Georgia title Saturday night at the RiverCenter’s Bill Heard Theatre, Miss Capital City Kristina Higgins told pageant officials Sunday morning she wanted to relinquish the crown.

“She just didn’t think that she could fulfill the duties,” said Billy Kendall, secretary for the Miss Georgia Board of Trustees.

Why not?  Why couldn't Ms. Higgins be Miss Georgia?  A lucrative career on the conservative lecture circuit (like Miss California)?  Some sex scandal?

Nope.

In a statement, 24-year-old Higgins suggested her duties as a middle school teacher could interfere with the time commitment that comes with being Miss Georgia.

“Due to my current job responsibilities as a middle school teacher and the responsibilities and time commitment as Miss Georgia, I have decided to not fulfill the duties of Miss Georgia 2009. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been chosen as Miss Georgia and fully support the system and wish Emily Cook the best of luck,” Higgins said in the statement.

She's a schoolteacher and she feels responsible to the kids.

Class act.  They should let her keep the crown anyway, because that kind of commitment embodies the ideals of the ultimate woman, which -- if I'm not mistaken -- is supposedly what beauty pageants are about these days.

An Open Letter To Walmart's Lawyers

Guys:

I can't imagine any earthly reason why I would want to follow Walmart's tweets on Twitter.  Believe me, there is nothing Walmart can say -- especially in 140 characters or less -- that would be of the slightest interest to me.

But, I recognize that I am powerless to stop the aging process which results in a slow slide into dementia.  I also recognize that, conceivably, I could get whacked in the head by a falling piano, lose all my senses, and start behaving erratically.  In other words, it is theoretically possible, albeit unlikely, that I may someday choose to follow Walmart's tweets on Twitter.  Perhaps I will center my entire life around Walmart's wonderful little missives -- who knows?

Should that happen someday, I hope you will forgive me if I avoid reading and agreeing to your stupid "Twitter External Discussion Policy" as well as your 3,379 word long "Walmart's Twitter Terms of Use", pictured (partially!) below.  

You need to realize that you're asking me to read the equivalent of 30 full-length tweets (and excruciatingly dull ones, at that) just to get permission to read a single actual tweet.  You get that, right?

What I'm trying to say is this: Dudes, get over yourselves.  It's just Twitter, for chrissakes.

Hugs and Kisses,

Ken

Greensboro Spared My Rendition of The National Anthem

It was originally supposed to be Scott and me, doing the National Anthem and "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" in front of 6,000 or so Greensboro Grasshopper fans.

Fortunately -- for greater Greensboro, I think -- I have a prior commitment tonight.

Opposing A Marker Acknowledging Slave Labor

The United States Capital Building, its wonderful dome, and the Statue of Freedom that sits atop it, were built by slave labor.

Yeah, I know.  Bit of national shame and embarassment.

Tuesday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives sought to redress that grievance in some small way with a resolution acknowledging the role slaves played in the Capital's construction.  The purpose of the resolution, according to its text, was to direct "the Architect of the Capitol to place a marker in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center which acknowledges the role that slave labor played in the construction of the United States Capitol."

A casual observer of national politics might watch the 24 hour news or read blogs and come away thinking that everything that happens in the halls of Congress turns into a divided partisan bicker.  But in fact, Congress tends to agree a lot on a lot of things, especially relatively minor things like the slave labor resolution.

And indeed, the resolution passed 399-1.

Of course, one wonders what was in the mind of the sole congressman who voted against it.  His name is Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

So why did he do it?

Well, his first explanation was this (I'm paraphrasing): (1) Congress had already changed the name of the Great Hall in the Capital Visitor's Center to Emancipation Hall in honor of all them slaves -- ain't that enough???? and (2)  Congress has been reluctant to plaster "In God We Trust" on every portico, doorknob and urinal in the Capital building.  So his vote was to defend religion.  (His actual words were:

"The architect of the capitol has been for years trying to eradicate any sign of faith or Christianity from the capitol itself and from the historical documents that flow from it," King says. "...I'm out of patience with these kind of maneuverings.")

But in an interview with Radio Iowa yesterday, King, after he established his "I'm no racist no really I'm not" bonafides, offered a new explanation for his vote, complaining that the slave labor resolution wasn’t a “balanced depiction of history”:

KING: I would just add that there were about 645,000 slaves that were brought to the United States. And I’m with Martin Luther King, Jr. on this. His documents, his speeches – I’ve read most of them. And I agree with almost every word that came out of him. Slavery was abhorrent, but it was also a fact of life in those centuries where it existed.

And of the 645,000 Africans that were brought here to be forcibly put into slavery in the United States, there were over 600,000 people that gave their lives in the Civil War to put an end to slavery. And I don’t see the monument to that in the Congressional Visitor Center, and I think it’s important that we have a balanced depiction of history.

Riiiiight.  A balanced depiction of history.

How many monuments are there in Washington D.C. which acknowledge slavery? ZERO.

How many monuments are there in Washington D.C. which acknowledge the contributions of those who fought in the Civil War?  Enough to fill a book... including the Grant Memorial just outside the Capital Building itself.

But setting that aside, a marker noting that the Capital was actually built by slaves seems highly related to the, uh, Capital Visitor Center -- the place which provides visitor information for people who want to learn about the Capital Building.  On the other hand -- while the deaths of Civil War soldiers bears historical importance, I'm not quite sure what those deaths have to do with the Capital building itself.

And finally, King wants to honor the "over 600,000 people that gave their lives in the Civil War to end slavery".  Someone needs to tell him that about 360,000 of the 618,000 war casualties actually died to end slavery.  The other 258,000 or so died to preserve it.  Just sayin....

On The Gay Marriage Front

It went little-noticed, but D.C. made an advancement in the gay marriage acceptance.  No, sadly, it didn't go as far as the New England states and Iowa in recognizing gay marriages solemnized within its borders, but it did pass a law saying that it would honor and recognize gay marriages from other states.  So you if you gay marry in Boston, and you move to D.C., they will treat you for legal persons as a married person.

This all goes to DOMA (The Defense of Marriage Act), which is the federal law stating that (1) that marriage is between a man and a woman only and (2) each state and the federal government do not have to recognize legally-valid gay marriages from them gay-loving states like Iowa.

Massachusetts fired a shot across the bow of DOMA today, by challenging its constitutionality in federal court:

The lawsuit questions the constitutionality of Section 3 of the law, which defines the word "marriage" for the purpose of federal law as "a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."

In doing so, it prevents same-sex partners from enjoying a wide range of protections, ranging from employment and retirement benefits, insurance coverage and Social Security payments.

[The lawsuit] does not challenge the constitutionality of Section 2, which provides that states are not required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

The suit alleges that the law violates the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves to the states all powers except those granted to the federal government. It also alleges that the law violates Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which limits the power of Congress to attach conditions to the receipt of federal funds.

Constitutionally speaking, the Massachusetts lawsuit should be a no-brainer.  Marriage is, and has always been, a creature of state law.  Each state, for example, possesses the power to decide the legal age at which people can be married.  They have their own divorce laws.  Quite simply, prior to DOMA, there simply did not exist "marriage law" at the federal level, and the principles of federalism embodied in the Tenth Amendment preserve those powers to the states.

There are some countering arguments, but none of them trump the Tenth Amendment.

Obama, the former constitutional law professor, knows this, I am sure.  But sadly, Obama the politician is AWOL here.  We'll see how this plays out.

Read The Whole Article, People

Shame on USA Today for their article entitled:

Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in '08

Why, that kind of makes the reader think that Obama is rewarding the parts of the country that voted for him at the expense of those who voted for McCain.

Certainly there's support for that theory.  As the article explains, 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34.

So naturally, conservatives are howling.

Never mind exactly how the Obama team managed to employ all the people necessary to pull off a scheme like this.  The facts are the facts, right?

Of course, what conservative critics fail to acknowledge, probably because USA Today stuck it deep into the article, is that those same 872 counties that supported Obama in 2008 also "collected about 50% more government aid than those that supported McCain" in the years 2005 through 2007.  Now how did Team Obama pull that one off, with a Republican White House?

The simple truth is that counties which are populated by the less well-off are historically the counties that require more government aid, regardless of who is in the White House.  And those same counties also tend to vote Democrat.

Nothing to see here.

Fox News & Friends Host Makes Hitleresque Comment

Wow.  Salon explains what you're about to see:

....Host Brian Kilmeade's performance on Wednesday was just terrible.

Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are -- we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other ..."

At this point, his co-host tried to -- in that jokey morning show way -- tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn't get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes .... Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."

"Pure society"?  Really?  You want to claim that Americans suffer from Alzheimer's because we're not being ethnically pure?

It is funny to watch Kilmeade's cohosts try to bail him out, and when he keeps running off at the mouth, how they frown and try to make clear to the viewers at home that they don't agree with him:

 

More On Sarah Palin's Reason For Quitting

Once you cut through the basketball metaphors and folksy homilies and -- well -- crap, Palin asserts the quit as governor because all the ethics violations against her was taking a toll on the state.  So, she was doing it for the good of the people.

The problem with that, as I mentioned yesterday, is that there are currently only three pending ethics violations investigations, and only one of those is against her.  That's out of 18 she's had since she became governor.

The Anchoarge Daily News looked into this further.  And it turns out that the people who were handling these ethics investigations on behlf of Sarah Palin were people in the Alaska Department of Law, whose job it is to do that.  In other words, it's not like Sarah Palin or the State of Alaska were incurring expenses for these ethics investigations.  There was no "millions" waster: those people would have been paid anyway.

Yet, the Palin camp would have you believe that roads were being built, police were not monitoring the streets, dogs were mating with cats, etc...  which was why Sarah was compelled to quit -- for the supposed "good of the people of Alaska".

CIA Admits It Lied To Congress For Years

Dog Bites Man story:

WASHINGTON — The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.

In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.

In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.”

I think we can safely assume that it relates to "enhanced interrogation techniques", but we can't be sure.

Why, by the way, are only Democrats upset that Congress was lied to by the CIA?

Well, recall a few months ago.  Nancy Pelosi said the CIA misled her about waterboarding, and the Republicans were all "The CIA?  Lying to Congress?  No, you are lying Ms. Pelosi".  So they can't stand togather now and admit the CIA has lied to Congress -- it might hinder their efforts to attack Pelosi.

Some More-Or-Less Seemingly Spontaneous (But Not Really) Public Tributes To MJ

Kind of in the same vein as "The Sound of Music" in the train station:

Gop Strategist On Palin

He doesn't mince words... and he's right on the money:

Republican strategist (and NBC analyst) Mike Murphy again takes on Sarah Palin. He calls her "the political train wreck that keeps on giving." He said she "brought nothing to the [McCain] ticket except a surefire knack for exciting voters who were already reliably Republican." More: "We are now told the party base -- those voters who will vote for a bag of cement if it has an R or D attached to it -- must be carefully appealed to, romanced and appeased. Under that funhouse reasoning, Palin was an inspired pick." And: "She lacks any real accomplishment - no military or private-sector career of note, no academic achievement beyond a frenetic bounce between five colleges, including a sun 'n' surf-oriented outfit in Hawaii. She has served only two years as governor of a small and uniquely easy-to-govern state (other governors pine for Alaska's small population and billions of dollars in easy revenue from oil production), a job she has now abandoned." To her presidential chances? "[S]he may have enough support to attempt a run for President. She'll lose, of course, almost certainly the Republican primaries and certainly the general election."

Technical Difficulties

Apparently my YouTube postings aren't coming through (thanks for letting me know, Brett!).  Ok.  Well, I'll see what I can do....