Stalked by Barack

Another note from Toonces (no salutation):

I know we've been contacting you more than usual lately. It reflects the reality that the campaign season is already ramping up -- whether it feels early or not.

So we have a dilemma. While our opponents are campaigning full time, I'm busy doing the job I was elected to do. There will be a moment when I can be part of this campaign in a bigger way, but it won't come for a while.

But that doesn't mean you can slow down. I need you to help pick up the slack.

Midnight tomorrow is an important deadline. The Vice President and I would love to meet you. Please give $5 now to support this campaign -- you'll be automatically entered to join us for dinner when you do [link follows].

Barack

What happened to "No purchase necessary"?

Geez, I beat Ace or an Ace-like entity on the "dinner with Barack" contest by a ton. Eeeeeeee! But he also linked to a later video where Barack announces that Joltin' Joe will be there too. Eeee--aw, fuck it.

A few more Koskid taglines

Went over there to see the reaction to Weiner's resignation. Eh. Lots of people saying he was an egregious dick who deserved to lose his job; at least as many defending him and excoriating Dem leadership for forcing him out. Whatever. Taglines!

Let the yoke fall from our shoulders; Don’t carry it all, don’t carry it all; We are all our hands and holders; Beneath this bold and brilliant sun; And this I swear to all - The Decemberists.

If it's
Not your body
Then it's
Not your choice
AND it's
None of your damn business!

Ayn Rand’s philosophy... reduces itself to: "I’m on board; pull up the lifeline."- Roger Ebert

Please Help Me Volunteer in Haiti

"We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy, but we can't have both."-- Justice Louis Brandeis

I am living proof that a person living with AIDS can still enjoy the passion of lovemaking. AIDS is no longer a death sentence!

LBJ & Lady Bird, Sully Sullenberger, Molly Ivins, Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Drew Brees: Texas is No Bush League!

Full Disclosure: I am an unpaid shill for every paranoid delusion that lurks under your bed - but more than willing to cash any checks sent my way

Resident Palin - even if she did take up residency in the White House in 2012, it's too painful to use the "P" word combined with her name

"My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now." - JFK during the 1962 Steel Crisis

Every moment in life contains an off ramp. Never be afraid to use it.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Note from Barack. Subject:

Dinner?

Like I said, "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

John --

I've set aside time for four supporters like you to join me for dinner.

Most campaigns fill their dinner guest lists primarily with Washington lobbyists and special interests.

We didn't get here doing that, and we're not going to start now. We're running a different kind of campaign. We don't take money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs -- we never have, and we never will.

Yeah, sure (caution: link goes to Firedoglake).

We rely on everyday Americans giving whatever they can afford -- and I want to spend time with a few of you.

Eeeeeee--wait a minute. Whaddaya mean, "a few of you"? But I want you all to myself, you yummy hunk of man-child, you.

So if you make a donation today, you'll be automatically entered for a chance to be one of the four supporters to sit down with me for dinner. Please donate $5 or more today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

No.

We'll pay for your flight and the dinner -- all you need to bring is your story and your ideas about how we can continue to make this a better country for all Americans.

Who's this "we" who's paying for stuff again?

This won't be a formal affair. It's the kind of casual meal among friends that I don't get to have as often as I'd like anymore, so I hope you'll consider joining me.

But I'm not asking you to donate today just so you'll be entered for a chance to meet me. I'm asking you to say you believe in the kind of politics that gives people like you a seat at the table -- whether it's the dinner table with me or the table where decisions are made about what kind of country we want to be. . . .

I've said before that I want people like you to shape this campaign from the very beginning -- and this is a chance for four people to share their ideas directly with me.

Hope to see you soon,

Barack

Update: Just noticed that Katherine Archuleta, formerly Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's senior advisor in charge of dealing with Rec!reate!68 before and during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, has been named director of Obama's reelection campaign. Probably on Glenn Spagnuolo's recommendation.

Yes, I knew

Tonight's lunar eclipse wasn't going to be visible in the U.S., but I took a pic of the moon over the parachute ride at Elitch's amusement park on the edge of downtown Denver anyway. There were some fireworks going on too, but none of those turned out.


He said as if this one did.

Brit curriculum overhauler: Get rid of climate change

Guardian:

Climate change should not be included in the national curriculum, the government adviser in charge of overhauling the school syllabus in England has said.

Tim Oates, whose wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year, said it should be up to schools to decide whether – and how – to teach climate change, and other topics about the effect scientific processes have on our lives.

In an interview with the Guardian, Oates called for the national curriculum "to get back to the science in science". "We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don't date," he said. "We are not taking it back 100 years; we are taking it back to the core stuff. The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist." . . .

"Oxidation and gravity don't date." Irresistible implication: climate change does, and has.

Climate change has featured in the national curriculum since 1995. In 2007, the topics "cultural understanding of science" and "applications and implications of science" were added to the curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds.

But Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, warned that Oates' ideas might not be in pupils' best interests and could make science less interesting for children.

"An emphasis on climate change in the curriculum connects the core scientific concepts to topical issues," he said. "Certain politicians feel that they don't like the concept of climate change. I hope this isn't a sign of a political agenda being exercised."

He hopes this isn't a sign of a political agenda being exercised. Hahahahahahahahahahah--I can't feel my feet.

Post: Wart case should be canned by Colorado Supreme Court

Well, duh. Not gonna link, for reasons readers if any will know. Here's a quote the Post uses from one of the several thousand committees that found Wart to be a liar and cheat:

"To put it most simply, it was part of a pattern and consistent research stratagem to cloak extreme, unsupportable, propaganda-like claims of fact that support Professor Churchill's legal and political claims with the aura of authentic scholarly research . . . "

Well, duh. We'll see. I'd laugh about this, but once a panel of judges gets to decide things it's anybody's guess.

Dick

Ace and various cob-loggers at AoSHQ (no link, you know where they are) have been posting about Wienergate almost nonstop. Hit and miss, but as usual the commenters rescue some not-all-that-funny posts and kick a couple of funny ones into hyperdrive.

What I can't figure out is, why would anyone, ever, post a picture of himself on the fucking interwebs, let alone of his penis? I've been doing this blogging shit for almost six-and-a-half years, and I've never posted a pic of myself, nor ever will.

I'm ungodly handsome, too (prove me wrong!). And my penis is gigantic (prove me wrong!). Point is, and as often noted basically everywhere, the internet is forever.

One-sentence opinion: Weiner is obviously guilty, guilty, guilty, and there's nothing better than seeing an arrogant asshole get shit for his arrogant assholiness. And tiny penis. But mostly his tiny penis. Okay, three-sentence opinion.

"60 or 70"

That's the "crowd" that attended Wart's speech in GJ yesterday, according to 11News. Worth every penny of that $350 Confluence Media Collective paid him. He spoke for two fucking hours, "mostly," the TV station says, "about Memorial Day." "During the better part of his two hour long talk, he raised questions about why Americans don't honor soldiers on both sides of other conflicts, particularly those involving Native Americans."

Yeah, sure. And the Japanese and Germans in World War II? Why don't we honor them? Huh? Huh?

Other quote: "'I speak truth to people as best I can and try to stay consistent with that understanding and that obligation," said Churchill. "That's my concept of integrity.'"

Integrity. Bwahahah--by the way, I'm a child molester.

Update: JWP notes that the Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to hear Wart's case. Frankly, I was hoping they'd just blow it off. The pirate with the parrot who leans to the right has interesting facts and figures.

Seven p.m. to five a.m.

That's apparently the timeframe, according to East Bay Indymedia, for Wart's appearance at the Eastside Arts Alliance and Cultural Center in Oakland June 3, along with Ericka "My current Heart Question is: How do we facilitate learning about the intersections of race and gender" Huggins, Liz Derias and Claude Marks, to panel-discuss "COINTELPRO 101." Good Christ, Wart, get off it.

Still no word on how Wart's speech in Grand Junction went today, if it's even happened yet, though a TV station there says Tea Partiers are going to protest.

Tis the season

Local power provider Xcel Energy is set to restart its June-September two-tier energy pricing (scroll to last item) Wednesday. The idea is to discourage air-conditioner use by nearly doubling the price per KwH over 500 per month. Commenter Judy F. on a WUWT open thread notes:

Tonight on the 5 O’Clock news on KCNC Channel 4 in Denver, the newscasters reported that the snowpack in Colorado was 232% of normal and A Basin (a ski resort on I-70 east of the Continental Divide) received 53 inches of snow in May. Where I live on the Eastern Plains, today it was a cloudy 63 degrees F and normal is 76 degrees F. Then the newscasters reminded us that Xcel Energy’s two tier rate plan would go into effect on June 1, because of the increase in electrical demand in the summer. Shoot. Except for 3 days last week, my furnace has run everyday since last fall. I hope it warms up enough so I don’t have to pay summer rates to HEAT my house…

Yeah, me too. It's been a very, very cool spring here, with somewhere around four inches of rain in the last three weeks (Denver averages just under 17 inches annually). And yes, our furnace has been running every day too. When it's springtime in the Rockies . . .

Scary cover

Of the Beatles' Run for Your Life by Cowboy Junkies:



Update: That's really a hell of an arrangement. Love the bass line. And it continues a decades-long tradition of other artistes doing Beatles tunes better than the Beatles did (see Cocker, Joe).

After you, Alphonse

Ack-ronym

'Bout halfway through Stanley Kurtz' Radical-in-Chief. Meh. Not that he doesn't demonstrate that Obama hung around and worked with a lot of socialists. It's just that the book has too many acronyms. This isn't Kurtz' fault. Socialists are famously acronym-happy. But it makes for a slog, particularly for bedtime reading.

But I did run across one acronym that was pretty good. Page 202:

Another indicator of ACORN's ideology in the leadership's strong sense of continuity with American socialist history. The first ACORN handbook for new organizers, published in 1976-77, features ACORN leader Wade Rathke's tribute to H.L. Mitchell, leader of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union (STFU). . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Update: Yes, I know that's not a true acronym. STFU.

Where the elite meet to advocate the destruction of the world economy and the micromanagement of your life

For years now, and particularly since Climategate broke, one blog or another will post on the latest lie, end-of-the-world fatuity, statistical manipulation or sinister government grab related to AGW, and without fail either the poster or a commenter will say something like, "They're getting desperate," or "It's all falling apart" (I'm repeatedly guilty of that one).

The Boulder Daily Gamera, though, makes me wonder. Their "editorial advisory board," which each week answers a reader's question, answered this one last Saturday:

An 11-year-old boy whose neighborhood burned in the Fourmile Fire has joined with a friend afraid of losing favorite hiking trails and an 18-year-old student with a growing asthmatic condition in a lawsuit filed in Boulder County District Court against the state for failing to protect the environment. The lawsuit is part of a youth effort in all 50 states. A nationwide team of legal experts has been assembled through the nonprofit organization Our Children's Trust to represent the young people in their lawsuits. What do you think?

Well, it's Boulder. What do you think they think? Board member Judy Amabile, while calling the lawsuit "frivolous," adds this:

I applaud these young people`s activism. They should be encouraged. Their passion for the environment can bring about real change. The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the formation of the EPA, all came about because passionate citizens pressured the government to act.

We need more environmental legislation. We need to make sure we continue to fund agencies like the EPA. We need to elect representatives to Congress who believe that environmental stewardship should be a top priority for our government. . . .

Board member Marc Raizman:

We unthinkingly do things on a daily basis that adversely affect the environment. Driving cars when we could be riding a bus or a bicycle. Using plastics that will last 1,000 years. Generating too much garbage that threatens to overwhelm our dumps. Using too many forest products, such as paper. Do we really need Kleenex when handkerchiefs are renewable?

A related problem is that we are caught in a cultural treadmill that the corporate world insists on feeding us primarily through advertising. For example, If we began avoiding products that carried too much packaging, the corporations would adopt [sic] and reduce their use.

Keep in mind: There is no infinite growth in a finite world.

Steve Fisher:

This lawsuit raises three points for me. First, what is the role of an individual state or local government in the solution of a global problem? In my nearly 40 years working in and for governments, I`ve developed great respect for the grave limitations of governmental entities to solve broad social problems or engage in grand social experiments. We have done it before, but I think the global environmental problem dwarfs all previous problems.

Yet what is the alternative? Can we wait for voluntary action? Do we need something like a global green benevolent despot? I, for one, come up without an answer other than to continue muddling through. Ultimately is the solution a zero population growth, low consumption global society? . . .

Anne B. Butterfield:

The youth could not have more daunting science to buttress their case. Geoscientists are now holding that we have entered into a new geological period called the Anthropocene marked by sustained human impact on the earth`s biological conditions through resource depletion and climate disruption. And the National Research Council this week issued a requested report warning Congress about the grave advance of human-caused climate disruption that will thrust "profound" threat on future generations. Like the youth, the NRC calls for action on a national level.

The kids` somewhat quixotic efforts perhaps could be aimed at Exxon Mobil for apparently funding a team of denier-skeptics who have co-authored a blizzard of supposedly independent papers opposing conclusions of climate science, with the result of misleading federal officials who in turn block climate action. Perhaps in time they will.

There were one or two others, but you get the idea. The unexamined assumptions, the ridiculous assertions, the sententious pronouncements, the judicious panic. And these are not dumb people (or rather, not uneducated people). Sometimes you just want to shake them till their teeth rattle and their eyes roll back in their heads. Don't, though. It's against the law.

Tenants, again

So I have this tenant, a woman with three kids. She's nice enough, and so are the kids, but when she moved in she told me she had a husband she was separated from who is a diagnosed schizophrenic.

Fine, fine. He's gone, right? Yep.

Well, a few weeks ago, and unbeknownst to me, he moved in. Generally speaking when something like this happens I look the other way, at least for a while, and then, if the person stays, we redo the lease to add him or her and, of course, raise the rent. This is what I told the woman we'd do. The guy might be a schizo, but he didn't seem to be causing any problems, so big deal.

Not so sure that's going to happen after today. While I was staring blankly out my office window this morning (one of my many talents) I noticed the guy coming up the sidewalk. As I watched he turned and waved cheerily behind him and yelled, "Hi!" Then he walked a few more steps and waved cheerily ahead and again yelled "Hi!"

Now, I can see a couple of blocks both ways on this street, and naturally I looked to see who he was waving at.

There was nobody. Not behind him, not in front of him.

I don't want to make too much of this. For all I know he was just practicing his walk through the well of the House prior to giving his first State of the Union speech. Hell, I do that all the time, except in my case I'm waving to the reporters during my perp walk.

But it made me a little nervous.

Gravy train for Wart

The Daily Reporter, taking from the Grand Junction Sentinel:

A former University of Colorado professor known for his comparison of Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi plans to speak in western Colorado.

The Daily Sentinel reported Tuesday that an alternative media group, Confluence Media Collective, invited Ward Churchill to speak in Grand Junction Memorial Day weekend.

Officials with the group say they're willing to let him cover any topic he chooses. They're paying him $350 and providing lodging.

What happened to that "up to" $11,000 he once supposedly got for a speech? And they didn't even throw in a carton of smokes? You're being ripped off, Wart.

Update: Good God, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel has a paywall. What's their motto, "The New York Times of far-western Colorado"?

Update II: The Confluence Media Collective puts out a variety of publications, among them The Red Pill, which describes itself as "independent, horizontalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and all-inclusive." . . . They also publish Cuntastic, a twice-yearly "Journal of Reproductive and Sexual Freedom," and Mammaphiles, "a compilation zines [sic] about radical parenting . . ."

Update III: In an update of his own, the pirate with the prognathous parrot (it's all about alliteration, baby!) notes the AP's spin on Churchill's firing.

Update IV (5/20/11): JWP says the church Wart was going to speak at has rescinded its permission for him to do so. He has their statement. Even Universalists know the Anti-Christ when they see him.

Update V (5/22/11): Wart gets new venue: a public park. He'll be speaking on Memorial Day.

Guard on the Right

Telegraph:

Silvio Berlusconi, the president of Italy, has launched a bizarre personal attack on his opponents accusing them of not "washing themselves enough."

Mr Berlusconi, 74, who has been charged with having underage sex with a prostitute [one imagines they mean "sex with an underage prostitute," but no matter], accused the centre left of being smelly as tensions rose ahead of local elections this weekend.

There's your problem right there. Tension. Here in the U.S., which thank God maintains its decades-long lead over Europe in anti-stench technology, guys can do death-defying motorcycle jumps and come out not the least bit gamy, I have learned via televisionic device.

The billionaire media tycoon is currently involved in four separate trials with charges also including abuse of office and corruption. The the [sic] election was being seen as a test of his popularity.

During a final rally in the southern Italian city of Crotone, Berlusconi said: "The leaders of the Left don't wash themselves much. When they go into the bathroom, and they don't go often since they don't wash much, they look in the mirror when they shave and surprise themselves."

Not exactly the Gettysburg Address there, Silvio.

Mr Berlusconi has a reputation for disliking beards, seeing them as sign of left leaning political sympathies. His obsession with hygiene has also emerged from intercepts of his infamous "bunga bunga" parties.

The phrase is said to refer to a crude after-dinner sex game and from the wire taps girls invited to the parties reveal how Berlusconi asked them to wash before performing sexy stripteases and lap dances for him.

Berlusconi has often resorted to personal attacks on his opponents particularly on their looks - last year he slammed centre left female opposition MPs as "ugly."

No doubt.

His comments provoked an immediate reaction from opponents including Pierluigi Bersani, the leader of Italy's the centre-left Democratic Party who said: "If we don't wash much, it's because we are clean." . . .

Yeah, sure. There's more, but it has nothing to do with smelliness, so read it yourself if you want.

Glenn Beck notes Wart's appearance at Tucson school board meeting

Where high school students were protesting changes in an ethnic (specifically Mexican-American) studies program.


"Whoa-oh. Who's that guy?"

(via Westword)

Update: In recapping the Churchill saga, Westword's Jonathan Shikes says that "A long legal battle [between CU and Wart] ensued, ending in November 2010 when an appeals court rejected Churchill's efforts to get his old job back."

Er, no. It ain't over yet, Shikesy, as the Westword piece you link to points out.

Hmmmm

Comcast weather page for Denver: forecast high of 37 degrees, forecast low of . . . 42 degrees. Anyway, it's damn cold, snowing and sleeting this a.m. and raining constantly all day. The coolest spring of the last three very cool springs. Won't bring up AGW, won't bring up AGW, won't bring up . . .

Startling D-blog ignorance revealed

Maybe "startling" isn't the right word. "More" is probably better. Been reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. Good stuff, generally speaking, though nothing earth-shattering to (Julian) Simonists. We're not all gonna die (at once, anyway).

But one thing Ridley mentions the D-blog had never heard of before. In a hunk where he's discussing the social progress capitalism has led to, he notes the abatement of cruelty to animals, and particularly, blood sports.

It's not in the index, goddamnit, but one blood sport that died out because of capitalism, he claims, is:

Fox tossing.

Fox tossing? Bear baiting, cock fighting, doggie death-duels, I know about. But fox tossing was a new one. At first I thought it was some weird editing mistake, but sure enough, mankind's savior, Wikipedia, put me some Knowledge:

Fox tossing would take place in an arena, usually either created by setting up a circle of canvas screens in the open or by using the courtyard of a castle or palace.[1] Two people would stand six to seven and a half metres (20 to 25 feet) apart, holding the ends of a webbed or cord sling which was laid flat on the ground. An animal such as a fox would then be released from a cage or trap and driven through the arena, across the sling. As it crossed the sling the tossers pulled hard on the ends, throwing the animal high into the air.[2] The highest throw would win the contest; expert tossers could achieve throws of as high as 7.5 m (24 ft). On occasion, several slings were laid in parallel, so that the animal would have to run the gauntlet of several teams of tossers.[1]

Nice. Here's an illustrative woodcut or whatever, also from Wiki:


Notice the little things mostly lying around all dead-like? Foxes.

Update: By the way, there are two footnote [1]s in Wikipedia's explanation. As far as I know, Wikipedia has never before made a mistake. Something wrong!

Update II: Just noticed another thing: the chicks pulling on the goddamn cords in the illustration. Hot, hot, hot.