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Page 51 of 791 pages « First < 49 50 51 52 53 > Last »
Oct 2007
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Alaska Republicans, Can You Hear the Train a-Comin’?
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Sun 28 Oct 2007 13:22
by Kevin McGehee
66° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Alaska]
[Get Offa My Lawn!]
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I’ve been saying for years that I don’t think Ted Stevens will ever be voted out of his Senate seat, because Alaskans of both parties rely too heavily on his seniority to bring home the pork.
It’s possible—not very, just enough to be measurable—that I might be wrong about that.
WASHINGTON—First it was DropDon.com, now the Alaska Democratic Party has launched RetireTed.com, a Web site aimed at unseating Alaska’s senior senator.
The site argues that Ted Stevens, a Republican, has been corrupted by his 39 years in the U.S. Senate and should retire.
“Power corrupts and Ted’s actions have become a national scandal,“ Democratic Party Chairwoman Patti Higgins said in a written statement released last week.
Democrats say an ongoing federal corruption investigation into Stevens’ ties to VECO founder Bill Allen, including a search of Stevens’ Girdwood home, has raised questions about his effectiveness in Congress.
[...]
“We do feel like Ted Stevens has done a lot for the state, but he’s getting pretty old and he is under a cloud because of the corruption investigation,“ Higgins said.» Democrats launch online offensive against Stevens
In the past, the only discouraging words about Stevens tended to be from the odd crank from either side of the political divide—leftists who never met a Republican they didn’t despise, and conservatives like me who thought Stevens had “gone native” and rather than being Alaska’s voice in D.C., had become Elmer Fed’s proconsul to those benighted Alaskan bumpkins with their outmoded notions of federalism. Some of the most widely detested federal laws affecting Alaska, such as the one that locked up millions of acres in new national parks, wilderness areas and preserves, and effectively retrogressed Alaska to territorial status once again, were crafted with Stevens’ input and enacted with his help.
None of which ever seemed to matter on Election Day; Stevens has never had a serious Democrat challenger.
Maybe the Alaska Democratic Party is ready to do more than pay lip service to the idea of beating Uncle Ted on Election Day. Their Republican counterparts need to pay heed and decide whether they want to run the risk that they’ll go down to defeat trying to defend the indefensible, or pre-empt the Democrats by giving their nomination to someone else in 2008.
My money is still on Stevens winning yet another decisive re-election victory, though. The Republicans don’t have the stones to tell him to step down, and the Democrats just don’t have anyone on their bench who could beat him. The best they had, Tony Knowles, couldn’t even beat Lisa Murkowski in 2004, and (despite my fears to the contrary at the time) barely made a ripple against Sarah Palin for governor last November.
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I’ve Been Saying that Online Privacy Is a Gentlemen’s Agreement
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Sun 28 Oct 2007 13:15
by Kevin McGehee
66° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Yee-haw!]
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...that therefore applies only to gentlemen and their female equivalents.
Which means that you cannot avoid leaving tracks—and if you piss someone off badly enough, nothing can stop them from finding you.
WATERFORD, Conn. - A 34-year-old woman has been charged with using the Internet to try to get revenge on an old boyfriend by breaking up his marriage. Pilar Stofega has been charged with second-degree harassment and breach of peace and released on $2,500 bond.
Waterford police say she created phony profiles of the former boyfriend’s current wife on some adult Web sites that included the wife’s home and work phone numbers and high school yearbook picture.
[...]
The man Stofega had dated eight years ago used his own computer to investigate and discovered someone had created a profile for his wife on several Internet sites, according to court records.
Police say the husband did more online investigating and was able to find out that the person behind the phony profiles of his wife was the woman he dated in 1999. He passed the information on to Waterford police, leading to Stofega’s arrest last week.» Woman charged in ‘Internet Revenge’ case
You can make it harder for them to find you—but the only way to make it impossible is to never go online in the first place.
If that’s not an option, your only hope is to not piss people off.
Update, Dec. 1: Another case in point: an astroturfing sockpuppet commenter is arrested.
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<headdesk>
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Sat 27 Oct 2007 10:27
by Kevin McGehee
51° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Asides]
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On the very same day this arrived, I found the missing original cable in a place I would have never thought to look for it, and I still have no idea why I would have put it there in the first place.
But now at least I have the ability, once again, to manage my tunes.
Update: And they did send me more than one! Though not more than two. And now that I look again at the order confirmation I received, that’s what it says: two.
Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been twelve. And this way if I ever do lose one and can’t ever find it again, I’m set.
Too bad I’ve already filled up almost two-thirds of the player’s maximum capacity…
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Holy Carp
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Fri 26 Oct 2007 10:31
by Kevin McGehee
57° and cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
2 comments
[Asides]
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The information on my driver’s license dates back to 1999. Back then I admitted to weighing 335 pounds.
Four years later I chose to renew by mail, sparing myself the ordeal of going to the impossibly cramped and crowded facility at the old Georgia State Patrol post in Newnan. That post has been replaced, and the driver’s license office is elsewhere entirely. And I have my 2007 renewal notice awaiting action. But I wouldn’t be renewing this one by mail even if the license office had not been greatly expanded and upgraded.
Because I’m looking forward to claiming a 100-pound weight loss on the new one.
The picture, I don’t have such high hopes. It’ll be an improvement on the one currently afflicting my license, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to run right out and get a passport picture.
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It’s Like Banging One’s Head Against a Brick Wall
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Fri 26 Oct 2007 9:23
by Kevin McGehee
55° and cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Media Ochre]
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Mr Jindal is something of a paradox. He is the first non-white governor since Reconstruction; he is a Rhodes scholar; he is the nation’s youngest governor. In other words, he’s a breath of fresh air, a sign of progress who promises to eradicate corruption in what many say is America’s worst-governed state. On the other hand, he is a religious conservative who was as reliable a rubber-stamp as George Bush had in Congress, refusing to make a fuss even when Republicans there were blaming New Orleans for Katrina.» Bucking a trend
As opposed to blaming Bush for Katrina—as everyone knows, he’s the one who has the hurricane-steering machine in that notorious back room off the Oval Office, right?
Of course, nobody blames Bush, or New Orleans, for “Katrina.“ And anyone with an interest in accuracy would also avoid even blaming Katrina, except as a catalyst, for what went wrong after that hurricane came ashore in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama back in 2005.
And that’s the point the Republicans were making, and that’s why Rep. Jindal didn’t “make a fuss” about it. Because he—apparently unlike reporters for The Economist—has an interest in getting at the details of actual, like, truth about things that, like, happen, and stuff.
I’ll admit that this business of wanting to get at the finer grains of truth that manage to undermine Teh Narrative™ being rewarded, apparently, by Louisiana voters, undermines another narrative about the sophistication of Louisiana voters, and their ability and willingness to think past the headlines they’re spoon-fed by the Establishment Media.
But hey, if <Teh Narrative™> even Louisiana voters </Teh Narrative™> can transcend a media trope, there may be hope for the rest of the country.
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Some Guns Get More Jumped than Others
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Thu 25 Oct 2007 13:05
by Kevin McGehee
56° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Alaska]
[Our Times]
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One week from today, most stores will have cleared out their Halloween candy and replaced it with Christmas candy. In many of those stores, Christmas merchandise is already on display. You may have noticed the increased catalog volume in your snail mail.
And in Fairbanks, Alaska, Christmas decorations have already been put up on the light poles.
Of course, in Fairbanks, the Christmas season starts pretty much with first snow, which rarely happens later than mid-October. In nearby North Pole, Alaska, Christmas is a year-round thing—but that’s a special case.
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