Stephanie Sailor destroys her laptop, much like my Steelers will destroy the Cardinals today. 🙂
Of course, the Super Bowl will be the first football game this season I’ll watch for more than ten minutes, so I doubt I can really call myself a fan.
I think this was at Boomershoot 2005.
You’re like me and The Superbowl isn’t your thing, here is some good reading material to substitute your time with. Some of it is a bit old, but I found them in my links file this morning and thought it’d be good to include them.
Damn W. Root posts at Reason.Com on FDR’s packing of the courts and the attempted packing of the SCOTUS. This is something else I expect President Obama to copy from FDR, so we might as well and get a hint at what it looks like.
Joel Kotkin labels the District of Columbia a fiefdom and calls it “Pyongyang on the Potomac” during his post on the concentration of power there.
Lawrence B. Lindsey writes in the WSJ and wonders why not a payroll tax holiday, pointing out that it would cost less, be reflected in the economy faster, and make more people happy. Megan McArdle replies here: “The main problem with a payroll tax holiday is that it minimizes Congressional opportunities for graft and larding out goodies to their contributors.”
Which is why we’ll never see it.
In the not-so-bright department, we have Guardian columnist, Polly Toynbee, exclaiming the virtues of a new bill in the UK that has as its sole purpose the redistribution of, well, I’m sure can guess what.
And lastly, I have a local nitwit columnist, Joni Balter, praising the arrival of The Lightworker as a sign that “government is cool” again, and that guys like local media whore/initiative writer, Tim Eyman, need to quit fighting and go into the whole she and her ilk keep trying to stuff him into.
In conclusion, I’d just like to say Go Griz! Have a good National Football Day!
Breakfast at Trib’s Place. Gourmet quality, and oh-so-filling too. We generally don’t bother eating lunch at Boomershoot after a morning meal like this.
The group of companies for which I work had a very good year and are actually looking to expand in 2009. So, this past December they had a celebratory dinner for the top folks and their wives. My wife and I got to pick the place. When I worked for a dot-com many years ago before the dot-com bust, our vendors often took us out to fine restaurants like longtime San Francisco fixture Aqua. At that time, Michael Mina was chef, and the food was incredible. (My memory of the excess of the dot-com era was when the rep from Multex ordered foie gras for his wife, who loved foie gras — and Aqua served a platter of the stuff. Had to be several hundred dollars’ worth of food on that platter alone.)
Anyway, Mina’s moved on from Aqua, but I wanted to see what the place was like a decade later at the cusp of another financial debacle, so off we went. First time I’ve been in a limo in a decade or so, too.
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We had reservations, but in typical SF style, they made us wait at the bar. Fifty-five minutes later we finally were shown to our table. Crowded? You bet. Despite the financial collapse, the high-rollers in San Francisco were still filling up the top restaurants.
Here’s my wife and me at the bar. Note the (ahem) nattily dressed gentleman behind us (I’ve got a better pic of him at right).
Squire Trelane of Gothos? or Austin Powers? I couldn’t make up my mind. The glasses kind of ruin whatever effect he was going for, I think. I suppose you run into that type of person wherever you go in San Francisco — it’s just been so long for me that I was no longer used to it.
One of the many nice things about Aqua is the decor. The muted colors, high ceilings, disappearing curve of the bar, and the gigantic mirrors all combine to make what is really a small space feel elegant and roomy.
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This was the menu that night (click for bigger). Prix fixe multi-course meal at $75/person. Of course we had appetizers, champagne, several bottles of wine, dessert, and dessert liquor, so the total cost with limo for each person was easily three times that or more.
The food was exquisite.
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Same time next year? I expect the restaurant will be a ghost town — if it hasn’t closed.
The lovely Xenia, with ammonium nitrate for Boomershoots 2008 and 2009.
First, the question which led up to the quote
Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine – Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?
Harry Kreisler – Director of International Studies @ UCBerkeley
And now, the answer
What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.
Samantha Power – Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy @ Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
You might remember her as the woman who called Hillary Clinton a “monster” last Summer and was subsequently thrown under the bus by the Obama campaign.
Well, bygones are apparently bygone, and she’s back with the Obama Team.
Sadly, she is a senior foreign policy adviser to a President.
However, I suspect that she is not been all that far away. She is in a long term relationship with he who would give you dog the right to sue you for the neutering, Cass Sunstein.
The Washington State Auditor can find massive wrongdoing happening, but he has no ability to punish the lawbreakers/porkbarrellers/influence peddlers other than a public admonishment.
And he has once again found wrongdoing, by a well-loved leftist establishment, and he is beginning that process.
The State Auditor has concluded that Sound Transit violated the law by donating money to several local, non-profit organizations.
That conclusion comes on the heels of an exclusive KIRO Team 7 Investigation into how transit money sometimes gets handed out to charity.
Sound Transit has basically said regardless of what State Auditor Brian Sonntag thinks, it will keep donating public tax dollars in ways it sees fit.
Sound Transit spends the vast majority of its multi-billion dollar budgets on trains, buses and rail. However, along the way, it has also quietly donated several hundred thousand dollars of public money to charity groups.
That’s not always legal — something KIRO Team 7 Investigators pointed out to the auditor last summer.
A just-released report admonishes the transit authority for paying “sponsorship money” to three nonprofits, totally $8,050 since 2006 . It states that the fundraising event donations were in violation of Article 8, Section 7 of the Constitution of the State of Washington: Credit Not to Be Loaned.
According to state records, even after the auditor’s office told Sound Transit to stop handing out these public expenditures, the agency ignored the warning and kept donating.
Becoming a member here, donating there all adds up. And it is all well and good when it is someone’s personal money. When it is taxpayer money, it should result in a jail sentence.
And when the agency is warned about the violation and puts its middle finger towards the Auditor, the agency should be shut down and their office lights shut off until the money is returned and those in charge are replaced.
Not in Washington though.
At least now we have an idea where Sound Transit got the money and manpower to push their “Transit Only” agenda last November.
It seems that, by hook or by crook, Obama is determined to get 60 seats in the Senate
Case in point
The Obama administration has been floating the idea of naming Republican Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.) to be Commerce Secretary, several Senate sources said Thursday.
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Gregg’s nomination was far from a done deal, but remains a serious possibility. Reached by phone, Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said he had no comment on whether he has been in talks with the White House about the post.
New Hampshire’s governor is a Democrat, who would be able to name Gregg’s replacement. That pick could give the party a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the chamber if Democrat Al Franken is also ultimately named the winner in the contested Minnesota Senate race.
Anyone know anything about this guy and whether or not he’ll be able to handle turning down this post?
When stocking up, remember that guns are good, but they can’t feed ya or keep ya warm.
“…a deputy found 44-year-old Jack McWhorter of Oklahoma starving and hypothermic, leaning against his wife’s body with an array of weapons spread in a half circle in front of him.” Continue reading
BillH of FreeinIdaho blog is (I believe) bringing this gun to Boomershoot 2009. Nice! I love those ventilated forends. They just look kewl.
