Born year, city of the Whiz Kids. Previous homes: NJ, NH, PA, MA, KY. Epidemiology PhD, now Research Consultant at a major hospital. Male.
WA Gov series on 2004 count and recounts.
BREAKING (really!) -- Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor!!
Introducing the story by mentioning General Clark's criticism of McCain's use of his years as a POW to somehow demonstrate his "preparation" for the presidency, NPR's Scott Horsley did yeoman work to embellish the old guy's reputation this morning. In a story titled McCain's First (And Only) Military Command, Horsley spins McCain's service running the VA-174 squadron in the most positive light possible.
The report is billed as "the first of two reports", in that
On Wednesday, NPR will look at a little-known piece of Barack Obama's resume: his short stint researching and writing about international finance.
Below the fold are a few choice excerpts from Horsley's suck up report.
In that article, she informed Kossacks of the latest chapter in the attempt by Dartmouth Review and PowerLine wingnuts to co-opt Dartmouth College. She further alerted Dartmouth alumni -- of which I am one -- of the need to cast votes in the College's Association of Alumni elections, and explained in some detail why we should vote for the Dartmouth Undying slate rather than the (misnamed) "parity" slate put up by the other side.
Voting in the Association of Alumni election ended today, and a few minutes ago I received an email message with some very, very positive results.
Suppose, though, that instead of changing the Democratic system to approximate the GOP or the general election, we changed the distribution of electoral votes in the general election to the approach used by the Democratic Party to allocate convention delegates. What would be the outcome of that change?
Update [2008-5-19 1:51:1 by N in Seattle]: WA Democratic Chair (and superdelegate) Dwight Pelz endorses Obama. More below...
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Many of you will, I'm sure, remember the name James Yee. He's the US Army chaplain who was arrested in 2003 under suspicion of espionage because he ministered to prisoners at Guantanamo. After ruining his career, the government eventually dropped all of the ridiculous charges against him. Ray Rivera of the Seattle Times wrote a superb special report series about the case in 2005.
Yee was honorably discharged from the Army in 2004, and still lives in western Washington.
On Saturday, James Yee was elected to represent Washington's 9th Congressional District as an Obama delegate to the DNC in Denver.
Baby Boomers like me probably have at least a vague recollection of the name Tom Rush. In the mid-60s we listened to his records, learned his guitar chords. He was a major part of that era's folk-music boom, along with the likes of Eric Andersen, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Tim Hardin (all but the last still around and still performing), and many more.
I'm on Tom's email newsletter list. Today's message includes a surprisingly direct reference to, and viewpoint on, a current presidential candidate, one that I'll share below the fold...
Note: I would have posted this earlier in the day, but I wanted to give the Key Arena rallygoers a chance to see it and respond to it.
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By now, the entire known world has heard that Washington's precinct caucuses -- the first of three steps leading to the selection of the majority of our state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention -- will begin at 1pm tomorrow, Saturday, February 9.
Many Washingtonians participate here on dKos, so I thought it would be interesting to hear from WA Kossacks about where each of us is going to be meeting tomorrow. Who knows ... some Kossacks might discover that they can meet other Kossacks at the very same site!
Below the fold are some specific questions. Please give a shoutout for your fellow WA Kossacks to see!
P.S. Please Recommend, so others will get a chance to see this...
Those of us who are "of an age" remember the influence of the Draft Board on the lives (and deaths) of us and our brethren. Even if the closest we ever actually came to experiencing that influence was listening to Arlo sing about the Group W bench.
Several years ago, when speculation about the possibility of an Iraq War draft was rampant, there was talk in liberal circles of applying to join Selective Service local boards so that a less militaristic viewpoint might be represented. Just to see what would happen, I submitted such an application.
Americans don't follow athletics. In fact, we don't even call it by its rightful name -- as football is called soccer here, so too is athletics called track-and-field by Americans. If it's referred to at all (which only happens once every four years, during the Olympics).
For those who enjoy the sport, the biennial IAAF World Championships are just about as important as the Olympics. In the rest of the world, there's lots of buzz about what took place yesterday in Osaka. The rest of the world is celebrating the winner in the men's 1500 meters ... Bernard Lagat, American.
As I write this, the Phillies are still at 9999 losses, hanging on the brink of going to five digits in the loss column. Then again, they haven't yet played any games after Tuesday's All-Star Game, so I suppose that isn't much of an achievement.
One thing I meant to discuss but didn't get around to in the previous post is the gap between the Phils and the rest of the pack when it comes to losses. It's not merely that they're just about to become the first professional sports team to reach 10,000 losses (unless you want to count the Washington Generals). It's their immense margin over the field.
Last Sunday, the Philadelphia Phillies erased an early Colorado lead and beat the Rockies, 8-4. By doing so, they forestalled -- for a few more days, until the All-Star break is over -- reaching a milestone that no other professional sports team has ever attained.
With their next loss, perhaps as soon as Friday, the Phillies will lose a baseball game for the 10,000th time.
As a Phillies phan for more than five decades, and as the possessor of a very low dKos UID, I feel the pain of this impending increase in digit-count.
Wednesday was a triumph for the geezers. Well, the baseball geezers.
In Phoenix, Randy Johnson (age 43 years, 233 days) pitched for the homestanding Arizona Diamondbacks, against Philadelphia Phillies starter Jamie Moyer (age 44 years, 172 days). It was a matchup of the oldest pair of lefthanders in baseball history.
By comparison, the starting pitchers in Atlanta were callow youths. The Braves sent out John Smoltz (age 39 years, 359 days) to face the San Diego Padres and his former teammate Greg Maddux (age 41 years, 25 days).
Much more on these estimable gentlemen, and some of their colleagues, below...
In a 5-4 en banc decision, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the plaintiff in Boehner v. McDermott. The full Associated Press article was written by Matthew Daly, and the text of the decision can be found here.
If the ruling stands -- I can almost guarantee that it will be appealed to the Supreme Court -- Congressman Jim McDermott will have to pay something on the order of $700,000 in fines and legal costs to his "colleague" John Boehner. This is the latest chapter in a very long legal battle arising from a taped cellphone conversation between Boehner and Newt Gingrich, way back in 1997.
A strongly-worded dissent by Judge David Sentelle ("We do not believe the First Amendment permits this interdiction of public information") makes up more than half of the text of the decision.
After more than two months, there's a new post on Baghdad Burning! With a sigh of relief that Riverbend is still with us, I urge you to read her latest message from the front lines.
It may turn out to be one of her last from her homeland.
Senator Maria Cantwell sent out a fundraising email today. Nothing extraordinary about that, even for a just-reelected Senator. Except that this message -- titled A Remarkable Man -- asked for contributions to the campaign of her stricken colleague Tim Johnson.
While extolling Johnson's accomplishments and the hair's-breadth margin of his 2002 race (Maria knows from razor-thin victories), as well as reminding us of the attacks on his former colleague Tom Daschle in 2004, Maria also takes a not-so-subtle swipe at another colleague in The World's Greatest Deliberative Body.
Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of words have been written about Maya Lin's masterful Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its deep symbolic power. As you'll see below the fold, a few of those words are mine.
Today, as we again commemorate the "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" -- the exact time and day of the signing, in a railroad car near Compiègne, France, of the ceasefire that brought World War I to an end -- I've been thinking about our human need to create memorials of important events. I've been wondering how the Iraq/Afghanistan War will some day be memorialized.
What symbols can represent its meaning? Which materials will evoke its complexities? Whose vision will distill it down to its deepest significance?
Such questions, I believe, need to be discussed and pondered. I hope that, after reading the rest of this essay, you'll leave comments and thoughts describing your vision of what we can tell our descendants about this part of our national history.
Continuing the lead-up to our get-together tomorrow evening, I once again remind you that the next SeattleKos Not-A-Meetup will take place tomorrow night, starting around 7:00pm, at:
