If you’re looking for some pithy content today, you’re in the wrong place. Slept extremely badly last night, so I’m looking for an extra-early bedtime, a melatonin and fervent hopes for a good night’s sleep.
I was in Ann Arbor much of the day, and had a first: A source who grew up in Columbia City, and remembered my stupid face in her parents’ evening newspaper. That would be Columbia City, Indiana, for you non-sophisticates out there. A real happenin’ town. I showed my horse there a couple of times, passed through the McDonald’s drive-thru lane. Woo. Good times.
Bloggage: Here’s the story I was writing when Wendy was editing me, on Friday.
I’m also reading up on the Panama papers, so I can think about them coherently.
I suppose y’all will be discussing Wisconsin by the time I check in tomorrow, but for now, it’s lights out for me.
Hattie said on April 6, 2016 at 3:35 am
Great piece, Nancy.
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Connie said on April 6, 2016 at 6:34 am
Columbia City trivia: Woodrow Wilson’s vp, Thomas Marshall, was fron Columbia City.
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David C. said on April 6, 2016 at 6:39 am
Well, the results in Wisconsin are pretty shitty. I’m getting pretty sick of Bernie. I originally thought his being in the race was a good thing if it kept Hillary from tacking too far to the right. He’s a one note Charlie who seems mostly clueless if questions can’t be answered with “break up the big banks”. Worse is vacuous twit Rebecca Bradley won the Supreme Court seat. She’s a real piece of work.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/rebecca-bradley-called-gays-queers-who-opted-to-kill-themselves-b99682686z1-371276861.html
The only bright spot I see is the school funding referendum passed here in Oshkosh. It’s nice to see people trying to patch up the holes that Scotty is punching in the public schools. But he’s a determined little prick and will keep punching.
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alex said on April 6, 2016 at 7:30 am
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie hailed from Columbia City. And here’s the town’s other most famous whore. Some big Koch up that bunghole.
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Sue said on April 6, 2016 at 7:46 am
Congratulations, David C. The trend toward passing local funding referenda is probably going to motivate those fine folks in Madison to find a(nother) way to roadblock funding for schools.
As for Bradley, disappointed but not surprised. Voter suppression is only part of the problem when you have such a gods-damned blind and deaf populace. Now she can get busy serving Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, as she pledged during her campaign.
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Suzanne said on April 6, 2016 at 7:55 am
Is Jim Banks the guy running against Stutzman? I can’t keep straight anymore which politicians put knots in my stomach. There are so many.
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Connie said on April 6, 2016 at 8:08 am
Thank you for all your kind words about my foot and mobility issues yesterday. Other firsts in the last 24 hours: Drove my car for the first time since January 11, 2015, and took a shower standing up. Went to CVS by myself!
We had changed the insurance on the old van to storage while this was going on and we only had one driver. $120 a year was nice, but now we need to reinsure it, get it out, tune it up, and get it running so we can be a two vehicle family again.
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alex said on April 6, 2016 at 8:11 am
Banks is running for Stutzman’s current seat, along with the equally insane Liz Brown and that carpetbagging crazy lady from Wisconsin, Pam somebody.
Todd Young is running against Stutzman in the primary. Baron Hill is running against Todd Young in the general election. 😉
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Deborah said on April 6, 2016 at 8:17 am
I’m in a Holidays Inn Express in the small town where my husband’s uncle’s funeral will be this afternoon. When we arrived last night I scrutinized the ceiling.
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brian stouder said on April 6, 2016 at 9:07 am
Deborah, I read the rest of that article last night.
Definitely skeevey.
I begin to think it’s a little hard to believe – since (carpet or no) he’d have to be making noise up there. Plus – if he could see the occupants of the room through a vent, what’s to stop them from possibly seeing him? And indeed, now the place is torn-down, so there’s no proof one way or the other. The forgotten murder is a major indicator that this story is fiction, I think.
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brian stouder said on April 6, 2016 at 10:17 am
(and indeed, while Talese points to several pop-culch parallels for this peeping tom, the one he doesn’t mention is “Rear Window” – which also has a self-justifying voyeur – who witnesses a murder)
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Sue said on April 6, 2016 at 10:55 am
Hilde/Hildy
Coincidence? I think not.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/06/nine-year-old-us-reporter-defiant-after-critics-say-go-back-to-playing-with-dolls
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alex said on April 6, 2016 at 11:09 am
Yay Hilde! She’s more earnest that some of the long-time veterans whose lazy-ass crap appears in our local fishwraps, that’s for sure. I’d trust her reporting instincts above theirs.
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Deborah said on April 6, 2016 at 12:57 pm
Connie, may I add my amazement that you were able to put up with that for a year without complaining much. I was in a boot for 9 weeks when I stress fractured my foot. I complained daily, probably more like hourly.
We’re waiting for relatives to meet with for lunch before the funeral. Earlier we went to see the playground we designed, it’s in the same town. It still looks good (to us). It’s getting a lot of use. The trees that were planted are in bloom, so that was nice to see. The paint on all of the “cars is being redone soon, but we knew that was needed when we first saw them last summer. The painter screwed up, so has to rectify. Always something, don’t you know.
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basset said on April 6, 2016 at 1:51 pm
Merle Haggard has died. If you immediately thought of “Okie from Muskogee,” you’re missing a lot.
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Scout said on April 6, 2016 at 2:08 pm
That is a great piece, Nancy. I read the link you posted on Facebook the other day.
Here’s CP’s take on Wisconsin. http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a43697/ted-cruz-bernie-sanders-win-wisconsin/
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Sherri said on April 6, 2016 at 2:51 pm
I don’t get Pierce on Clinton. Whatever he means by her record on downticket races being spotty at best, the fact remains that she has raised ~$20 million for downticket races this cycle, and Sanders has raised zippo. How you have a revolution by yourself is another unanswered question of the Sanders race. As for uninspiring, she is still beating Sanders, despite the “Bern” everybody is allegedly feeling, not only winning more delegates (even without superdelegates), but actually garnering more votes. Sanders does well among white people, especially in low turnout caucus states with lots of white people, but he still sticks to his “my economic plan is good for everybody”, ignoring the fact that a white man with a criminal record is more likely to get a job than an African American man with a college degree.
Breaking up the banks is a nice sound bite, but it’s not clear what problem he thinks it would solve. Too big to fail, yes, but that’s not why the economy crashed. The economy crashed when we let a smallish investment firm (Lehman) fail, not a big bank. Breaking up the banks does nothing about the shadow banking system, does nothing about leverage (Dodd-Frank has already changed capital requirements for banks to reduce leverage), does nothing about the interconnectedness that led to one firm locking up the entire credit system for the world (indeed, would probably exacerbate it.) It’s simple, of dubious legality the way Sanders thinks he can do it, and probably unhelpful. It’s about the level of Rand Paul wanting to get rid of the Federal Reserve Bank. I want to ask, “And then what?”
As for what a President Sanders would or would not sign, including gun legislation, that assumes a lot of facts not in evidence, since we simply don’t know how much Sanders would be willing to sacrifice his precious purity to compromise to get half a loaf rather than none.
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brian stouder said on April 6, 2016 at 4:26 pm
Sherri for thread win!!
Secretary Clinton is a reasonably good speaker, and is one who knows how to operate at the top-end of the US government.
Whoever follows President Obama has a tough act to follow, but give me Hillary’s down-to-Earth aspirations and perceptions of reality, over anyone else’s bright, shining …..wishful thinking
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Sherri said on April 6, 2016 at 4:46 pm
Kevin Drum shows just how brutal that Sanders interview with the NYDN was: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/quiz-day-match-questions-bernies-answers
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brian stouder said on April 6, 2016 at 5:12 pm
I clicked on this story to see what the bad acronym was, and it was worth a thirty million dollar chuckle –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/05/george-mason-u-changes-name-of-scalia-law-school-to-avoid-embarrassing-acronyms/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_evening
The lead:
Almost immediately after George Mason University announced last week that it was changing the name of its law school to the Antonin Scalia School of Law, the pundits pounced: the acronym for the school would be either ASSOL or ASSLAW. Social media erupted.
I think “social media erupted” is the new “hilarity ensued”
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LAMary said on April 6, 2016 at 5:40 pm
Basset, I thought of “If We Make it Through December.”
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David C. said on April 6, 2016 at 5:44 pm
A week or so ago I said a guy came to the door canvasing against the school referendum. He told me I had no right to vote to raise his taxes and if I wanted I could donate to the schools. This is the guy.
http://www.thenorthwestern.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/04/06/oshkosh-schools-winning-streak-continues/82657928/
Jim LeClaire, one of the leaders of a group opposed to the referendum, said it was mind-boggling, saddening and frustrating that voters approved the spending.
Although he congratulated the district when it passed the 2014 referendum, LeClaire said this time he cannot because he believes school officials twisted the truth and used a list of budget cuts to scare people into voting yes. He predicted the district will return with another question in 2018.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is just a terrorist act to get money,” LeClaire said. “And that’s really sad.”
How do you reporters listen to something like that and not say “are you fucking serious”? It must take a lot of practice.
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Jolene said on April 6, 2016 at 6:17 pm
Some years back, there was a very good feature on Merle Haggard on the PBS American Masters series*, but, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a link to it. There are, of course, lots of clips on YouTube. Here’s one that mixes music and conversation, giving a sweet sense of his earliest experiences of music.
*For Roku users: Do you know about the PBS app? Among the many good things currently available is an American Masters feature on Sister Rosetta Tharpe, another early voice in American music.
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beb said on April 6, 2016 at 6:40 pm
Sherri @17: I read an explanation of why Pierce doesn’t think much of Clinton downticket fund-raising. http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2016/04/04/is-clinton-really-supporting-down-ballot-candidates-or-just-laundering-campaign-donations/
The TL;DR version is that all the money being dispersed to state DNC committees get returned to Clinton’s presidential campaign committee. It’s not staying downticket to help local candidates.
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ac jones said on April 6, 2016 at 7:19 pm
Just down the road a peice from Columbia City in Whitley County is South Whitley. That is the home of Janie Fricke. She recorded duets with Merle Haggard–Natural High, Kern River, etc maybe the best American music ever, at least in my collection. My favorite Merle Haggard’s song is “That’s the way love goes” best line is “I’ve been throwin horseshoes over my left shoulder, I’ve been searchin all my life, lookin for that four leaf clover.” beautiful…
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Sherri said on April 6, 2016 at 7:56 pm
On the other hand, at the time Clinton set up that arrangement, not even Sanders had any plans to run a serious campaign against her, he was just running an issue campaign. So a different way of looking at the arrangement is preparing for a general election race against the Republicans. I know the ideologically pure Sanders supporters sniff corruption at the mere hint of Clinton’s name, though. I had someone at our caucus ask me if Hillary would really try to overturn Citizens United since she’s benefiting from it (it’s right there on her web page). I said yes and moved on; arguing with Sanders supporters is like chasing your tail. Yes, Citizens United was a terrible decision, and I’d like it overturned, but the big problem with money in government isn’t the money that Citizens United unleashed, it’s the money that was already there, from lobbyists. Since Citizens United, a few big names have been more open, but their money was always there; whats more insidious is the growing use of 501(c)4 organizations to hide donors.
Washington State Democratic Party doesn’t appear to be on the list. The Sanders supporters are clamoring for the Washington superdelegates to flip and “follow the will of the people” based on a Sanders win in a caucus with a turnout of about 200,000 people. (There are ~4 million registered voters in Washington; you don’t have to register a party affiliation, and anybody can attend a Dem caucus “who considers themselves a Democrat”).
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alex said on April 6, 2016 at 9:10 pm
ac jones, another (sort of) favorite son of South Whitley was the humorist Will Cuppy. He was born in Auburn, but his family was from South Whitley where they reputedly operated an Underground Railroad station on their property along the Eel River.
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Linda said on April 6, 2016 at 10:42 pm
I saw Haggard last fall in Toledo, and he has too many favorites to name–Mama Tried, Big City, Workingman’s Blues. He didn’t do that last one in Toledo, and shockingly, he didn’t do The Fightin’ Side of Me. He did Are the Good Times Really Over for Good, then politely said that was all the politics he would do for the night. He did Okie from Muskogee as his finale, but it seemed more ironically than straight. Of course, he couldn’t fit all his work into an hour and a half set, but he and the Strangers kicked ass.
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Deborah said on April 6, 2016 at 10:43 pm
I’m back in Chicago after driving back from the town where the funeral was about 250 miles away. Happy to be home. Taps sure gets me every time, the trumpet player was actually good too.
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basset said on April 6, 2016 at 11:00 pm
I was ready to be all pissed off because the thread seemed stuck on the same ol’ politics earlier today and nobody mentioned Merle… good to see, though, that some of us share my appreciation. I told a Duke graduate once that Merle was one of our great folk poets, she looked at me like I had two heads.
Saw him four times, at the Little Nashville Opry outside Bloomington, in a sports arena in Wichita, in a country dance bar in Clarksville, Tenn., and at Loretta Lynn’s ranch about an hour west of Nashville. Had tickets to see him at the Ryman in September, he was booked for March and when that show was postponed we thought he probably wouldn’t return.
Live version of “Today I Started Loving You Again,” that hits the spot right there.
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Brandon said on April 6, 2016 at 11:35 pm
A Dennis Hastert update:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/former-house-speaker-dennis-hastert-%e2%80%98deeply-sorry%e2%80%99-for-conduct-decades-ago/ar-BBrshXm?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=HPCDHP
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