Getting out the Vote: Silent Reprise

Posted on August 18, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Two points from yesterday’s info I’d like to review:

First, Evergreen Politics, a NW based leftist blog, had a post up yesterday that followed the same lines as my GotV: Pt1. That is, it only followed the same lines to the length of telling people to register. The poster, Lynn Allen, was apparently too lazy to look up the appropriate links for the people stopping by. If you read my response to Rivrdog in the Part 1 comments, you’ll see how right I was there.

Even in the comments section, she admits that she has no idea how to register via her county using this wonderful internet thingy we use to blog.

I badly want to leave a snarky comment about much I rool and she drools, but what with the last leftie chick I irritated turning into a full fledged stalker a couple months back, I feel I should refrain.

But she is still either ignorant or lazy (and she probably really does drool).

Secondly, I reminisced about not being able to vote against ‘Baghdad’ Jim McDermott. I did forget, however, that there is a candidate running against him this time whom I would actually like to vote FOR.

His name is Steve Beren and I have written about him before after he was kind enough to stop by and leave a comment. His official website is BerenforCongress.

While his website has an “About Steve” section, this column in last week’s Seattle Times tells a much more detailed story about Beren’s journey from being activist in the Socialist Workers Party to his present love for America and the opportunity it truly stands for.

While I have recently relinquished my opportunity to vote for Mr. Beren, I would urge any and all of the folks who stop by here and either can vote for him or know folks who can, to do so forthwith on their trip to the polls.

Primary: September 19th

General election: November 7th

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

This link is a bit old

Posted on August 17, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Just like the cars in this story.

Nissan leased a small squadron of electric vehicles to the California city of Pasadena. A week or so back, the city’s lease expired and Nissan sent their trucks to the city motor pool to collect their property.

The city employees then took it upon themselves to block the trucks sent by Nissan from entering the lot and collecting Nissan’s property.

Sounds like theft to me, but the inmates at the Kos Kids Animal Farm and Petting Zoo believe the city employees were righteous beyond reproach.

The great story: Pasadena government employees blocked the trucks sent by Nissan to pick up and presumably destroy the cars.  We have heard the story about the GM eVs in California, and it is happening again.

While there are only 11 vehicles, evidently they still run great and are incredibly efficient.

But the real news today is that someone stood up and stopped it.  They likely don’t have a legal leg to stand on, but public action could create problems, and I would encourage a little post-CT rage against the machine.

If we stand up and make noise, Nissan will look poorly.

The story was posted at 2019 PST.

If you read through the comments of the post, you’ll see that it took less than 12 minutes for one of the Kos Kids to stand up and say that the City of Pasadena should claim Eminent Domain over the vehicles.

There is apparently no such thing as Private Property in the “Reality Based Community”. To them, if you believe something should be yours, the best recourse is to steal it and then try to shame the rightful owner into letting you keep it, just as Paul Scott, co-founder of “Plug In America”, the group who is leading the charge for this gang of thieves at the City of Pasadena motor pool.

“What we’ll do is shame Nissan, as we did Ford and Toyota,” Scott said, by drawing attention to Pasadena’s Hyperminis and publicly protesting the Japanese manufacturer.

Maybe the city should look into tossing Scott’s ass in jail and firing the larcenous city employees instead of playing puppet to an eco-socialist group who saw religion in the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car”?

Posted in Freaks, Mutants, and Morons | 2 Comments

Getting out the Vote: Part 1

Posted on August 17, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Down to the wire, I tell ya!

With everything going on since the moving of Casa de Analog in March, guess who almost forgot to change/register his new address with the Washington Secretary of State so that he could vote?

Yep, me.

I’d been remembering and procrastinating for a while now, and then in a state of deep discombobulation, having woken up waaaaay too early yesterday afternoon, I decided that that was the appropriate time.

I went to the website, got the phone number, called and discovered that THIS SATURDAY IS THE LAST DAY TO GET CHANGES IN BEFORE THE PRIMARY!

Egads!

Form printed out, filled in, applicable boxes checked and off to the post office I went. As long as it is post marked by Saturday, I’m good to go.

It was and I am.

Are you?

If you are a Washington State resident, you can go here to the online Washington State Voter Database (brought to you by Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics) and check your voter registration information for accuracy.

Because I know you’re all signed up to vote (right?), you can then go here and print out this PDF file to fix any inaccuracies.

Get it to your appropriate County Elections office, whose address you can find by calling the Washington Secretary of State’s toll free phone line, found here, which will transfer you to the people you need to talk to.

One thing that all this reminded me of is that I will never again be able to vote against Jim McDermott. Made me long for the good old days.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | 3 Comments

Getting out the vote: Part 2

Posted on August 17, 2006 by Phil Kadath

It must have been something in the Chicago water system that made him forget that he already voted that day.

If there’s one thing Donovan Riley apparently learned during his time in Chicago, it was “Vote early and often.”

Riley, 69, the former CEO of the University of Illinois Medical Center and a former law professor at Loyola University, is running for a state senate seat in Milwaukee.

On Nov. 7, 2000, the day of the big election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Riley appeared at the polling place in Oconomowac, Wis., where he had registered to vote just the day before, voting records show. His ex-wife owned a home there.

“Then he drove down to Chicago where he was already registered and he voted again,” said Michael Crooks, a Wisconsin attorney who filed a complaint against Riley with Wisconsin election officials. “This is about as blatant as it gets.”

(snip)

“My best recollection is that I was splitting my time between Wisconsin and Illinois and it’s possible I made a mistake,” Riley said in a statement released last week.

 

Riley faces incumbent Jeff Pale in next month’s Democratic primary election for a state senate seat in Milwaukee, 35 miles from Oconomowac.

If you click on the link, you’ll see that, as usual, the paper waited until the next to the very last paragraph to mention his party affiliation. And in truth, the last paragraph is a single sentence.

How quaint.

I can chalk a good number of things up to deja vu, but going to my polling place isn’t one of them.

Posted in Too Stupid to Live | Leave a comment

Let me be the first to cry Werewolf!

Posted on August 16, 2006 by Alaska

Dead on the side of the road in Maine, could this be proof of the fabled lycanthrope?

maine_mystery_beast 1.jpg maine_mystery_beast 22.jpg

Just what is this beast? A genetic experiment gone awry? Or just natural selection at work? Is it the same mystery creature that’s been slashing dogs’ throats in the area? My vote says it’s a werewolf, if for no other reason than that since I was a young’un I’ve thought it’d be fun to be one. Some are calling it a coyote-dog cross. Bollocks. I’ve seen coy-dogs. That, sir, is no coy-dog.

Oh, BTW, the best werewolf short story — bar none — is the late James Blish’s “There Shall Be No Darkness.” It’s hard to find: Pronzini’s Werewolf! collection has it.

Posted in Evil walks the earth, Freaks, Mutants, and Morons, Friday Fiction | 9 Comments

I must be missing something

Posted on August 16, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Can I get a helping hand here, please?

Some public universities in Ohio are including in a six-question form inside the applications for employment. The questions are:

  • Are you a member of an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List?
  • Have you used any position of prominence you have with any country to persuade others to support an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List?
  • Have you knowingly solicited fund or other things of value for an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List?
  • Have you solicited any individual for membership in an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List?
  • Have you committed an act that you know, or reasonably should have known, affords “material support or resources” to an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List?
  • Have you hired or compensated a person you knew to be a member of an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List, or a person you knew to be engaged in planning, assisting or carrying out an act of terrorism?

Of course, a large number of the ‘intellectuals’ applying for employ at the universities are crying about having to answer these questions. Apparently they don’t think giving support to terrorists is a ‘bad thing’.

Here’s a little inside info: The background check to get a job driving a garbage truck has questions somewhat similar to these on it and then goes further than the standard Commercial Drivers License proceedure or even a Concealed Pistol License background check does. One of the circumstances is if your car was repossesed recently or you’re behind in your mortgage payments, you fail and don’t get the job.

If I was sending my kids off to school, I would have to interview each and every one of his/her instructors before I let them take classes there, which is one of the reasons I’ll probably never have kids. But if more parents took a greater interest in their child’s higher education, the one they’re usually paying for directly, we wouldn’t have a vast sea of radical socialists on campus because no one would want to take their classes.

Now here is my question: Do you believe that this set of questions qualify as a “Loyalty Oath”?

The America Association of University Professors is comparing the two and thinks they can beat the questionaire in court with that tack. I can’t see it because it is merely askign ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, not demanding any kind of fealty.

I just hope questionaire gets a judge worth their pay who’ll tell the professors to stuff it. I also hope that there will be loads of media attention to the questionaire by the suit so that more univerisites get into including it in their employment paperwork.

Found at the AoSHQ

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense | 1 Comment

Diet Coke and Mentos

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Alaska

I guess the Feiler Faster Principle applies to political cartoons, too! 

I hope I’m not showing my age too much by marveling that this YouTube video has become so widely viewed so quickly that a newspaper’s political cartoonist could unblushingly use it to lampoon the new danger of liquid bombs on aircraft (click, then scroll down to “Chemical Reaction,” the cartoon for August 11th).

Cartoonist Nick Anderson doesn’t seem too worried that anybody won’t get the joke, although he helpfully included links on his site for the clueless.

Well, just call me clueless, ’cause his cartoon ran in my local paper today, and I didn’t get it – until I happened on the appropriate video over at Kirk’s place. Thanks for keeping me culturally hip, Kirk!

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

They can’t even get the dead

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Phil Kadath

To vote for their candidates and ideas

Workers paid by a liberal group to register voters in Franklin County have turned in more than 500 forms with nonexistent addresses and potentially fake signatures, elections officials said yesterday.

Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said he has forwarded the cards to county authorities for possible criminal charges.

Elections workers verifying new-voter forms discovered signatures with the same handwriting, addresses that were for vacant lots and incorrect information for voters who already were registered, Damschroder said. One card had the name of an East Side man who’s dead.

All the questionable cards were turned in by workers for Ohio ACORN, a group that’s also paying people to gather signatures for a proposed November ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage.

As Stefan Sharkansky points out at his Sound Politics Blog, these are the same folks who are implicated in voter registraion schemes in many other states, and fed fictitious voter info to a judge.

Posted in Useful Idiots | Leave a comment

Been there. Heard that.

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Perhaps you’ve seen this photo from Zombie’s post on the pro-Hizballh rally this last weekend.

IMG_7966.jpg

A lot of folks were shocked to see the blatant anti-semitism displayed in public, but not me.

I listen to the Randi Rhodes show on my local Air America affiliate.

Posted in Evil walks the earth | 4 Comments

And so began ‘Darth Vader Week’

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Phil Kadath

As always happens when I take time off, my work from the days I wasn’t there was left waiting for me. As I sat down at my desk three hours before my regular punch-in time I opened my work emails to find out that the person who finalizes the data I enter was taking the last two days of this week off and needs all of last week’s numbers, and as much of this week as I can get my hands on or guestimate, by Wednesday morning.

It is crunches like that begat ‘Darth Vader Week’.

I’ve got a solid 5-12’s awaiting me this week. Seeing as how I normally put in 5-10’s, it worn’t be that big of a deal, except for the part where have to I play Nostradamus tonight/tomorrow morning. If I’m too far off, someone will get a swift talking to, and I can guarantee you it won’t be the lady in the main accounting office who is taking a four day weekend. Luckily, I made a couple good musical purchases over the weekend that should help me focus my inner eye to the future.

The 5-12’s may also effect my blogging flow, but I’ll do my bestest, I promise. At least it isn’t like the week of Seafair which started out as 5-10’s and then had a couple of 8’s on the days most people call their ‘weekend’ tossed in.

But hey, I live to serve (and collect paychecks that make my coworkers jealous but still aren’t as large as the Analog Wife’s).

I announced the beginning of Darth Vader Week last night over the company airwaves and except for a ruptured airline on one of the trucks (thankfully, not to the braking system) everything went smoothly.

BTW, it is called Darth Vader Week because of the motto I work under when the proper conditions set in: “Do it my way and nobody gets choked”

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | 1 Comment