95 responses to
“Phoned-in Phriday.”

1. Connie said on March 7th, 2008 at 10:08 am

   We’ve had a hawk around our house this win­ter, check­ing out the feed­ers on the deck. We think he’s look­ing for lunch. My hus­band has been try­ing to get pho­tos with very mixed suc­cess. http://​elmores​.net/​r​o​u​n​d​-​h​e​r​e​/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​s​.​p​h​p​?​i​d​=​1​2​1​0​_​0​_​1_35_C and http://​elmores​.net/​r​o​u​n​d​-​h​e​r​e​/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​s​.​p​h​p​?​i​d​=​1​2​1​5​_​0​_1_0_C are his pics of a cooper’s hawk.

   So is it the links that puts me into moderation?

   NANCE: Yes. More than one bumps you into mod­er­a­tion. I don’t mind links, if you don’t mind mod­er­a­tion. But if you saw the spam fil­ter, you’d know why this is so.

2. Dorothy said on March 7th, 2008 at 10:22 am

   Well, I don’t have a sickly orchid, but I did have a sticky spi­der plant that I finally decided to pitch. It made me very sad, because it was started 10 years ago from a “baby” given to me by my inter­net friend, Simone. She lives in Canada. Sim­ply trim­ming leaves wasn’t stop­ping the stick­i­ness. I just real­ized I had to get rid of it, because it was drip­ping onto the table where I had it perched. Ick. When we’re in a house again, I’ll buy a volup­tuous spi­der plant for the new house.

3. nancy said on March 7th, 2008 at 10:29 am

   If the stick­i­ness takes the form of tiny “sprays,” you’ve got scale. (It’s the bug pee.) Adults look like brown bumps about half the size of a lentil, and the imma­ture ones are just lit­tle yel­lows streaks or dots.

   I just pitched the orchid. The eas­i­est and most low-tech solu­tion was remov­ing the cul­prits with rub­bing alco­hol. But as far as I can see, they’re all on the blos­soms. Ever try to remove a sticky bug from an orchid petal with vig­or­ous rub­bing? You see the problem.

4. Carter said on March 7th, 2008 at 10:46 am

   Either Neem or an insec­ti­ci­dal soap are the way to go for the scale that have attacked my Areca palms. For the rub­ber plant, I do the rub n’ buff rou­tine with rub­bing alcohol.

5. brian stouder said on March 7th, 2008 at 10:48 am

   Con­nie — great picture!

6. Sue said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:01 am

   Here’s what I do for my house­plants, but I don’t know if it works for orchids. Mid-may, all my plants are moved out­side to the north side of the house (no direct sun­light there). The plants spend the next four months out­side, grac­ing the front steps or placed in var­i­ous spots. They are happy as can be, and grow and thrive. Mid-September, they all get moved inside and are put on dor­mant sta­tus (water­ing but no fer­til­izer) where they stay until March 1. Most make it through the win­ter because they’ve grown so strong over the sum­mer, and I sel­dom deal with any stick­i­ness or stress-related behav­ior, like falling leaves. On March 1, every­one gets a dose of fer­til­izer and a hair­cut, and begins to grow again and wait for May.

7. Sue said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:02 am

   Any­one heard from Danny lately? I’m get­ting worried.

8. Julie Robinson said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:15 am

   Some­times life is just too depress­ing. Nancy, go buy your­self some fresh flow­ers! They usu­ally work won­ders for me. And play all your happy music.

9. 4dbirds said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:44 am

   Nancy you only have one boy in your house. I have four. I bet my bath­rooms beat yours. Not exactly some­thing to brag about.

10. nancy said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:49 am

    I am play­ing my happy music, if “Do Your Thing” by Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band counts. (For those who need an addi­tional ref­er­ence: It’s the song that was play­ing when Lit­tle Bill put his wife, and him­self, out of their mis­ery in “Boo­gie Nights.” It’s still a happy song.)

    Thanks for the scale advice, all. I’m tak­ing a break from bath­room clean­ing to allow the Soft Scrub with Bleach to do its bleachy magic.

11. alex said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:51 am

    Scale’s no big­gie, really. I used to have house­plants galore when I lived in a glass box in the sky and when they’d start pee­ing the sticky stuff, I’d sim­ply put them in the shower, fill a spray bot­tle partly with Ivory Liq­uid dish soap and part water and mist them with it. Scale gone. There was also some stuff from the plant place that you could put in the soil and it seemed to work well also.

    These days no house­plants because I have too damned many out­doors to worry about. Tried to win­ter an orange bego­nia, but it croaked. The lit­tle frond of vinca that was in the pot, how­ever, is now like a full head of Rapunzel’s hair. Can’t wait to put it in the ground. The green­house doesn’t sell starts one-tenth as vig­or­ous or one fifti­eth as long.

    Edit: The scale prob­lem only seemed to occur when­ever I’d put indoor plants out­doors on my balcony.

12. Dexter said on March 7th, 2008 at 12:50 pm

    Stamp­ing presses were my career for a cou­ple decades.
    Many times a press would be unbolted and we were told it was going to Mex­ico.
    I worked in a facil­ity that would pur­chase a press for $2 mil and spend tens of thou­sands prepar­ing space for it and hook­ing it up.
    Huge things. Slowly, we heard the presses were all going away, and in the course of a few months , 40 presses had been moved out on trucks for for­eign ports. This time we were told con­flict­ing tales of exactly they were going — nunya biz­ness, they said. With no stamped parts, they closed down a multi-million dol­lar all-newly equipped heat treat depart­ment.
    All the while this was hap­pen­ing, the union was fight­ing to keep milling machines, almost new, state-of-the-art SMS CADCAM machines, in pro­duc­tion . The com­pany insisted on sell­ing most of the new mills and farm­ing out the machin­ing, also.
    All they kept were the robot­ics for sub-assemblies , the final assem­bly depart­ments, and ship­ping.
    The work­force dropped from 475 to 125, and many of us whis­tled our way to the office and took our 30 and out pen­sions.
    The other work­ers? They found some­thing else, prob­a­bly at a third the pay we received as a UAW facil­ity. It’s the Amer­i­can Way, don­cha know? Any­body tells you dif­fer­ently is a god­damn liar.

13. Mouse said on March 7th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    Way off the sub­ject– Dex­ter, is Kauf­mans’ still open?Back in the 60’s we would drive over & pound many 3.2s then hit the bars in Edon on the way back to Angola.

14. Danny said on March 7th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    Sue, thanks for your con­cern. I was sicker than I thought when I pre­ma­turely announced my con­va­les­cence the other day. I’ve been flat on my back all week with a more or less steady 102 temp and body aches.

    I came into work for a cameo appear­ance yes­ter­day (had some things that just needed to get out) and today is my first full day back. Kinda. I am still light-headed.

    Maybe if I find the energy later I can tell you all about my movie watch­ing over the period of ill­ness and why, as an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, I can say with absolute bib­li­cal author­ity that Owen Wil­son and Vince Vaughn are two of the four rid­ers of the Apoc­a­lypse. The hor­ror. The horror.

15. Dexter said on March 7th, 2008 at 2:12 pm

    Mouse: Jim Kauf­man died years ago…place changed hands a few times…now called “Rita’s”. I have no idea if the down­stairs that was used as the night­club “The Rathskeller” is used any more.
    We’d hit Kaufman’s after “Our Place” (near Defi­ance) .
    Edon Steak­house was quite a place, eh? Tom and Dorothy ran it.
    Once I and my bud­dies were slug­gin’ back PBR and a cou­ple came in want­ing a steak. Tom had to tell them they didn’t real have steak. And the ham­burg­ers sucked, too. Oh, gee…that was JUST forty years ago. Hand me my cane and fetch the vit­a­min pills.

16. nancy said on March 7th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    I hope you’re not talk­ing about “Wed­ding Crash­ers,” Danny. ‘Cause that was sort of funny. Not a clas­sic, but not bad for a cable-TV Sat­ur­day night.

    Sounds like you had flu.

17. brian stouder said on March 7th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    Good to see you back in the sad­dle, Danny. A polit­i­cal digression:

    It was dis­heart­en­ing to see Saman­tha Power’s igno­min­ious depar­ture from the Obama cam­paign; to me, she embod­ied all that was best about it, with her ide­al­ism and her impec­ca­ble schol­arly cre­den­tials, and her pow­er­ful (so to speak) and clear-eyed Pulitzer prize-winning book A Prob­lem from Hell.

    At least twice in this pri­mary cam­paign, the Obama oper­a­tion seem­ingly had the Clin­ton cam­paign on the ropes, and they were in posi­tion to deliver a knock­out punch; and twice the Clin­ton cam­paign came right back, full of fight.

    It seems to me that, right now, after those two huge vic­to­ries in Ohio and in Texas, the Clin­ton cam­paign is ascen­dant, and on the verge of deliv­er­ing a knock out blow to the Obama campaign.

    I’ve read Power’s remarks, and it is not clear to me just what she meant by “We %^%$up in Ohio”. (pos­si­bly she meant they should have sim­ply con­ceded the state? Buck­eyes are all bug-eyed crazies??).

    So the ques­tion is, what do you think is hap­pen­ing? Do you think the Obama cam­paign can come back from this? I’m ready to agree with the Clin­ton campaign’s com­plaints about the main stream media’s pro-Obama bias. Many pun­dits on teevee are nat­ter­ing about how Obama needs to win North Car­olina as he loses PA to remain in the race, whereas it strikes me that he has to WIN Penn­syl­va­nia or con­cede the contest.

    After los­ing Texas and get­ting creamed in Ohio, if Obama gets smashed in Penn­syl­va­nia, then his cam­paign loses any cred­i­ble ratio­nale to go forward.…other than “slay­ing the mon­ster” [to para­phrase Ms Power]. And the press is already tamp­ing down expec­ta­tions for Sen­a­tor Obama in Pennsylvania.….which sim­ply makes no sense at all, to me

18. Julie Robinson said on March 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

    Brian, I’d love to see Clin­ton and Obama make nice. Let’s put both of them on the ticket, Hillary first and Obama as VP. Then in 8 years he can run for Pres­i­dent as incum­bent VP. Let’s raise money for the gen­eral elec­tion rather than spend­ing it in a nasty pri­mary fight.

    There’s really lit­tle dif­fer­ence between the two, and Democ­rats, wasn’t this sup­posed to be our year? Although part of me is soooo excited about an Indi­ana pri­mary where my vote will count.

19. Connie said on March 7th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

    Thanks Brian, I will pass the com­pli­ment on to the pho­tog­ra­pher. My guy has become quite the nature pho­tog­ra­pher in his later years. (Remem­ber the tur­tle pic?) Here is my fave for this win­ter, I swear this pos­sum is smil­ing for the pho­tog­ra­pher. http://​elmores​.net/​r​o​u​n​d​-​h​e​r​e​/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​s​.​p​h​p​?​i​d​=​1​2​3​2​_​0​_​1_15_C

20. Harl Delos said on March 7th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

    Dex­ter said:

    Mouse: Jim Kauf­man died years ago…place changed hands a few times…now called “Rita’s”. I have no idea if the down­stairs that was used as the night­club “The Rathskeller” is used any more.
    We’d hit Kaufman’s after “Our Place” (near Defiance) .

    There were four or five Kaufman’s. When I patron­ized them, which would have been the early 1970s, the one in Defi­ance was on 5th Street, sev­eral doors away from Morey’s News Stand, towards Clin­ton Street. Steve Kauf­man ran that one, and said his mother owned it. I think she ran the one in Bryan. Best I remem­ber, the one in Pauld­ing was infor­mally called Dan & Rita’s.

    I remem­ber going into Kaufman’s with my best friend on my 18th birth­day. He announced to the bar­tender that he wanted to buy me my first legal 3.2. Made me a lit­tle mad; I’d been drink­ing 6.0 there for about a year, and had never been carded.

    In fact, I never got carded any­place until I was about 25, and that only because I went into a place in Indi­anapo­lis that carded every­body at the door. A year ago, though, my wife was carded at a restau­rant with a liquor license. Given that we have great-grandchildren, she accused the waiter of try­ing to earn an extra-big tip. (He *did* get one.…)

21. nancy said on March 7th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Harl, was it at Red Robin? I got carded there the other day. (Reminder: I am 50.) I thought it would be suit­able for a quick ham­burger, but turned out to be one of those assaultive, loud, in-your-face, all-the-waiters-gather-round-the-table-and-clap-for-your-birthday sort of hell­holes. I couldn’t get OUT of there fast enough, and the waiter got about 14 per­cent from me. Just cut the bull­shit and give me my Labatt’s, for god’s sake.

22. brian stouder said on March 7th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Con­nie — yep! I’d say that pos­sum is a bit of a ham!

23. Harl Delos said on March 7th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    Julie Robin­son Said:

    Brian, I’d love to see Clin­ton and Obama make nice. Let’s put both of them on the ticket, Hillary first and Obama as VP.

    Never hap­pen. That’s be like Ronald Rea­gan agree­ing to be VPOTUS under Nikita Khr­uschev. Rea­gan ran as a staunch anti-communist, and Obama has run oppos­ing nasty politics.

    It’d be hard to find *any­one* to run as VP for Hillary. John “Cac­tus Jack” Nance Gar­ner said it was the worst mis­take of his life, agree­ing to be vice-president, and said the posi­tion wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. But under Hillary, the role of the vice-president would be dimin­ished even fur­ther, because Bill would end up doing any­thing mean­ing­ful — such as attend­ing funer­als — nor­mally per­formed by the VPOTUS. Either of the two con­tenders would serve the coun­try bet­ter as Sen­a­tor than as VPOTUS.

    The num­bers say that Obama will have more votes, more states, and more pledged del­e­gates than any­one else. What’s more, while Hillary is min­ing the exist­ing Demo­c­rat base, and has extremely high neg­a­tives with inde­pen­dents and Repub­li­cans, Obama has been get­ting peo­ple sup­port­ing him that oth­er­wise would be sit­ting on their hands. Even if he didn’t have a bet­ter chance to beat McCain than Hillary, run­ning Obama would be a good idea in terms of build­ing the party mem­ber­ship. There’s lit­tle doubt in my mind that Obama will be fac­ing McCain this fall.

    Dis­claimer: my opin­ion doesn’t count; I’m a con­ser­v­a­tive inde­pen­dent, reg­is­tered as a Repub­li­can here in the closed-primary state of Penn­syl­va­nia. Good grief, we need to open these primaries!

24. Harl Delos said on March 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    Nance won­dered:

    Harl, was it at Red Robin? I got carded there the other day. (Reminder: I am 50.) I thought it would be suit­able for a quick ham­burger, but turned out to be one of those assaultive, loud, in-your-face, all-the-waiters-gather-round-the-table-and-clap-for-your-birthday sort of hell­holes. I couldn’t get OUT of there fast enough, and the waiter got about 14 per­cent from me. Just cut the bull­shit and give me my Labatt’s, for god’s sake.

    We get ads for RedRobin on DirecTV, but I’ve never seen one.

    From your descrip­tion, it sounds like a Farrell’s Ice Cream Par­lor with a license to pour. I always kinda liked Farrell’s, but then again, I was a lot younger when they were still in busi­ness. These days, Friday’s and Damon’s are too rau­cous and noisy for me. I think a bar should be dark, quiet, and have a high rel­a­tive humid­ity, so I can de-stress. Think Nick & Von’s, which would be won­der­ful even if the food was merely so-so. And if the wait­resses are fat, friendly, pretty, and effi­cient, that’s great, too. (I blogged ear­lier today on islands of com­fort in a stress­ful world.)

25. michaelj said on March 7th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    Some­thing Else. Fine writ­ing about a not-well-enough-respected man.
    Actu­ally, the word John Nance Gar­ner used was piss. I think you still can’t print that in papers of record.

    If hawks are threat­en­ing the tufted tit­mice, call Tripp Isen­hour. Randy John­son atom­ized a seag­ull and nobody charged him with any­thing. A Tin Cup moment.

26. Wally Wilson said on March 7th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    You can get ready-to-use neem in a spray bot­tle just about anywhere…but it’s labeled as “Rose Pride” of all things (inex­pen­sive _and_ safe to use indoors). The label will list the ingre­di­ent as “clar­i­fied extract of neem oil,” or somesuch.

    Neem is harm­less to mam­mals, acts as a fungi­cide (in most cases), and is a cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem agent for insects. All that from a tree.

    It’s best to just take the plant into the bath tub or kitchen sink, give it a rinse with water, first, and then let them crit­ters have it.

    If you have a cat, never ever use any­thing that has per­me­thrin as a com­po­nent. Very toxic to catseses.

27. Jeff said on March 7th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Why you’d let Saman­tha Power walk for what she said when & where she said it (if she’d been talk­ing to a room­full of high school year­book edi­tors, sure), and given who she is and what she rep­re­sents, Obama’s cam­paign should have begged her to stay … unless peo­ple inside that camp are already angling for spots in the Clin­ton camp.

    Harl, i couldn’t agree more — an expe­ri­enced sen­a­tor with senior­ity has more clout and room to maneu­ver than a VPOTUS, and Obama could show his bub­ble peo­ple that he really does have what it takes to hold down the Oval Office with another term or two in the Sen­ate. But i still think a Hillary Clin­ton nom­i­na­tion is what’s gonna hap­pen when the party geron­toc­racy of the 60’s gen­er­a­tion fin­ishes their lob­ster bisque in Den­ver, and i also think it’ll be the next best thing to hand­ing this all off straight to John McCain, for all Terry McAulliffe’s energy and drive (that man is amaz­ing, he said from the other side, an oppo­nent wor­thy of respect).

    Not say­ing it’s a good thing, just that it’s gonna hap­pen that way. The deal is, peo­ple in all fifty states vote, they’re appor­tioned accord­ing to the Elec­toral Col­lege, and the math and the sys­tem and the trends as they stand means that the Reds and Pur­ples are gonna vote Johnny Mac in, while the Blues muster the same 42% they keep assem­bling, with 4 to 7% “inde­pen­dent” vot­ers fling­ing paint at Nader or Hagelin or who­ever is on the bal­lot when they aren’t cast­ing a half­hearted vote for the Ds.

    And the 52 – 54% who don’t want major changes to the econ­omy, want global mar­kets to stay open enough to main­tain the flow of con­sumer goods they use right now, dis­like any tax increases, won’t accept hav­ing their health insur­ance changed from what it is cur­rently, or the def­i­n­i­tion of human life and mar­riage sig­nif­i­cantly altered from what they’re used to, will keep vot­ing in stiff, short-sighted, GOP-policy stan­dard bearers.

    Obama almost, but not quite changed the topic of con­ver­sa­tion. A Demo­c­rat with a coher­ent, clear, not-just-anti-stuff plat­form needs to step up and swing the baton to a whole new tempo.

28. Dexter said on March 7th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    “Every small town in Michi­gan, or Ohio, has gen­er­ally been built around a large fac­tory. And we’ve vis­ited a lot of those towns,” said Stephan Wolf, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of Hilco Indus­trial Corp., the com­pany that staged this week’s auc­tion. [from the lead story, DetNews]

    And Indi­ana. Remem­ber the GE Tool & Die School? Teach you a trade and pay $65 a week, too.
    Good job train­ing , and I had sev­eral friends start a career there.
    Now the trade is not so pop­u­lar, as job offers are few; read­ing the num­bers (57,000 in MI down to 39,000) is proof enough.
    It’s been quite a run, from the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1937 to the post-Roger Smith era. The last 25 years, job secu­rity has been a myth and unions are sur­viv­ing by the com­pro­mis­ing meth­ods. It’s a new day.

29. michaelj said on March 7th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    We used to have a gigan­tic jade, which became infected with spi­der mites. A mild solu­tion of water and dish­wash­ing liq­uid did the bas­tards in. When we owned a farm­house in Brock­ton, MA, our trees, includ­ing pear and apple, were beset with tent cater­pil­lars. You could actu­ally hear them chomp­ing. I truly lost my senses, and declared a bor­der­line psy­chot­i­cally obses­sive war on the bas­tards. Crushed them with ham­mers, burnt them with smol­der­ing cig­ars. Bacil­lus thuringien­sis proved effective.

    McCain? Straight talk? If Amer­i­cans vote for this mum­bling equiv­o­ca­tor against any­body we deserve what we get, and we’ll get it, good and hard. Every­thing with this guy is a youth­ful indis­cre­tion, or, even bet­ter, a lapse in judg­ment that led to the appear­ance of impro­pri­ety. Should have spent time in Club Fed for Keat­ing Five. His abject fawn­ing over W goes way beyond gag reflex. Shrubco and Bush’s brain slan­dered McCain unmer­ci­fully in 2000, and now they’re best buds.

    Obama is dis­sem­bling about what he did on his Cana­dian vaca­tion, and Hillary’s guilty of some double-talk on NAFTA, but how is it that nobody in the press men­tions how W came in and sim­ply abro­gated the Envi­ron­men­tal and Labor agree­ments B. Clin­ton grafted onto the unadul­ter­ated Free Greed sit­u­a­tion left by Bush pere, who proved unequiv­o­cally that get­ting shot down doesn’t pre­pare you to be Pres­i­dent? (HW did some­thing sim­i­lar with Soma­lia, spite­fully leav­ing a no-win briar patch for his suc­ces­sor. Prob­a­bly BaBar’s idea.)

    Any prob­lems with party mes­sage and party unity for Democ­rats are the daily news­pa­per land­ing with a thud on Dr. Dean’s door­mat. Obama’s posi­tions on issues dif­fer from Clinton’s about as much as Clarence Thomas doesn’t judge cases Scalia-free. What’s going on is liberaller-than-thou Deany Babies have their guy and that’s about that. It doesn’t help when the hope can­di­date spouts Ray­gun hagiog­ra­phy and says he knows his opponent’s sup­port­ers will vote for him, but he’s not sure his will vote for her.

    As for the inva­sion and McCain’s vision of end­less occu­pa­tion, it would be nice to think Amer­i­can vot­ers had a clue about Pub­lic Law HJ 114. The so-called autho­riza­tion required the Pret­zeldent to allow the UN and el Baradei to pro­ceed, and to return to Con­gress with addi­tional evi­dence before tak­ing action against Iraq. (The incred­i­ble cam­paign of dis­in­for­ma­tion by the mis­Ad­min­is­tra­tion is actu­ally beside the point, though it’s not far-fetched to think Con­gress­peo­ple just wouldn’t believe a Pres­i­dent would flat-out lie his ass off to Con­sti­tu­tional delib­er­a­tors and law-makers.) Incon­ve­nient for the Obama troops slag­ging Hillary’s vote, but, then again, he wasn’t there. Nobody voted for the inva­sion, and Bar­rack will per­sist in mis­rep­re­sent­ing the facts of this matter.

30. michaelj said on March 7th, 2008 at 6:44 pm

    This is what Hillary Clin­ton said on the Sen­ate floor when she cast her Iraq vote:

    Because bipar­ti­san sup­port for this res­o­lu­tion makes suc­cess in the United Nations more likely and war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legit­i­macy to our cause, I have con­cluded, after care­ful and seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion, that a vote for the res­o­lu­tion best serves the secu­rity of our Nation. If we were to defeat this res­o­lu­tion or pass it with only a few Democ­rats, I am con­cerned that those who want to pre­tend this prob­lem will go way with delay will oppose any United Nations res­o­lu­tion call­ing for unre­stricted inspections.

    This is a dif­fi­cult vote. This is prob­a­bly the hard­est deci­sion I have ever had to make. Any vote that may lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with con­vic­tion. Per­haps my deci­sion is influ­enced by my 8 years of expe­ri­ence on the other end of Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue in the White House watch­ing my hus­band deal with seri­ous chal­lenges to our Nation. I want this Pres­i­dent, or any future Pres­i­dent, to be in the strongest pos­si­ble posi­tion to lead our coun­try in the United Nations or in war . Sec­ondly, I want to ensure that Sad­dam Hus­sein makes no mis­take about our national unity and sup­port for the President’s efforts to wage America’s war against ter­ror­ists and weapons of mass destruc­tion. Thirdly, I want the men and women in our Armed Forces to know that if they should be called upon to act against Iraq our coun­try will stand res­olutely behind them.

    My vote is not, how­ever, a vote for any new doc­trine of pre­emp­tion or for uni­lat­er­al­ism or for the arro­gance of Amer­i­can power or pur­pose, all of which carry grave dan­gers for our Nation, the rule of inter­na­tional law, and the peace and secu­rity of peo­ple through­out the world.

    Sounds con­sid­ered and statesmanlike.

31. LAMary said on March 7th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

    Red Robins are all over the place here, and yes, they are obnox­ious. And overpriced.

    And that pos­sum is def­i­nitely smiling.

32. Dexter said on March 7th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

    LAMary, Brian, Connie:

    A cou­ple weeks ago , Loretta Lynn was fea­tured on XMX, the won­der­ful XM radio chan­nel that does long spe­cials on artists, one-on-one.
    Bill Ander­son did the inter­view, and the topic turned to the “holler” where Loretta grew up in Ken­tucky. Butcher Holler.
    Loretta and Bill started allud­ing to pos­sums, and Loretta said they ate a lot of them when she was a kid. She said a pos­sum recipe was in her cook­book. Bill laugh­ingly admit­ted to eat­ing pos­sum, too. I didn’t research any recipes. I never ate pos­sum and I never ate squir­rel brains.
    And I ain’t got no han­kerin’ to, “nither” !!
    http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​I​m​a​g​e​:​L​o​r​e​t​t​a​_​L​y​n​n​_​h​o​u​se.jpg

33. michaelj said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:00 pm

    Hawks (mostly red­tails), ospreys, eagles (bald and golden), feral chick­ens and occa­sional pea­cocks (God knows where they came from). We have them all on our bar­rier island. Herons (Great Blues, many of whom are snow white), egrets (Peter Matthiessen’s plume birds), king­fisher (once), cor­morants, anhin­gas (snake­birds!), turn­stones, skim­mers, all sorts of gulls.

    The most impres­sive, eas­ily, in grace and almost pre­his­toric mag­is­te­r­ial pres­ence, is the brown pel­i­can. Seen from the right per­spec­tive, late on hot sum­mer beach days after some Sam Adams, they strongly resem­ble ptero­dactyls, and can glide from out of, to into to out of sight with­out appear­ing to move a mus­cle, inches off the water.

    We also have a pileated wood­pecker that’s the bane of our early morn­ings. And all sorts of song­birds. Con­gresses of crows. Turkey vul­tures with 8-ft. wingspans. Red­wing black­birds and wood storks.

    And gators and dol­phins that pace our kayaks in the estu­ar­ies. Dol­phins are shame­less about mat­ing. Lib­ertines. Gators, more fas­tid­i­ous. We have signs that warn “Do not feed or molest the alli­ga­tors.” Isn’t a human being dumb enough to “molest” an alli­ga­tor some­body that ‘s swim­ming in the shal­low end of the gene pool?

    And we’ve got snakes, cop­per­heads that swim in our pool but no water moc­casins (which is for­tu­nate, because they scare the shit out of me), small tim­ber rat­tlers, much larger king snakes that sup­pos­edly eat rat­tlers. A friend claims to have seen a coral snake. A very large, non-venomous con­stric­tor called a pine snake is pretty com­mon and they keep the rab­bits in check.

    And we have deer, but they eat rich peo­ples’ aza­leas, so they’re endan­gered by Home­own­ers Asso­ci­a­tions. Peo­ple have “Save the Sea Pines Deer” bumper stick­ers to protest “culling” (foul euphemism for slaugh­ter, try hand to hoof, you cow­ards). W have TShirts that say “Arm the Sea Pines Deer”. There is noth­ing much more funny than some dum­b­ass hunter falling out of a deer­stand and break­ing his ine­bri­ated ass.

    I imag­ine some­where ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the quest­ing vole’, but they live under­ground so they’re hard to spot.

    It’s all Bun­gle in the Jun­gle, and we never take it for granted.

34. LAMary said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:06 pm

    Michaelj, we’ve been call­ing those pel­i­cans ptero­dactyls since my kids were lit­tle and in the the kid­die dinosaur lov­ing phase. Aren’t they amaz­ing to watch? They just dive into the water at full speed.
    Lots of hawks here too. They get into fights with the crows over the canyon behind my house.

35. Dexter said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:11 pm

    Ran­dom thought: I had beef bar­ley soup today. Any­body remem­ber the diner on Michi­gan Avenue in Detroit, a half block from Tiger Sta­dium , called some­thing like The Left Field Inn? Best beef bar­ley soup in the world. Also, in that ‘hood, Hoot Robinson’s poured the biggest shots of booze to go with your Stroh’s or Molson’s, and Paros Home Plate had the best grub, but Bill Reedy’s Saloon…THAT was a great bar. OK…baseball mem­o­ries over…I always get this way when I think of the demise of Tiger Sta­dium (and even worse, Comiskey Park in Chicago…I cry about that and it’s been almost 17 years since it closed…here’s Frank singing about it:
    http://​ball​parks​.phan​fare​.com/​s​l​i​d​e​s​h​o​w​.​a​s​p​x​?​u​s​e​r​n​a​m​e​=​b​a​l​l​p​a​r​k​s​&​a​m​p​;​a​l​b​u​m​_​i​d​=​3​3​8​3​5​0​&​a​m​p​;​s​e​c​t​i​o​n​_id=-1

36. Jeff said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:22 pm

    No com­ment dept. –
    http://​www​.slate​.com/​b​l​o​g​s​/​b​l​o​g​s​/​t​r​a​i​l​h​e​a​d​/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​3​/​0​7​/​p​o​w​e​r​-​o​u​t​a​g​e​-​p​a​r​t​-​2.aspx

37. michaelj said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    Pos­sums are one of those cre­ations God should apol­o­gize for. Incred­i­bly nasty ani­mals, and they don’t smile, they smirk. Like rac­coons with­out brains and a nice Ivy League coat. Wily and innately evil. Born to be road­kill, armadil­los with­out the half-shell.

38. Harl Delos said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

    Dex­ter said:

    Loretta and Bill started allud­ing to pos­sums, and Loretta said they ate a lot of them when she was a kid. She said a pos­sum recipe was in her cook­book. Bill laugh­ingly admit­ted to eat­ing pos­sum, too. I didn’t research any recipes. I never ate pos­sum and I never ate squir­rel brains.

    I only ever tasted one pos­sum, and it was a life­time sup­ply. I don’t mind fat meats, and I don’t mind “gamey” meats, but pos­sum is greasy as hell, and it takes “gamey” to whole new levels.

    They’re pretty, though, when they don’t feel threat­ened. It’s just that I don’t want to face a rabid one.

    How many squir­rel brains does it take to make one mouth­ful? I’m sur­prised that any­one even both­ers. We used to have fried brain sand­wiches every time we butchered beef or pork. They’re good with mus­tard. LOTS of mus­tard. We also had chit­ter­lings, crack­lings, and mom made a really great tripe soup. I wish I knew how she made it, because I can’t seem to make tripe edi­ble, no mat­ter what I do, and I can cook almost anything.

    I was in a class at Defi­ance Col­lege that, last day of class, the prof had a tra­di­tion of hav­ing the class meet at Kissner’s, and he’d buy brain sand­wiches for any­one that would eat the whole sand­wich. If some­one only ate part of the sand­wich, they paid their own way.

    I met my cur­rent wife online, and when she came to visit, I took her to Kissner’s and bought her a brain sand­wich. She was will­ing to taste it, decided she liked it. I thought I had quite a catch, if a Main Line girl from Philadel­phia would try eat­ing brain. After we mar­ried, she told me that she hated it, but she pre­tended to like it because she wanted me to approve of her. Turns out she’s not from the Main Line, but from the next county, too. Sheesh. And women won­der why men don’t trust them in posi­tions of power?

    I don’t even know what kind of brain they serve at Kissner’s these days. Pork? Sheep? I know they changed a cou­ple of decades ago, because they couldn’t get what they had pre­vi­ously used, but I can’t remem­ber what they changed to and from.

39. Harl Delos said on March 7th, 2008 at 8:55 pm

    michaelj said:

    Actu­ally, the word John Nance Gar­ner used was p***. I think you still can’t print that in papers of record.

    I wasn’t sure how Mrs. Der­ringer felt about Thomas Bowdler.

    I sus­pect she’s happy to use shock­ing words when they’re called for, but if you overuse shock­ing words, they lose their power. In that case, what are you going to do when you really *need* one?

40. Jeff said on March 7th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    On the other side of the Demo­c­ra­tic deci­sion, this is not to be con­fused with an endorse­ment, but –
    [link]
    She couldn’t explain how her mom would affirm fed­er­al­ism ver­sus a fed­eral solu­tion for every prob­lem, but she acknowl­edged the need for keep­ing room for local solu­tions, which made me smile! A very smart young woman, even if she did pose for a pic­ture with me and the Lit­tle Guy.

41. Jeff said on March 7th, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    Both pics we got after Chelsea’s appear­ance at Deni­son Uni­ver­sity can be seen at http://​knap​sack​.blogspot​.com.

42. brian stouder said on March 7th, 2008 at 9:18 pm

    Jeff — great “no com­ment” article! — But still, gotta com­ment! I really like Saman­tha Power — and her fate is just a pre­view for the legions of younger folks who might be tempted to believe that Pres­i­dent Bush is the worst pres­i­dent ever, ever, ever.

    Remem­ber that gen­eral who got whacked for stat­ing the truth about how many troops it would take to sta­bi­lize Iraq — Erik Shinseki?

    http://​www​.freere​pub​lic​.com/​f​o​c​u​s​/​n​e​w​s​/​8​5​3​8​5​9​/posts

    Power’s remarks about with­drawal from Iraq just pro­vided Sen­a­tor Clin­ton with her own ‘Shin­seki moment’, and if she wins the pres­i­dency (as now looks more likely) we will see the video of her crit­i­cism of “the ama­teurs” within the Obama cam­paign again and again

    edit: great Chelsea pics!

43. michaelj said on March 7th, 2008 at 9:44 pm

    It’s like Art Lin­klet­ter said, “Peo­ple eat the damnedest things. Or some­thing like that. I’m sure I’ve eaten both squir­rel and pos­sum, dis­guised as Brunswick stew on blue Sun­days at the bootlegger’s in Athens. Why do peo­ple eat rodents with bushy or cot­ton­tails but would be hohor­ri­fied by rat cas­soulet? Who were the intre­pid gas­tronomes that first braved things as revolt­ing look­ing as squid, or conch or Qua­hogs, or snails? (I’m par­tial to all four, but slugs and gas­tropoda are still slugs and gastropoda.)

    Brains? Tripe? Sweet­breads? Giblets? There’s a word for that stuff, and it’s offal, but I guess it’s all protein.

44. Dexter said on March 7th, 2008 at 9:58 pm

    Harl:
    I quit Kissner’s 15 years ago when I gave up booze, but what a won­der­ful place it was . It’s still there. I really liked Maag’s, too. The bar­tenders in white aprons out of a bygone era, the liv­er­wurst and all the other great sand­wiches, and if you were obser­vant you knew they kept a bot­tle of Corby’s Whiskey in a cold well . Some­body liked a cold shot with their beer, and I sam­pled it, and thought it was OK that way, what the hell. I liked to go there and bull­shit with one of the part-time bar­tenders who used to drive a truck to Bridge­port, Chicago, where I liked to go after Sox games and hit the bars.
    He knew good Chicago sto­ries. I liked to lis­ten.
    Every win­ter hol­i­day sea­son I think fondly of that spe­cial drink they made at Kissner’s…“Tom and Jerry’s”, a brandy spe­cialty with a secret ingre­di­ent list. Damn , I rem­i­nisce too much, I’ll try to be better!

45. del said on March 7th, 2008 at 11:52 pm

    No ref­er­ence to sen­ate floor Iraq speeches can pass with­out men­tion­ing Robert Byrd. Here’s part of his …

    One can under­stand the anger and shock of any Pres­i­dent after the sav­age attacks of Sep­tem­ber 11. One can appre­ci­ate the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing only a shadow to chase and an amor­phous, fleet­ing enemy on which it is nearly impos­si­ble to exact retribution.

    But to turn one’s frus­tra­tion and anger into the kind of extremely desta­bi­liz­ing and dan­ger­ous for­eign pol­icy deba­cle that the world is cur­rently wit­ness­ing is inex­cus­able from any Admin­is­tra­tion charged with the awe­some power and respon­si­bil­ity of guid­ing the des­tiny of the great­est super­power on the planet. Frankly many of the pro­nounce­ments made by this Admin­is­tra­tion are out­ra­geous. There is no other word.

    Yet this cham­ber is haunt­ingly silent.

    Made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand to atten­tion when I heard it real­time…
    Jeff, nice pic­ture. Not too dif­fer­ent from the Jeff in my mind’s eye.

46. Harl Delos said on March 8th, 2008 at 2:50 am

    Michaelj said:

    Brains? Tripe? Sweet­breads? Giblets? There’s a word for that stuff, and it’s offal, but I guess it’s all protein.

    To a veg­e­tar­ian, sir­loin steak is offal. I’m not sure some­one with Won­der Bread sen­si­bil­i­ties would appre­ci­ate it, but I recently read a book by Tom Parker-Bowles (Camilla’s son), called “The Year Of Eat­ing Dangerously.”

    There are 9 chap­ters, each one hav­ing him go to a dif­fer­ent locale to eat all sorts of strange things. He starts out in Glouces­ter­shire, try­ing to catch elvers (baby eels), goes to a chilli fes­ti­val in the south­west, eats all kinds of strange things in China, judges bar­be­cue in Nashville, eats fugu in Japan twice (the first being so-so, the sec­ond time exquis­ite), strug­gles to eat dog in Korea (but the wet-dog smell has him retch­ing — his only real fail­ure), has var­i­ous bits and pieces in Laos, vis­its a celtic com­mu­nity in Iberia for shell­fish that are like pink penises, and fin­ishes by eat­ing din­ner with the Mafia in Sicily.

    It’s a *really* amaz­ing book. Writ­ing a book about eat­ing is impos­si­ble; heck, even doing a TV show about food is impos­si­ble. Molto Mario made bread soup this week, from broth, broc­coli, and stale bread, and I couldn’t imag­ine that it tasted as good as his guests pro­claimed, so I made some, and it’s VERY good, although I couldn’t pos­si­bly tell you what it tasted like. Not like bread, and only a lit­tle like broc­coli. (If you want to try it, the recipe is at the Food Net­work site, called “Pan­cotto con Broccoli”)

    But this book really made me crave some of the foods he ate.

    In the last few years, I’ve been eat­ing more and more pho. It wasn’t worth all the blood and gore and guts we spent in Nam, but Tom lists pho as one of the ten most spe­cial foods (I think his list of 10 items actu­ally has 11, but cheat­ing IS allowed) in the world, and I’m inclined to agree. Yet the type of pho I like best has tripe and ten­don in it. Isn’t ten­don another word for gristle?

    Was “Beef Man­hat­tan” invented at Balyeats? It’s the only restau­rant I’ve ever seen that offered it. It’s an open faced sand­wich — white bread with a scoop of mashed taters, with beef and gravy over all. If you want to really do it up well, you use a hearty bread (Innkeep­ers, avail­able at Costco, is great) instead of white­bread, you don’t peel the taters before you make them into mashed, and you boil beef shank to flinders and thicken the broth to get your beef and gravy.

    Peo­ple down in Day­ton and Cincin­nati have never heard of it, although when I lived in Cincin­nati in the late 1970s, I found that nobody there had ever heard of Hills Broth­ers (“Head For The Hills”) cof­fee, either. And here in Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch coun­try, stores have MJB cof­fee, which wasn’t avail­able in Cincin­nati super­mar­kets, but it’s from the same San Fran­cisco com­pany that roasts Hills Brothers.

    And nobody here seems to know about church base­ment beef sand­wiches. As best I can tell, you bake a whole brisket in a roaster at 225 for about 6 or 8 hours, until it falls apart into strings, and then you turn the juices into a gravy, so the whole thing is about sloppy joe con­sis­tency. And some­times, they make the same sand­wich spread from chicken, turkey, or once in a very great while, pork. When I was grow­ing up, it was as impor­tant a rit­ual to eat those sand­wiches at the wed­ding recep­tion as it was for the older unmar­ried sis­ter to dance in the pig’s trough. Are all the peo­ple in Penn­syl­va­nia liv­ing in sin? I guess that’d explain all the bas­tards work­ing in government.…

    Dex­ter, a “Tom & Jerry” is just an alco­holic egg nog, and if you think about it, the recipe for egg nog are as closely guarded a secret as the recipe for bar­be­cue sauce. There are a mil­lion recipes, and they’re all sim­i­lar, and all dif­fer­ent, and most of them highly tasty.

    Brian, I have my qualms about the Sen­a­tor from Illi­nois. He reminds me too much of Win­field Moses. When he first went into office, he had all these peo­ple from IPFW advis­ing him on what to do, and he started out to be so promis­ing, but it didn’t take long before he was one of the dirt­ier politi­cians I’d run into. Some­one who was in the inner cir­cle at the begin­ning, and sev­eral peo­ple told me ended up quit­ting in dis­gust, told me that his wife led him down that path.

    As a con­ser­v­a­tive inde­pen­dent, I ought to be sup­port­ing the Sen­a­tor from Ari­zona, but the thought of a cen­tury more in Iraq is unac­cept­able. There’s an old joke about the guy who moves into a hous­ing devel­op­ment where every house looks the same. He turns down the wrong street late one night, and only dis­cov­ers his mis­take when he’s mak­ing love to his wife — she moves. Now, if you find your­self in that, ahem, posi­tion, is it the hon­or­able thing to make sure she cli­maxes before you leave — or should you grab your pants and run for the door as fast as you can?

    And I don’t rel­ish con­tin­u­ing this 28-year oli­garchy of Bush and Clin­ton for another four years. As the judge sup­pos­edly said of ster­il­iz­ing Deb­o­rah Kallikak, “seven gen­er­a­tions of imbe­ciles is enough”.

47. basset said on March 8th, 2008 at 7:00 am

    »it was as impor­tant a rit­ual to eat those sand­wiches at the wed­ding recep­tion as it was for the older unmar­ried sis­ter to dance in the pig’s trough

    dance in the pig’s trough? what’s that about?

48. Jeff said on March 8th, 2008 at 8:01 am

    Harl — “Was “Beef Man­hat­tan” invented at Balyeats? It’s the only restau­rant I’ve ever seen that offered it.”

    Dude, you gotta eat at more mid­west­ern truck stops is all i can say. From Wheel­ing to Joliet to Omaha, Beef Man­hat­tan is at every diner and 24 hour road­side affair i’ve ever picked up a menu at. And washed my hands after han­dling the menu. (Yes, i travel with some Purell in the car: why do you ask?)

49. brian stouder said on March 8th, 2008 at 8:58 am

    Harl — I despised Win Moses, back in the day. Odd bit of res­o­nance in your post, though, re Obama/Moses; when Saman­tha Power came to Fort Wayne, and I got her book signed and yapped with her a lit­tle, Win Moses his-own-self was orbit­ing ever closer, as if he wanted to hear what was being said (and in fact, I was rec­om­mend­ing to her that she should stop and see the Lin­coln Museum while she was in town, since she quotes Lin­coln on the title page of her book; which got a rise out of her!)

    Re Sheets Byrd — if the GOP is stuck with its share of wide-stance sen­a­tors (etc), at least it doesn’t have that self-righteous grand wiz­ard (or what­ever the hell) klans­men in their fold. ..

    and re truck stops — I once found myself at a truck stop at Grants­burg, Mary­land, at about 9 at night (although maybe it was 10 local time), because it was the only place I could find to eat. What­ever I ordered, the wait­ress asked if I wanted pota­toes with gravy, and I said “sure!” — and I got crinkle-cut fries with gravy driz­zled on them!

50. Jeff said on March 8th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    Best Beef Man­hat­tan i’ve had in the last few months — right before the great-nieces and nephews did Aunt Georgia’s funeral, at “The County Kitchen” in Arcola, Illi­nois. Wasn’t just sen­ti­ment, it was fine Amish-esque cook­ing. Plus they have a pretty good Amish lifestyle museum around the cor­ner worth the stop off the interstate.

    My youngest brother is a jazz/blues pianist who plays with a cou­ple trav­el­ing bands out of Bloom­ing­ton, IN, and he’s the Man­hat­tan afi­cionado. He likes it at a place in Jasper, and there’s a place called Bill Zuber’s in Amana, Iowa that’s finest kind. But he put the Arcola place in the top five.

51. del said on March 8th, 2008 at 10:22 am

    Dex­ter, I lived for a while in the Cork­town neigh­bor­hood of Detroit close enough to Tiger Sta­dium that our yard became a park­ing lot on sell­outs; the diner with the great beef bar­ley soup was prob­a­bly the late Max Silk’s place (don’t recall the name we just called it Maxie’s). He became a local trea­sure for not only his soups (corn chow­der, my fave) but his char­ity –would feed the guys on skid row. Max was Jew­ish and teamed up w/ Msgr. Kern to help those in need. Every­one loved Maxie — a big heart. As a young man, how­ever, he spent 10 years in prison for his “crime” while part of the infa­mous Pur­ple Gang. That crime? Haul­ing a truck­load of booze dur­ing pro­hi­bi­tion. One of the greats.

52. del said on March 8th, 2008 at 10:58 am

    Brian, the first time I heard about Sen. Byrd’s past was after I recalled “the speech” to another. Kinda reminds me of the movie O Brother Where Art Thou and this clip in which a younger R. Byrd? makes a cameo.
    http://​youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​h​f​T​U​v​Fj6kvc

53. Harl Delos said on March 8th, 2008 at 11:21 am

    Bas­set asked:

    dance in the pig’s trough? what’s that about?

    It’s teas­ing about becom­ing an old maid, but it’s self-deprecating humor, if you know what I mean, because nobody is hold­ing a shot­gun on the sis­ter, if you know what I mean.

    Some churches do it, and some don’t. No sil­lier than toss­ing the bou­quet or the garter.

    Brian wrote:

    What­ever I ordered, the wait­ress asked if I wanted pota­toes with gravy, and I said “sure!” — and I got crinkle-cut fries with gravy driz­zled on them!

    When Philips bought Syl­va­nia, they closed their fac­tory in Seneca Falls, NY, and a lot of peo­ple moved to Ottawa to work in the Philips Dis­play Com­po­nents fac­tory there. Not much demand for TV pic­ture tubes these days; the fac­tory has prob­a­bly closed by now.

    But in any case, around Seneca Falls, peo­ple pop­u­larly order a “quickie”, which is a ham­burger bas­ket (do younger read­ers know that’s a burger and fries?) cov­ered with beef gravy. When they came to Ottawa, they’d go into a restau­rant, and ask the wait­ress for a quickie, and they’d get blank stares. I sup­pose in some towns, they’d get their faces slapped, but… (I imag­ine that they ordi­nar­ily get a lit­tle soft sol­der first, instead of being approached so bluntly.)

    del said:

    As a young man, how­ever, he spent 10 years in prison for his “crime” while part of the infa­mous Pur­ple Gang. That crime? Haul­ing a truck­load of booze dur­ing pro­hi­bi­tion. One of the greats.

    One of the large-format mag­a­zines — pos­si­bly Col­liers, because I think it was too early for Life or Look — did a story on Pauld­ing County, because it had an extremely high unsolved mur­der rate. The Pur­ple Gang dumped their bod­ies there. The sher­iff said that he didn’t see any rea­son to waste local tax­pay­ers’ money solv­ing Detroit’s crimes.

    Of course, there have been few sher­iffs in Ohio that were re-elected at least once who weren’t mil­lion­aires when they retired. Among other things, the sher­iff gets paid a per-diem for pris­on­ers, and the less he spends to feed and care for them, the more goes into his pocket, and it’s all legitimate.

    Of course, there were other things. When Rick Yocum was at the Crescent-News, he said he sent a case of liquor to each sher­iff, in order to get coop­er­a­tion from them. And news is legal. Whore­houses, places sell­ing Indi­ana liquor and North Car­olina cig­a­rettes, places with pay­off pin­ball machines, and after-hours estab­lish­ments all con­tribute to the sheriff’s retire­ment fund, because they may not be legal, but vot­ers don’t seem to object much to those businesses.

54. Jeff said on March 8th, 2008 at 11:49 am

    Ohio and West Vir­ginia sher­iffs also used to have almost feu­dal con­trol over prop­erty fore­clo­sures, and of course knew before any­one else which prop­er­ties were going up for fore­clo­sure, sher­iffs sale, etc.

    You could get rich on spec­u­lat­ing directly, or by charg­ing for early access to the info. But yes, it used to be hard to end you career as a sher­iff in any cat­e­gory other than rich, or con­victed. Not much in between.

    They assure me down at the Cour­t­house that those days are long gone — well, since the 80’s any­how. Or at least the 90’s they got it all cleaned up. It’s been years, OK? Noth­ing to see, move along …

55. basset said on March 8th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    so how do they actu­ally do the danc­ing in the pig’s trough? prob­a­bly pretty hard to find a gen­uine trough in most places these days. I sup­pose it’s some­thing sym­bolic, bring in a kid’s plas­tic sled and hop around on that for awhile maybe.

    and why the pig’s trough, why not the horse’s? ama­teur folk­lorist, that’s me.

    never heard a bas­ket with gravy called a “quickie,” but here in the south you want to be care­ful about say­ing “give me some sugar” to a waitress.

56. MichaelG said on March 8th, 2008 at 3:26 pm

    We lost sev­eral silkies (a type of ban­tam chicken) http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​Silkie to red tail hawks. You could always tell when there had been an air strike. The girls, banty and oth­er­wise, would all be clus­tered near tree trunks look­ing fear­fully at the sky. The only attack I ever wit­nessed was when a hawk hit our white silkie rooster. The rooster fought back and ended up being more than the hawk wanted to han­dle. What a spec­tac­u­lar sight it all was. Lots of scream­ing too. It took me an hour to coax the lit­tle guy out of the bushes. He was scared shit­less but other than los­ing some feath­ers, unharmed. A year or two later he fed a fox. Oh, well.

    Were Sen. Clin­ton to be nom­i­nated and offer the VP job to Sen. Obama, it would pose a true dilemma for him, I think. Look at where pres­i­dents have gen­er­ally come from and you don’t see a lot of sen­a­tors mak­ing the jump. I don’t really know why other than maybe senior sen­a­tors have some sort of Wash­ing­ton insider aroma to them that the elec­torate doesn’t like. On the other hand the VP spot seems to be a shoo in. A gov­er­nor­ship is a good step­ping stone as well. Other than the above, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be veep under Hillary with that other guy around.

    And I also don’t like the dynas­tic aspect of hav­ing 28 years of nuthin’ but Bushes and Clin­tons in the Pale Palace.

    The stuff men­tioned by michaelj is known as “offal” because that’s what it has been called for hun­dreds of years. It’s not a value judg­ment. I have seen what you guys call “Beef Man­hat­tan” all over the place called a hot beef sand­wich. It can also be had in turkey fla­vor as well. Slices on white bread topped with mashed pota­toes and gravy.

    Pho is won­der­ful stuff. There are sev­eral vari­eties of it. There are any num­ber of excel­lent Viet­namese restau­rants around here sell­ing it with those great piles of aro­matic greens to accom­pany. Yum. Best I ever had was from a street ven­dor in Ho Chi Minh City a cou­ple of years ago.

    I’m not famil­iar with the Ital­ian ver­sion of bread soup, but the Por­tuguese ver­sion called “Sopa Acorda” (the “c” should have one of those lit­tle things on it that tells one to pro­nounce it as an “s”). It’s a clas­sic in Por­tuguese cooking.

    Scari­est thing I ever ate was one of those eggs with the fully formed baby duck inside. I choked it down with copi­ous glugs of Heinekens. This was also in the RVN a few years ago. Once was more than enough.

    Hills Bros cof­fee used to be roasted in a plant right at the SF end of the Bay Bridge so that peo­ple cross­ing the bridge would be wel­comed into the City (in SF the word “City” is cap­i­tal­ized) by the aroma of freshly roasted cof­fee. It was won­der­ful. I have no idea where it is processed now. Nor do I know where MJB is processed. I’m too lazy to google all that stuff to find out. MJB is Max J. Bran­den­stein. I once worked for a guy who was mar­ried to a Bran­den­stein. Max’s grand­daugh­ter I think. Same guy dated Diane Fein­stein back in the day.

57. nancy said on March 8th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    Jeff, in Indi­ana sher­iffs get a cut of any delin­quent prop­erty taxes they can col­lect. In most coun­ties, the sher­iff is the highest-paid pub­lic offi­cial by far. And many of them had no higher education.

    I was also inter­ested in how they were invited to put their wives on the pay­roll, usu­ally as jail matron (at least in the smaller coun­ties). It’s like get­ting a nice lit­tle bump to the house­hold income. Thanks, taxpayers!

58. brian stouder said on March 8th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

    Say — did some­one already men­tion it and I missed it ? — in all this talk about birds and wildlife, the PGA golfer who delib­er­ately took aim and drove a golf ball at a hawk — and HIT it? The bird (who was perched in a tree) dared to shriek while the golfer was try­ing to tape a seg­ment for a tv show called “Shoot like a pro”. (maybe it would be bet­ter titled “Shoot like a mani­a­cal psycho!)..!!!

    http://​sports​.espn​.go​.com/​g​o​l​f​/​n​e​w​s​/​s​t​o​r​y​?​i​d​=​3​2​7​9​9​5​8​&​a​m​p​;​c​a​m​p​a​i​g​n​=​r​s​s​&​a​m​p​;​s​o​u​r​c​e​=​E​S​P​N​H​e​a​dlines

    Accord­ing to court doc­u­ments, Isen­hour got upset when a red-shouldered hawk began mak­ing noise, forc­ing another take. He began hit­ting balls at the bird, then 300 yards away, but gave up. Isen­hour started again when the hawk moved within about 75 yards, Florida Fish and Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Com­mis­sion offi­cer Brian Baine indi­cated in a report.

    Isen­hour allegedly said “I’ll get him now,” and aimed for the hawk. “About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head, and [Isen­hour] was very excited that it was so close,” Baine wrote.
    A few shots later, wit­nesses said he hit the hawk. The bird, pro­tected as a migra­tory species, fell to the ground bleed­ing from both nostrils.

    and then

    Isen­hour said his fam­ily has adopted three cats from a local shelter.

    “I am an ani­mal lover,” he said. “We ask that every­one accept my sin­cer­est apol­ogy, and please be respect­ful of my family’s privacy.”

59. Harl Delos said on March 8th, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    Accord­ing to dic​tio​nary​.com, which is based on Ran­dom House unabridged, offal has three definitions.

    of·fal /ˈɔfəl, ˈɒfəl/ –noun
    1. the parts of a butchered ani­mal that are con­sid­ered ined­i­ble by human beings; car­rion.
    2. the parts of a butchered ani­mal removed in dress­ing; vis­cera.
    3. refuse; rub­bish; garbage.of·fal /ˈɔfəl, ˈɒfəl/

    It all depends on your cri­te­ria for “ined­i­ble”, it seems to me. A suf­fi­cient quan­tity of polar bear liver is lethal from all the Vit­a­min A in it. That’s pretty clearcut, but deer liver, on the other hand, is the most desir­able of the veni­son cuts.…

    You can buy pigs’ troughs at any trac­tor store. And yeah, it means you pretty much dance with­out mov­ing your feet very much.

    A horse trough would be awfully dif­fi­cult to carry into the church base­ment, and even more dif­fi­cult to carry out. When we moved from Milan Cen­ter to Florida Avenue, we brought along a 1952 Inter­na­tional Har­vester deep-freeze. Get­ting it into the base­ment was dif­fi­cult. It was still work­ing very well when we moved out, but we decided to donate it to the new own­ers; freez­ers are pretty cheap these days, and med­ical treat­ment isn’t.

    Not only are sher­iffs, even hon­est one, paid extremely well, but it’s a pretty secure job. Run­ning against the sher­iff can be fool­hardy, if you know what I mean.

    I don’t know if there are a lot of cof­fee roast­ers every­where these days, but there sure are a lot in Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch coun­try. They even roast Star­bucks cof­fee here. Lots of smaller roast­ers, as well. Inter­est­ing piece of trivia: Star­bucks didn’t sell bev­er­age cof­fee until they had five stores. Ini­tially, they just sold beans and grind. That sur­prised me; I fig­ured they were a drink store from the get-go.

60. del said on March 8th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    Harl, your com­ment about sher­iffs hav­ing a secure job reminds of metro Detroit’s Macomb County sher­rif. After decades in the job he was con­victed of crim­i­nal sex­ual con­duct with an intern. Spent 3 years in prison. But that didn’t turn off the elec­torate towards his son, who ran for his seat and won. He’s still there. Among the elder’s accom­plish­ments — bring­ing back the old-time black and white striped garb for pris­on­ers. Pub­lic ate it up. Kinda like return­ing the fire engines to fire engine red after dab­bling with optic yel­low.
    As to Brian’s note about the golfer who mis­took the endan­gered hawk for a varmint, any­one notice the max­i­mum prison sen­tence? 14 months. Hmph.

61. nancy said on March 8th, 2008 at 5:21 pm

    Yeah, I say screw his family’s pri­vacy. His kids need to learn daddy’s a prick. Let’s all send them post­cards say­ing so.

    Grow­ing up in Jack Nick­laus’ home­town, I learned about golfers early. After nearly being run over in Fos­ter Park about a mil­lion times — by golfers who thought the biking/walking/jogging track was their per­sonal cart path — I can think of a few peo­ple who’d be much improved by hav­ing some balls shagged in their direction.

62. Dexter said on March 8th, 2008 at 5:43 pm

    The cur­rent Allen County Sher­iff is the son of my Eng­lish teacher.
    I don’t know Sher­iff Fries, but the old man was the wit­ti­est teacher ever, and when I saw him a cou­ple years ago at a reunion he was still smok­ing that pipe, same as 48 years ago. All the “kids” loved, and still love, Corky Fries.

    http://​www​.allen​coun​tysh​er​iff​.org/

63. del said on March 8th, 2008 at 7:09 pm

    I had a col­lege Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor (Leon Lin­deroth) who’d been a/the sher­iff with/of Chippewa County (MI). He was ter­rific; much life experience.

64. Connie said on March 8th, 2008 at 8:09 pm

    Indi­ana leg­is­la­ture passed a bill this ses­sion meant to con­trol Sher­iff profit mak­ing. And they used to also make huge prof­its from feed­ing jail pris­on­ers cheaply as they got to keep the unspent funds.

65. Kafkaz said on March 9th, 2008 at 3:58 am

    Even minia­ture golf pisses me off, so it’s not that hard to imag­ine real golf giv­ing a per­son mur­der­ous thoughts. (Games aren’t my best thing. Scrab­ble is fun, but that’s about it.)

    Bird watch­ing, con­versely, is very calm­ing. We live in a old neigh­bor­hood sur­rounded on three sides by for­est pre­serve, so we get lots of most excel­lent birds. When a hawk is in the vicin­ity, the other birds get very ner­vous – amaz­ing how quickly the “on alert” sta­tus spreads when a preda­tor shows up.

    For sev­eral sum­mers, we had a red headed wood­pecker who fre­quented one of our feed­ers, but I have not seen another of those in years. They’re swoop­ers, and when they swoop from a tree on one side of a road to a tree on the other side, they tend to get done in by cars.

    Used to keep a draw­ing pad and col­ored pen­cils nearby when I was read­ing on the deck so I could draw the more strik­ing birds. Good way to really get to know them. Should take that up again. (Should also diet, exer­cise, and stop swear­ing, but shoulds have a way of get­ting tum­bled to the bot­tom of the to do heap.)

    Any­way, seems like when­ever I hap­pen to glance at what­ever golf thing my hus­band might be watch­ing on tv, even the pros are hard pressed to get that silly white ball where they want it to go. So, how in heck did this guy man­age to hit a hawk, and hard enough to kill it?

    Guess he’ll be pon­der­ing that one for awhile, too. (Besides, isn’t “don’t aim at any liv­ing thing” one of the first rules when learn­ing to wield any poten­tially dan­ger­ous weapon?)

    Sup­posed to be “a mur­der of crows” and “a tedium of golfers,” isn’t it? Not a mur­der­ous golfer and a hawk defunct.

66. brian stouder said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:17 am

    Ear­lier, Nancy ref­er­enced a good arti­cle in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel fea­tur­ing the views of Gerry Prokopwicz,

    http://​www​.news​-sen​tinel​.com/​a​p​p​s​/​p​b​c​s​.​d​l​l​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​?​A​I​D​=​/​2​0​0​8​0​3​0​4​/​N​E​W​S​/​8​0​3​040321

    regard­ing the loom­ing dis­in­te­gra­tion of the Fort Wayne Lin­coln Museum, and today we have this fea­ture in the Fort Wayne Jour­nal Gazette, by Harold Holzer

    http://​www​.jour​nal​gazette​.net/​a​p​p​s​/​p​b​c​s​.​d​l​l​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​?​A​I​D​=​/​2​0​0​8​0​3​0​9​/​E​D​I​T​0​5​/​8​0​3​090352

    an excerpt — 

    Con­sor­tiums are needed; advis­ers are required; ideas are needed. I am relieved to know that the com­pany has already indi­cated its inten­tion to con­vene a group to explore these pos­si­bil­i­ties. If it takes longer than four months to craft a plan, per­haps the chains can even be left off the doors for a few more months. One final exhi­bi­tion of the collection’s best pieces would at least inspire the kind of send-off the place deserves.

    Lin­coln once warned, “We can­not escape his­tory.” Lin­coln Finan­cial never has, and it shouldn’t now. Its his­toric oblig­a­tion, first to Robert Lin­coln him­self when the foun­da­tion was first estab­lished, and all through the years as the col­lec­tion was amassed, does not van­ish with the pub­li­ca­tion of a news release.

    Oth­er­wise what has been described as a shut­down will in real­ity be an assassination.

    To which all I have to say is — Hear Hear!!

    PS — and once again, Mitch Harper’s Fort Wayne Observed seems to be ham­strung, offer­ing almost com­plete silence on (what seems to me to be) a HUGE, HUGE Fort Wayne story, while nn.c has it cov­ered. When nn.c isn’t bitch­ing* about the weather, or the need to clean bath­rooms, the site has the pulse of Fort Wayne pol­i­tics and cul­ture, and the ever present abil­ity to make nation­ally rel­e­vant news. Thanks, Nance (Sincerely!)

    *yes­ter­day the ques­tion whether it is worse to be a ‘bitch’ or an ‘ass­hole’ arose over on Laura Lippman’s site (with­out clear resolution)

    PPS — Kafkaz — the moron shot ball after ball at the bird — and then the bird moved closer, and he let fly many more shots on video tape! I think the thing is on youtube, if you can stom­ache it)

67. Kafkaz said on March 9th, 2008 at 12:50 pm

    Urgh, no, Brian, I think I have to give this record­ing a pass. He was *deter­mined* to hit the bird, then? Sigh. Some­how, I was kind of hop­ing this would turn out to be some­thing like the oppo­site of the dumb luck or blind chance of a hole in one. Would still be hor­ri­ble, but the cruel deter­mi­na­tion makes it an entirely more evil thing.

    Watch­ing hawks cir­cle and glide is one of my favorite things. Always makes me think of Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins’ “The Wind­hover”: “My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird – the achieve of, the mas­tery of the thing!”

68. michaelj said on March 9th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    Could some­body just phone in where and how Clin­ton went so neg­a­tive on Bar­rack. Just one com­ment. Any­thing? Didn’t happen.

    I just don’t see that hav­ing hap­pened. Basi­cally, utter bull­shit. Or maybe udder since W tried to milk bulls on more than one occa­sion, and boy I think­this is Rov­ian. All hat ring a bell? MMMoron. Maybe he thought that was Ken­ny­boy whose teats he was yanking..

    You couldn’t in a zil­lion years hit a bird with a golf shot. Even if you really wanted to. And I love watch­ing hawks cir­cle. They’re going to eat the tufted tit­mouse that’s just been blath­er­ing on our balcony,

    Kafkaz, sec­ond or third best poem, But who cares? House­man, Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins, William Blake, Christina Rosetti?. Everybody’s sec­ond to Yeats in chan­nel­ing some­thing mys­ti­cal, or nys­ti­fy­ing. Well, there’s Under Ben Bul­ben which puts most other attempts at poetry to abject shame.

    Think about Yeats’ con­tem­po­raries. I think hawks con­cate­nate. I don’t think ospreys do. They just choose to dine, rapa­ciously. Awe­some sight. Rap­tors only eat things still alive. Neo­cons reg­u­lalary dine on the dead.

    If you live in what passes for the coun­try, but it’s really the city, you prob­a­bly think the brother was the poet. I’d say Christina ate his lunch.

69. brian stouder said on March 9th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    Could some­body just phone in where and how Clin­ton went so neg­a­tive on Bar­rack. Just one com­ment. Any­thing? Didn’t happen.

    Well, to me THIS qual­i­fies, MichaelJ -

    http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​L​H​F​R​E​D​H​B​-​n​Q​&​a​m​p​;​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​=​r​elated

    unless you would accept that a per­son as well-read and intel­li­gent as Sen­a­tor Clin­ton has any doubt as to whether Sen­a­tor Obama is a rad­i­cal Mus­lim or not.

70. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 6:14 pm

    Not quite with you on this one Brian. No men­tion of rad­i­cal anything.

71. brian stouder said on March 9th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

    from

    http://​blogs​.abc​news​.com/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​a​l​p​u​n​c​h​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​3​/​c​l​i​n​t​o​n​-​s​a​y​s​-​o​b.html

    To be fair, Clin­ton went on to say that hav­ing “been the tar­get of so many ridicu­lous rumors… I have a great deal of sym­pa­thy for any­body who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time.”

    That said, it’s the “as far as I know” that has some Obama sup­port­ers up in arms.

    (Like the one who posted the clip on Youtube under the header: “Hillary Clin­ton Stokes False Rumors about Obama’s Faith”.)

    I guess the ques­tion is how would this look if the shoe were on the other foot.

    Let’s try just one of any num­ber of ridicu­lous anti-Clinton smears.

    HYPOTHETICAL STEVE KROFT: You don’t believe that Sen­a­tor Clin­ton killed Vince Foster?

    HYPOTHETICAL BARACK OBAMA: Of course not. I mean that’s, you know, that, there is no basis for that. You know, I take her on the basis of what she says, and, you know, there isn’t any rea­son to doubt that.

    HYPOTHETICAL KROFT: You said you take Sen. Clin­ton at her word that she didn’t kill Vince Foster…

    HYPOTHETICAL OBAMA: Right, right..

    HYPOTHETICAL KROFT: …you don’t believe that she killed Vince Foster.

    HYPOTHETICAL OBAMA: No! No! Why would I? There’s noth­ing to base that on. As far as I know.

    Hmm.

    And lest we for­get this con­text, from the per­spec­tive of Obama sup­port­ers: two Clin­ton cam­paign vol­un­teer coor­di­na­tors in Iowa were asked by the Clin­ton cam­paign to resign after it came out that they had cir­cu­lated those insane Obama-is-a-Muslim-Manchurian-candidate emails.

    What if Obama answers a ques­tion about Saman­tha Power’s remark in the same way — “She’s not a mon­ster as far as I know”?

72. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    Michaelj, many observers attribute any neg­a­tiv­ity directed at Obama to Hillary’s sur­ro­gates. Can’t be dis­proven. Hillary’s resiliency reminds me of Danny’s clever remark: “If you my last feel­ing I will be invin­ci­ble,” or sumpin like that.

    P.S. Kafkaz is right, bird watch­ing is calm­ing. Saw a hawk today soar­ing in frigid clear skies (play­ing catch out­side with my son as a reward for com­plet­ing his “wordly wise” homework.)

73. Harl Delos said on March 9th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

    Could some­body just phone in where and how Clin­ton went so neg­a­tive on Bar­rack. Just one comment.

    I sup­pose the com­ments that her hus­band keeps mak­ing don’t count?

    In Nevada, Bill com­plains that there’s a lot of crossover vote with­out con­se­quences, that some­one can decide to be a Demo­c­rat for the cau­cuses, and then decide they were a Repub­li­can after all, and vote in the GOP pri­maries a cou­ple of weeks later. And, of course, that’s the *only* state in which Sen­a­tor Clin­ton has beaten Sen­a­tor Obama in a cau­cus. Golly gee, must be a coincidence.

    And there in the Car­oli­nas, Bill seemed to have a lot of trou­ble remem­ber­ing that Sen­a­tor Obama wasn’t Sen­a­tor Rain­bow Coalition.

    And Sen­a­tor Clin­ton has been talk­ing about her 35 years of expe­ri­ence, such as choos­ing the china for white house teas, and lead­ing impor­tant inter­na­tional pol­icy dis­cus­sions in which Sin­bad, Cheryl Crow, and Chelsea are par­tic­i­pants. And she’s been crow­ing about her leg­isla­tive accom­plish­ments, as if renam­ing a fed­eral build­ing after Thur­good Mar­shall required reach­ing across the aisle to work up bipar­ti­san sup­port, and as if Sen­a­tor Obama’s pas­sage of a law requir­ing that cops video­tape ALL inter­ro­ga­tion, not just the con­fes­sion that is made after the cops brow­beat an inno­cent sus­pect, was noth­ing. They play hard­ball in Illi­nois, both in Chicago and downstate.

    And she’s been insist­ing all along that Sen­a­tor Obama hasn’t been “vet­ted”, as if being dis­barred was no big deal. And she talk about being a fighter, but the first time, some­thing goes wrong, she’s in tears. Do you sup­pose North Korea is going to think she’s a tough cookie, the way she treated Bill for rap­ing women in Arkansas, and shar­ing a cigar with Mon­ica, and humil­i­at­ing her in the world press for months on end?

    No, she disses Sen­a­tor Obama, as just another dumb, uh, Hawai­ian. Yeah, that’s the phrase I was think­ing of. Dumb Hawaiian.

    I can’t see how Sen­a­tor Obama has been able to hold his tongue so long. Yes, Sen­a­tor Clin­ton has been “vet­ted” and every­where they turn, there’s more lies and deceit. Want to explain that cat­tle futures busi­ness, Mrs. Clin­ton? Want to explain the travel office shenani­gans? Were you involved in the sale of par­dons, Mrs. Clin­ton, or was it every­body else in the fam­ily *except* you? What about those Rose law firm billing records that dis­ap­peared for two years only to mys­te­ri­ously show up on your read­ing table? Did you have *mice* in the White House, ma’am? Why did you refuse Jack Anderson’s request for your senior the­sis at Welles­ley for months — and then tell him that no the­sis (and no expla­na­tion) would be forth­com­ing? Why can’t you reveal the *topic* of your senior the­sis? Was a col­lege senior in the 1960s writ­ing a paper that *still* is so impor­tant to national secu­rity that it must remain secret?

    And for that mat­ter, why are you wait­ing until after April 15 to release your income tax returns for 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006? That’s when the 2007 return is due, but didn’t you file taxes those other six years? Or is that $5 mil­lion loan to your cam­paign really not your money after all, but a gift from a lobbyist?

    Tell you what, I’ll fur­nish Mrs. Clin­ton *two* pil­lows, if some­one will just pin her down to answer­ing some of these ques­tions on cam­era, so they can be uploaded to YouTube.

    It’s no secret that Karl Rove wants Mrs. Clin­ton to be nom­i­nated. It’s the one thing that will get Repub­li­cans to turn out in droves for McCain, guar­an­tee­ing not only the White House, but keep­ing a lot of house and sen­ate seats in GOP hands.

74. Jeff said on March 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

    Wow, Harl, you just saved me a bunch of typ­ing. Y’all, what he said. And what Josh Mar­shall said at TPM — http://​talk​ing​pointsmemo​.com/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​1​8​2​1​91.php

    The new pol­i­tics has to cross the rick­ety but famil­iar bridge to the 21st cen­tury of the old pol­i­tics, and Obama has to decide if he’s gonna cross it, or build a new one, but he can’t stand on the shore much longer skip­ping pretty stones over the creek.

75. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 8:17 pm

    Brian, I didn’t bother with the youtube post because it’s over 6 min­utes and dull, but the Obama madrassa story started in print through the own­ers of the Wash­ing­ton Times, then it was on TV’s FOX News; both attrib­uted it to unnamed sources close to Hillary’s peo­ple. (Things that make you go hmm­mmm.) Com­ment­ing on accu­sa­tions that one’s oppo­nent is a Mus­lim is a hel­luva lot dif­fer­ent than com­ment­ing on one’s oppo­nent being a mur­derer. (See “par­alip­sis?”)
    Harl, you’ve said a lot but still haven’t answered Michaelj’s orig­i­nal ques­tion. If it’s out there please bring it to the table for all of us …

76. Jeff said on March 9th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    SNL cov­ered it for Harl, too, but i’ll swing — Hillary, her “first lad­die in wait­ing,” her ads, and her staff are all say­ing Obama isn’t up to the 3 am phone call. They’re indi­cat­ing that he might, well, sound like Fred Armisen doing a phone-it-in imi­ta­tion of a ner­vous Barack on the phone, beg­ging the grown-ups to bail him out of the real prob­lems he didn’t see coming.

    In pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics, that’s pretty harsh — not say­ing your oppo­nent is wrong, or that you’re more right, but that they can’t cut it. And Obama’s answer is still just a repeated refrain of “Yes, We Can.”

    My worry is that David Axel­rod has a good idea how to man­age union con­tracts and keep city ser­vices going dur­ing a heavy snow­storm, but who’s the cam­paign gonna pick up to help them say effec­tively “We do *so* know what to say when the phone rings at 3 am and a cri­sis is brew­ing in Gotch­aback­istan, and here’s who we’ll have in the room to help us make the answer work.”

    Am i say­ing McCain is bet­ter? Not sure — the prob­lem is we’re nowhere near talk­ing about that (who will Johnny Mac lis­ten to at 3:08 am? still unclear); Obama has to answer effec­tively why he’s chang­ing the sub­ject, or answer­ing with an illu­mi­nat­ing parry, but na-na-na-i-can’t-hear-you is wear­ing thin, even on col­lege campuses.

77. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    Harl, Clin­ton won the New Mex­ico cau­cus too. As for it being no secret that Rove wants Clin­ton to be the nom­i­nee, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. One thing we can always lie about with impunity is what we think and feel. Of the the 3 great lies one of them falls into that cat­e­gory (1) the check is in the mail, (2) (lit­tle help), and (3) I love you. If Karl Rove is as smart as they say, he must know that he’s held in low regard (with Dick Cheney like approval rat­ings) and there­fore would make sense for him to pub­licly sup­port the Demo­c­rat he secretly wants to lose. And which can­di­date do you think would look into any of his poten­tial wrong­do­ing more, the “change” can­di­date or HRC?

78. michaelj said on March 9th, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    McCain’s worse than W. He believes he’s hon­est. And worse than that shitheel isn’t a good idea.

79. Jeff said on March 9th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

    Unless Karl wants us to think that he thinks we’ll think he’s going to sup­port the one he actu­ally fears, so we’ll think that he’s think­ing the other way, but antic­i­pat­ing that, he’s already thought of it, so is actu­ally for Hillary.

    This way lies mad­ness … don’t bother, we’re here.

80. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

    Jeff, Touche. Are you the com­menter who ref­er­enced my new favorite word, apophe­nia? Love it. As for the sec­ond great lie, a lawyer who was num­ber 3 in the Jus­tice Dept. under Clin­ton used to tell it thusly (to lighten up the crowd): Knock, knock — “Hello, we’re here from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, we’re here to help you.”

81. Jeff said on March 9th, 2008 at 9:29 pm

    Don’t mean to be so chatty, but after three days of shov­el­ing, shov­el­ing, shov­el­ing … i don’t want to leave this recliner for a while, and my back may not let me.

    Any­how, Jack Shafer at Slate, who really ticked me off with his take on the McCain story in the NYTimes (short ver­sion: i think he’s wrong) couldn’t be more right in his analy­sis of why pla­gia­rism mat­ters … and i thought denizens of the NN.C might find it of interest:

    http://​www​.slate​.com/​i​d​/​2​1​86029/

    [Yes, del, i’m that Jeff, cur­rently hid­ing under a “mild-mannered” dis­guise until all the other crankier Jeffs calm down or wan­der off. Apophe­nia is a use­ful cat­e­gory to keep in mind, even — especially? — for a per­son of faith.]

82. Harl Delos said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    > Harl, Clin­ton won the New Mex­ico cau­cus too.

    She did? Last I heard, she was lead­ing by 1700 votes, with 17,000 pro­vi­sional bal­lots still to be counted.

    But then, I haven’t heard what ever hap­pened to the recount in New Hamp­shire, either. Large dis­trict or small, Clin­ton and Rom­ney did a LOT bet­ter in precincts that used Diebold equip­ment than in ones that didn’t.

    > As for it being no secret that Rove wants Clin­ton to be the nom­i­nee, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. One thing we can always lie about with impunity is what we think and feel.

    What you tell large groups of your fol­low­ers to *act* upon is hard to con­ceal. In pre­vi­ous elec­tions, Rove’s fol­low­ers have sup­pressed black votes by send­ing out lit­er­a­ture that inti­mated that peo­ple with out­stand­ing war­rants would be arrested when they showed up, or with the wrong date to vote, or the wrong loca­tion. In Ohio, they made sure there were plenty of vot­ing machines and thus short lines in some precincts and not in other precincts, and golly gee, isn’t it a coin­ci­dence that coun­try club precincts were the ones not short­changed? I don’t think it was Rove who did all that — but when he gives speeches say­ing that GOP mem­bers should pray that Hillary is run­ning against them, I think they get the idea.

    > Of the the 3 great lies one of them falls into that cat­e­gory (1) the check is in the mail, (2) (lit­tle help), and (3) I love you.

    Wal­ter J. Hickel, back in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, said, the check’s in the mail, of course I won’t come in your mouth, and I’m from the gov­ern­ment and I’m here to help you. The press ser­vices cleaned up the sec­ond part to “of course I’ll respect you”. He got fired, though, when he said you’re guar­an­teed the minor­ity vote if you promise loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to take a shit. I think he got fired because that’s what they try to promise the *white* voters.

    > And which can­di­date do you think would look into any of his poten­tial wrong­do­ing more, the “change” can­di­date or HRC?

    Rove doesn’t really mat­ter. If they couldn’t defeat Dubya’s re-election with Rove, they surely can’t use it to beat McCain, who was in the Sen­ate, not the White House.

    What Karl’s been teach­ing the GOP, and Democ­rats are too stu­pid to learn, is that peo­ple don’t vote for a can­di­date they like, they vote against a can­di­date they hate or are scared of. It’s not some­thing the GOP invented — the daisy ad against Gold­wa­ter was the ulti­mate scare/hate ad. On the other hand, the GOP has learned their les­son, and the Democ­rats never have.

    “Don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner, but the Clin­tons are Republic[an]s who found a way to run against other Republic[an]s” — Dave Winer.

    The folks on Script​ingNews​.com argue that Obama should name a VP now, fig­ur­ing that the right choice would end the “self-immolation” of the next six weeks. Liv­ing in Penn­syl­va­nia, I think I’m going to *enjoy* the next six weeks, but I have to agree, it’d be smart for him to name his veep now — and I came up with a name I haven’t seen any­one else men­tion: Clau­dia Kennedy. Expla­na­tion on my blog.

83. michaelj said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:13 pm

    Yeah, del, but some of us just have an aver­sion to lying. Bar­rack says “trust me” but as far as the inva­sion and NAFTA are con­cerned, he’s not only lied his ass off, he’s accused his oppo­nent of lying, when she was telling the truth.

    That’s news that will not appear on MSNBC. Keith will stick with the lie and slag Hillary. I swear, this is Deanie Babies gone wild. Peo­ple with no idea of the process, that think Kucinich is cute. And never both­ered read­ing Pub­lic Law HJ 114.

    And the guy gets all hagio­graph­i­cal and post-climactic about Ray­gun. Did Ronny open a big tent for black peo­ple? Does Bar­rack think Ray­gun did, when he waxes poetic? The worst bull­shit is Kennedy com­par­isons. Ms. Obama sure as hell hasn’t got Jackie’s class. More like L’il Kim or Court­ney Love. And Jackie wasn’t Ethel, either. But I’m sure that’s insert­ing the race card.

    What’s stu­pid is, these peo­ple are talk­ing about Jack when they’re dying to mean Bob, but they’re too dense to get it.

84. michaelj said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:20 pm

    Do y’all think bum­rush­ing cau­cuses is remotely demo­c­ra­tic? Cau­cuses, by def­i­n­i­tion, are exclu­sion­ary. It’s Deany Baby heaven. We’re more lib­eral than thou. Which makes us, ta-da, pro­gres­sive, so we get to tell the whole state how to vote.

85. brian stouder said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    Wal­ter J. Hickel bzzzzt! Earl Butz — a hoosier — Dept of Agriculture

    He had got­ten away with a quip about the Pope issu­ing pro­nounce­ments on birth con­trol — say­ing some­thing like ‘you can’t make the rules if you don’t play the game’.….but the loose shoes (etc) got him whacked

86. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    TPM post above’s got no dirt on Hillary — just blames Hillary for Saman­tha Power’s res­ig­na­tion over her Hillary-is-a-monster com­ment. Don’t see how she’s to blame for that. It also likens her “involve­ment” in Power’s res­ig­na­tion to the swift-boating of John Kerry. With Hillary, peo­ple see what they want to see –she’s the Rorschach woman. To all of her crit­ics, Michaelj’s Wal­ter Mondale-era query remains: Where’s the beef?

    Ran­dom thought: polls over­state Obama’s but under­state Clinton’s sup­port. After the NH pri­mary a poll­ster wrote about the phe­nom­e­non (Time or NYT) that peo­ple tend to over­state their sup­port of African Amer­i­can can­di­dates to poll­sters vs. what they do in the polling booth. (Could this help to explain Obama’s cau­cus vs. pri­mary results?) And I can see a sim­i­lar dynamic play­ing out as poll­sters call women vot­ers at home to poll them at the din­ner hour. Some wouldn’t be com­fort­able voic­ing sup­port for Hillary in front of their hus­bands, but once they get to the polling booth …

    It’s dif­fer­ent with me; my wife’s the boss.

87. del said on March 9th, 2008 at 10:56 pm

    Michaelj’s cau­cus analy­sis rings true.

88. Harl Delos said on March 9th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

    Dif­fer­ent peo­ple have dif­fer­ent ideas about what qual­i­fies as “mon­ster”. Vir­ginia passed a bill Sat­ur­day that makes it ille­gal for an adult to french-kiss a minor. It’s a mis­de­meanor that puts you on the sex­ual preda­tor list, gives you up to a year in prison, and a fine of $2500. It was unan­i­mous in their upper house, and one per­son voted against it in the lower house; he wanted to make it a felony.

    But I think a mon­ster is the fel­low who killed Nancy Eagle­son and left her nude where coon hunters found her. And an even greater mon­ster is the sher­iff who knew it was one of his deputies that did it, and didn’t lift a fin­ger to do any­thing about it.

    I had a friend who was a para­plegic, and as a lit­tle girl, her mother didn’t bother with a chastity belt for her daugh­ter, she just used a nee­dle and car­pet thread. Mama also rented her out to a group of men to make a movie with a goat. I think that group of men were mon­sters, and her mother even more so. And I don’t think charg­ing them with a felony is appro­pri­ate; I wouldn’t want mon­sters like that get­ting prison, or even the elec­tric chair. I want to see humungous Oster­iz­ers built. Just press the “frappe” button.

    But a guy who has a jail­bait girl­friend, and french kisses her? That’s almost a model of restraint. My wife dis­agrees; she thinks the law is nec­es­sary, and the pun­ish­ment appropriate.

    So while I wouldn’t call the junior sen­a­tor from New York a mon­ster, I note that after know­ing what was hap­pen­ing in terms of ren­di­tions and at the Abu Ghirab prison, she voted to autho­rize the same force against Iran that she autho­rized for Iraq.

    The link to “Pub­lic Law HJ 114″ doesn’t work, and that’s not the name, any­way. The AUMF is not “Pub­lic Law” at all, but “H.J.Res.114 of 2002″

    And the AUMF allows the pres­i­dent to
    1. defend the US against the con­tin­u­ing threat posed by Iraq
    and
    2. enforce U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil resolutions

    Given that Iraq does not have the capa­bil­ity of launch­ing an attack on the United States, and is in full com­pli­ance with all applic­a­ble U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil res­o­lu­tions, the “war” in Iraq is NOT sup­ported by the AUMF.

    If I were advis­ing Obama, I’d sug­gest he intro­duce a bill in the Sen­ate declar­ing war on Iraq, point­ing out that since the AUMF has long ago expired. That puts the shoe on the other foot. Instead of need­ing to achieve a super­ma­jor­ity to over­ride a veto, Obama sim­ply needs a major­ity to vote down the dec­la­ra­tion of war.

89. michaelj said on March 9th, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    Seat­ing Michi­gan del­e­gates makes more sense than award­ing del­e­gates by cau­cus states. And those folks aren’t more lib­eral. They seem to believe in elec­tion by anoint­ment. These peo­ple stabbed Kerry in the back, and let Ken­neth Black­well do the dirty work. Obama may think he’s Bono, but Michael Stipe mum­bles more effec­tively than Bono over-emoting to truly obnox­ious effect.

    NAFTA? Well he told a for­eign gov­ern­ment that was just window-dressing. And the Autho­riza­tion? He’s about as famil­iar with what that said as Rush Lim­baugh is. Nobody in Con­gress autho­rized Shock and Awe. Not Kerry, not Hillary, not any­body but Cheney and Rummy and the aholes that tried talk­ing Clin­ton intoNeo­cons this stu­pid­ity in 1998. Thanks to later signees Rummy and Cheney, they just went ahead and did it. And then, with Ken Blackwell’s help in Cuya­hoga and other Ohio coun­ties, Amer­i­cans were stu­pid enough to re-elect the­se­jerks that fig­ure they can whipe their pim­ply white asses with the Con­sti­tu­tion, or maybe just do that Grover thing and drown the gov­ern­ment like unwanted kittens.

    Invad­ing Iraq was just the ulti­mate sign­ing state­ment. Almost half of Amer­i­can vot­ers voted for this war crim­ina, after his crimes were painfully appar­ent. We live in a coun­try where peo­ple let Swift Boaters decide their votes. And re-elect Stal­in­ists to export democ­racy by force. If he had a clue, Johnny Cougar would say “Ain’t that Amer­ica.” Real Amer­i­cans are wait­ing for Inde­pen­dence Day.

90. michaelj said on March 10th, 2008 at 12:06 am

    Once it was engrossed HJ 114 became a Pub­lic Law. What it said, in part, was that W had to allow el Baradei’s inves­ti­ga­tions, and con­sult Con­gress before pro­ceed­ing in any fash­ion. If you say that’s not so, you dis­sem­ble in a Bar­rack­ian fashion.

    Obma knows what the bill said, and he’s admit­ted that he’d have voted for it given the man­u­fac­tured evi­dence. When you write your own myth, you’re prob­a­bly too close in time to clean up all the incon­ve­nient details.

91. michaelj said on March 10th, 2008 at 12:15 am

    It’s revolt­ing that Amer­i­cans and Iraqis got killed because some idiot draft dodger was the per­fect brain-dead tool for bas­tards that want to make Amer­ica a one-party state with no gov­ern­ment but Kennyboy’s elect.

92. Harl Delos said on March 10th, 2008 at 2:10 am

    Once it was engrossed HJ 114 became a Pub­lic Law.

    There was never an HJ 114. There is no such thing. They have HB (House Bill), HCR (House Con­cur­rent Res­o­lu­tion), HJR (House Joint Res­o­lu­tion), HR (House Res­o­lu­tion), SB (Sen­ate Bill) SCR (Sen­ate Con­cur­rent Res­o­lu­tion), SJR (Sen­ate Joint Res­o­lu­tion) and SR (Sen­ate Res­o­lu­tion). Each of them has their own num­ber­ing, which starts over each year.

    And if they become pub­lic law, the num­ber­ing changes.

    The last House Joint Res­o­lu­tion 114 was “Mak­ing fur­ther con­tin­u­ing appro­pri­a­tions for the fis­cal year 2005, and for other pur­poses”. Nei­ther the cur­rent con­gress nor the for­mer one has had 114 joint res­o­lu­tions. The AUMF is Pub­lic Law 107 – 243, but it is most decid­edly NOT “Pub­lic Law HR 114″.

    And since you don’t know that, you obvi­ously haven’t read it. So why are you chid­ing US for not read­ing it?

    (Since his link doesn’t work, here’s one that DOES work: http://​canthook​.com/​f​i​l​e​s​/​A​U​MF.pdf You’ll notice that the Gov­ern­ment Print­ing Office puts the proper name at the top of the first page of the document.)

    Seat­ing Michi­gan del­e­gates makes more sense than award­ing del­e­gates by cau­cus states.

    Cau­cuses are unde­mo­c­ra­tic, because it’s *dif­fi­cult* for peo­ple to express their pref­er­ence, so it’s bet­ter to use a process where it’s *impos­si­ble* to express a pref­er­ence, because there’s only one can­di­date on the ballot?

    NAFTA? Well he told a for­eign gov­ern­ment that was just window-dressing.

    Cite, please.

    Who in that for­eign gov­ern­ment did he talk to?

    When and where was this conversation?

    Do you have a record­ing of the con­ver­sa­tion, or just a transcript?

    Or per­haps are you rely­ing on a sum­mary, writ­ten by a non-participant, of a con­ver­sa­tion which did not include Sen­a­tor Obama, which has been refuted by those who *were* par­tic­i­pants in the conversation?

93. Harl Delos said on March 10th, 2008 at 2:19 am

    Once it was engrossed HJ 114 became a Pub­lic Law. What it said, in part, was that W had to allow el Baradei’s inves­ti­ga­tions, and con­sult Con­gress before pro­ceed­ing in any fash­ion. If you say that’s not so, you dis­sem­ble in a Bar­rack­ian fashion.

    If you’ll quote the part that says Dubya had to allow el Baradei’s inves­ti­ga­tions, I’ll con­cede the point.

    And if you quote the part that says Dubya had to *con­sult* Con­gress before pro­ceed­ing, I’ll con­cede *that* point. He does have to notify Con­gress within 48 hours AFTER using force, but not con­sult, and not before. And he has to give them reports every 60 days. But that’s not at all what you’re positing.

94. del said on March 10th, 2008 at 8:14 am

    Great link Harl. I’d never read HJR 114 or what­ever it’s called. It essen­tially granted Bush author­ity to defend against any threat posed by Iraq (inter alia).

95. del said on March 10th, 2008 at 8:45 am

    Uh… I mean take rea­son­able and nec­es­sary actions with the Armed Forces.