So my new thing is to just claim executive privilege whenever someone asks me something I don’t want to deal with and to date my friends and colleagues have not been impressed.
At any rate, good morning, and here is an interesting read.
This post is in: Open Threads
So my new thing is to just claim executive privilege whenever someone asks me something I don’t want to deal with and to date my friends and colleagues have not been impressed.
At any rate, good morning, and here is an interesting read.
Comments are closed.
cmorenc
Don’t expect facts to get in the way of a provocative (and sometimes incindiary) dog-whistle story line for the GOP about connections between urban areas, crime, and concentrations of black people. If the grossly misleading Willie Horton story didn’t matter to the more genteel poppy Bush back in 1988, it sure as hell won’t to today’s feral MAGA-dominated GOP.
Steeplejack
Finally got my bionic tooth installed this morning, celebrated with breakfast at IHOP and am now back in the bunker and out of the tactical gear (pants!). What a day.
waspuppet
I’ll just demand a special master for everything and report back on how that works.
Matt McIrvin
@Steeplejack: I am still waiting on a permanent crown.
I went to vote. There are several contested races on the Democratic side and it seemed a little less dead than usual, though at midday, almost everyone there seemed to be over 70. There were several registered independents who seemed unclear on why they had to ask for a specific party’s ballot in a primary election. We also got redistricted into different precincts for this cycle so there were some people who didn’t know which polling place to go to.
AxelFoley
For the first time since 1869, a federal office holder has been ordered to be removed from office, via the 14th Amendment, due to participation in the January 6th insurrection:
https://twitter.com/crewcrew/status/1567168897798774786?s=21&t=aW-GMcC65IlHZO_vj_u9QA
Another Scott
@AxelFoley: Good, good.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
In case anybody was having second thoughts about hating on Politico.
Clearly, a “good German.”
Joey Maloney
I misread as “fecal” but I guess either works.
oatler
Ken Levine is ending his blog today. We’ll miss him.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: OMG
trollhattan
First time in my more than a decade there, my employer has informed the staff that unless required to be on the jobsite, stay home and out of the heat.
Forecast keeps extending how long this is supposed to last, now through Saturday. This gets a hearty “blecch.”
Betsy
Good morning, Cole. It’s good to be here (on your blog, and in general).
Leto
I tried to claim “executive privilege” on the chocolate milk Saturday. I was informed that “it’s already in muh belly” trumps (ha!) executive privilege. We’ll see how that holds up in court!
Mike in NC
January 6 Committee is interested in bringing in that piece of shit Newt Gingrich to testify about his many attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Read that he was at one point being looked at as Trump’s VP! Can you even fucking imagine two of the most vile scumbags in the history of American politics on the same ticket?
Kelly
My guy has a milling machine about the size of a microwave oven that makes the crown while I wait. It’s more expensive but all done just one visit and I get to watch the little robot work.
scav
@waspuppet: Honestly, I keep hearing Special Master and think they gotten very overt with their kink over their in family valuesville.
Amir Khalid
I’ve run out of free stories at that site, and I’d be grateful for a TL;DR type summary.
In GAS news, today is an NGD for me. A cherry-red Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50s now sits in my guitar rack.
To cut a rather long and somewhat fraught story short, I originally wanted a slightly cheaper model in a different colour, maybe for sometime next year. But cheaper model in preferred colour was out of stock all over Singapore and Malaysia: Gibson had for some reason sacked its distributor. Dealers here were clearing out their remaining stock. I had to buy now or miss out. So I went online and ordered a Standard 50s in a soothing honey burst.
Just my luck: the next day, the vendor rang me up to say that they had found a cracked neck on the very last such guitar they had, sorry sir. With no other choice, I accepted the same model in cherry red. I unboxed her today. She looks really nice, and is barely distinguishable from an echte Gibson in feel, playability and sound. I’m happy enough.
jonas
@waspuppet: Your boss: “We have reason to believe you’ve been stealing office supplies. In fact, the custodian recently retrieved all this from your office… [points to huge pile of paper, staplers, computer equipment, toner cartridges]. What do you have to say?
You: “I’d like a special master to go through this and determine which stuff I’m entitled to keep.”
Boss: “You have til noon to clean out your desk and leave the building.”
You: “I protest. Getting fired can have serious consequences for my reputation!”
Boss: “Who the fuck you think you are? Trump?”
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’m home from the cataract surgery with a giant patch over my right eye that slows me down when I try to read. Now I’ll go catch up.
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
Provably, a lying “good German”.
trollhattan
Somebody do a welfare check on Tony Jay–Liz Truss is giving her first speech as PM and I’m concerned what will happen when she tells Britain she can fix the energy crisis with tax cuts.
Oh, God, “Our country was built by people who get things done,”
Dazzling stuff.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
I get mine tomorrow….
And like everything else the price of admission to the club has gotten far more expensive.
James E Powell
@Amir Khalid:
Congratulations! There is a Les Paul shaped whole in my own guitar inventory. Some day, some day.
Who is your favorite LP player? Favorite LP song?
trollhattan
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Repeat after me: “Yarrr, mateys!”
Hope it goes swimmingly–I know when mom had hers done it restored a lot of resolution the cataracts had silently taken away.
Amir Khalid
@James E Powell:
Jimmy Page. Rock’n’Roll, from the fourth album.
Ken
She’s not wrong, if by “things” you mean “sailing over and slaughtering the people that sailed over two centuries before”.
Dangerman
I told the officer I had a standing order to park there longer than 20 minutes and the prick still gave me a ticket.
JCJ
@Amir Khalid: I was driving by Prairie Home Cemetery in Waukesha (Wisconsin) recently and saw a sign for the Les Paul Monument. I am not a musician of any sort but I drove in to see it. I am sure a guitarist such as yourself would appreciate this gravesite.
http://homeoflespaul.com/places/les-paul-monument/
Geminid
@trollhattan: And the jackals bark “Tony! Tony! Tony!…”
I think Mr. Jay will drop in before too long.
redoubtagain
@Ken: And the Windrush generation (and their descendants) , that her government is sending back to the West Indies.
Baud
@Dangerman:
Claim executive privilege.
trollhattan
@JCJ:
Speaking of the Les Paul, friend of mine through a complicated series of events is in possession of a custom Les Paul that Gibson made for Eddie Van Halen, and was recently given to him by the estate. Gibson had evidently hoped Eddie might switch to their brand (which IIUC did not happen).
ChrisSherbak
It’s an interesting article – thanks for the ref (I don’t go out of my way to read Atlantic articles – maybe I should put them in my Feedly rotation.) I thought there were some interesting points, but it feels like more of a presentation of facts vs. much deep analysis of causes and effects. Maybe her (mostly white?) audience is not familiar with a lot of what she puts down?
Her then moving to her experience in Ethiopia was quite jarring – felt like there was a longer article there but got edited to sh-t. I actually liked the analogy of forced migration there vs. our Great Migration but it’s not clear that the ‘migration’ to the burbs of the upper class is quite comparable. Hard to know if the first half was her original idea or the 2nd half was. Definitely added her to my Twitter feed.
Kristine
@Amir Khalid: I could be mistaken, but I think I recall you posting here about your first lessons. Now you’re a collector–wow.
Every time I read something like this, I think I should give lessons one more try. I have a cherry red/white Peavey Falcon (described to me as a Strat knockoff) and a black Fender electric-acoustic. Haven’t touched them in years but won’t part with them because Maybe.
Danielx
Yeah I tried that special master thing on the spousal unit regarding something I didn’t want to do. Response: there’s only one special master around here and you are not it.
trollhattan
@Danielx: Need a toy judge in your pocket first, who can declare “special master!” whenever it becomes advantageous.
Think they can be ordered from Federalist.com.
Betsy
@Matt McIrvin: Registered independent. What a joke. Of course they did.
Like you can just come to the polls for a party primary and then pick and choose across ballots and races. It just beggars belief.
You want to determine who’s going to be on the ballot for a party? You might have to vote on the ballot for that party!
Gee, in some places you might even have to be registered with that party!
kalakal
@Amir Khalid: Good choice.
I’m more of a Strat guy myself. but LPs really do have a certain something. And they snarl like nothing else
sdhays
@trollhattan: Definitely what makes the UK special. Most countries are built by the people who really can’t be bothered.
trollhattan
@Geminid: Turns out Truss is a neocon circa 2000.
Immediately reminded of Obama poking at Republicans for believing tax cuts solve everything. “Break your arm, tax cut!”
trollhattan
@sdhays: “I thought a bridge here might be handy and ‘poof’, bridge appears!”
MomSense
@Amir Khalid:
Cherry red is classic! Enjoy!
Betsy
@Mike in NC: uLgggh!!
TheronWare
@Danielx: Ouch! I can feel that retort from New Jersey! hehehehe!
Danielx
@trollhattan:
and tax cuts will pay for themselves…wait, didn’t they try that in Kansas?
Ohio Mom
We recently switched internet providers which meant I had to give up my old email address. The upside of this, I thought, was that I’d finally be rid of all sorts of junk mail (mostly from stores and local nonprofits) who would not know my new address.
Well that lasted all of two weeks. The first junky announcement just arrived.
trollhattan
A Tuesday quiz: which insufferable opinion writer is responsible?
The Golux
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Enjoy. I had mine done in March, and was flabbergasted by the improvement, especially color perception.
Dadadadadadada
@trollhattan: Sully?
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: Those dental milling machines can make a regular glue-on crown, but last I knew they can’t make the ones that have the metal plug inside needed to attach the crown to an implant post. I’ll bet that’s coming though; soon technology will replace a good deal of what dental labs do.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
I will say this is a very nice aspect of LA County moving to voting centers: there’s no more need to show up to your precinct. Every polling place in the county has the full voter roll and the ballot information for every precinct. You just go to a polling place that’s convenient for you, and they look up your information. The voting machine recognizes the right races and candidate orders for your ballot*, and your name is marked as having vote in a central register. And, of course, you can get your ballot in any of more than a dozen languages.
*California has an elaborate system of randomizing the order of candidates on the ballot. Different precincts have different candidates at the top, so no candidate has an unfair advantage from being listed first on every ballot.
James E Powell
@Amir Khalid:
Have you seen the documentary It Might Get Loud?
The whole thing is good, but watching The Edge and Jack White watch Jimmy Page was my favorite part.
kalakal
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Good to hear. Aside from the eye drops you should be back to normal pretty soon
Spanky
@trollhattan: Ts:dr. I gave up at “Mandarins”.
trollhattan
@The Golux:
I’ll give a hint: once decried the effect dungarees had on proper society.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Frankly amazed at how CA voting has deployed tech to ease both the process and assure your vote has been counted. I get texts that my ballot is on the way to my house, then a confirmation text it has been received by the county.
The process would give any good southern Republican the vapahs. “Why, the very idea, my stars!”
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: I have no idea — tell us!
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
That sounds like George Will. It has his signature mix of insufferable smugness and use of a cloud of ornate verbiage to hide a mundane point.
ian
@AxelFoley: Not sure it matters in the big scheme of things, but it is a county office holder, not a federal office holder.
From the article in the twitter link
Good news he is losing his job
persistentillusion
@Geminid: He’s fluffing the invective at the moment so that his creative descriptors are up to his exceptional standards.
Tony Jay
@trollhattan:
@Geminid:
It’s my 50th birthday week, and my Better Half has brought me to see astronaut Tim Peake give a talk about his astronautics. Also I have a beer.
Dizzy Lizzy Truss and her manifest unsuitability for any job higher up the food chain than Assistant to the Chief Gobshite are not invited.
I will be discussing her in due course., though. Because I simply have to.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
One thing California has gotten right is the way to use technology. For all the tech surrounding the voting process, the actual ballots are still pieces of human-readable paper.
BruceFromOhio
Why aren’t these people in prison he asked himself for the sixteen jillionth time
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-donald-trump-voting-92c0ace71d7bee6151dd33938688371e
Immanentize
@Amir Khalid: As you know, there is nothing I care more about than my son. However, I fear he would not say the same about me —
He just got his first guitar, a green telecaster. Not a Fender, because he couldn’t afford that yet but he spent his bucks on a used Tokai ’80s model from a friend at school with “too many guitars.”
Eunicecycle
@sdhays: that made me LOL!
Eunicecycle
Sorry duplicate comment and I can’t see how to delete?!
Doc Sardonic
@trollhattan: EVH never repped Gibson, but he did do recordings on the 1984 album with a korina Flying V with no whammy bar.
cmorenc
@Roger Moore: We should eschew the obfuscation of erudite profuse perambulations.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: I’m glad that at least someone has a life outside this hellsite!
I hope it’s a very happy birthday week for you and yours.
Jay
Steve told me a good “essential worker” joke the other day.
Because of the “labour shortage”, a Corp hired a tribe of Cannibals. They were promised an okay wage, full benefits and 24 hour access to the Cafeteria, so they wouldn’t have to kill or eat anyone.
Things went well for a year, until the Head Cannibal called the others into the Staff room and demanded to know who killed and ate the janitor.
After a while of uncomfortable silence, one Cannibal confessed.
The Head Cannibal went off on him, “you moron”, “for a year we have been eating Administrators, Department Supervisors, Assistant Managers, Managers, Account Managers, and nobody noticed.”
”But you had to kill and eat the one person here who does actual work!!!”
Amir Khalid
@Kristine:
My low-end Squiers, Epiphones, and made-in-China copies hardly qualify me as a collector. In my mind, collectors are the rich people who pay the price of a house for vintage ’59 Les Pauls or Buddy Holly’s red Strat.
If you want to pick up your guitars again, there so many free/low-cost learning resources on the interwebs, especially YouTube, available. Good luck. Have fun.
Matt McIrvin
@Betsy: We have semi-open primaries where someone registered without a party preference can vote on either ballot, but they definitely only get to vote on one…
Ken
I’m going to guess a badly-trained neural net.
(Which, as XKCD reminds us, doesn’t mean a computer was involved.)
Immanentize
@Doc Sardonic: one of my greatest concert moments:
Seeing Albert King — cranky old Albert King — playing his Flying V, upside down left-handed of course, while smoking his pipe at Antones in Austin. His voice was like warm butter and whiskey. Mmm-mmmm.
UncleEbeneezer
@James E Powell: For me there will never be anyone who used a LP better than Tom Scholz of Boston. His tone was just pure Les Paul-ian bliss.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: That’s nice. In my part of Massachusetts, at least, they’ve moved from binders full of paper records to doing all the ticking off of voters on iPads, so I think the only thing preventing them from doing it that way is that they use stacks of preprinted bubble-form ballots. But as of now you have to show up to your precinct’s polling place. The middle school where I vote serves two precincts, but which precincts those are recently changed.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
A collector is someone who buys a thing to have it rather than to use it. If you have guitars you rarely if ever play, you’re a collector. Of course it’s possible to be both a player and a collector.
Martin
@AxelFoley: Useful precedent if it holds. Both by labeling Jan 6 as an insurrection, and validating the use of the 14th amendment.
Presumably this could be used against Mastriano, and of course Trump. I’ve argued that Liz Cheney, running in the R primary in 2024 would have standing to file this case against Trump. I can’t imagine the courts removing him after the primary, though.
Immanentize
@Amir Khalid: Do not lie to yourself, you are a collector of guitars.* My memory is good enough to remember when you said your THIRD guitar was the last and already too many.
*Or do you prefer “guitar gatherer?”
Doc Sardonic
@Kristine: Lot’s of good people giving lessons on YouTube. I highly recommend Carl Brown, Marty Swartz(may not have spelled that right) are 2 that I can think of off the top of my head.
Ken
Give it a couple weeks. She might be out of office by then, and you can confine your remarks to a quick “I told you so”.
eclare
@Matt McIrvin: We don’t have party registration in TN. On primary day you show up and point to R or D in front of the election worker as to which ballot you want.
JoyceH
Open thready stuff – last night I watched the first episode of The Rings of Power, and hey, it was fine. And frankly, I found it refreshing that Galadriel actually got to DO stuff, other than just stand around being beautiful and womanly and queenly, blah blah blah, which is pretty much all Tolkien let any of the female characters (with one exception) do.
But something else struck me – with all the online controversy about the characters coming in a variety of colors, being ‘untrue’ to the source material, why is nobody complaining that Tolkien elves did NOT have pointy ears?
Kristine
@Doc Sardonic: Thanks for the names. Online at-my-own-pace and time seems like a pretty good option.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Collect your bespoke gold star, Roger Moore!
For no discernible reason, my local paper reprints George Effing Will (also Kathleen Parker) and I thought I’d share. He’s my go-to example of obfuscating lack of substance with extremely dense prose.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
I thought the Cult of Tax Cuts was just an American thing
Amir Khalid
@Immanentize:
The Immp has made a fine choice. The Telecaster is pretty much the most basic yet versatile electric guitar there is. Bruce Springsteen has essentially played nothing but Teles for half a century.
Captain C
@trollhattan:
“Unfortunately, no one like that is in the Conservative Party today. Unless you count grifters. We’re great at that!”
–What Liz Truss would have added if she was remotely truthful.
Ken
There’s no delete. In emergencies you can say “WaterGirl” three times and she will appear and grant you one wish.
Repatriated
@Roger Moore:
My one complaint with that ballot system is that the human-readable text is not what the scanner reads — it reads the barcode.
I see a possible vulnerability from the availability of pre-printing your ballot from the county website: malicious third-party sites that either provide a “voter guide” front-end to the county website, or mimic it outright. These could create ballots where the barcode does not match the plaintext candidate names.
Now, if they used optical character recognition on the plaintext candidate names instead of the barcode, it would be nearly as good as you could get.
trollhattan
@Tony Jay:
And a joyous half-century celebration to you, sir!
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Double thumbs up good.
catclub
@Ken: Obama was elected when the economy was coming apart. Likewise a woman PM gets the job right when the wheels are coming off.
UncleEbeneezer
So I played at a house-party on Sunday and assembled a funk/jazz quartet named Valley To Valley with some great musician friends I have known for years. We were only able to have one rehearsal prior to playing. Anyways, part of the deal with playing was that every band was assigned a song based on the party them of “Babe/Baby” (host just had a baby) and we had to give them a new spin. My group was assigned Sonny & Cher’s classic, “I Got You Babe” which I decided to give a 70’s fusion vibe. Here is the video. I am on drums. It was 110 degrees in Van Nuys and still 100 degrees when we went on at 7pm. Enjoy.
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
Check out Roy Buchanan (in case you haven’t already).
https://spillmagazine.com/spill-feature-roy-buchanans-top-ten-tracks-remember-roy-30-years-later/
kalakal
@Immanentize: heh. You may be pleasantly surprised at the value of that old Tokai. They’re great guitars, I love my Tokai Strats but even the cheaper modeld tend to go for more than the cheap Fenders these days. Mind you. they can be a swine to accurately id as per year & model*
The priciest ones are the ones made between roughly 79 & 83, that’s what the collectors go for.
The Moar You Know
@Immanentize: If that happens to be an 80s Made In Japan Tokai, it’s worth more than any non-vintage USA Fender and is a far better-built instrument to boot.
Soprano2
@trollhattan: I feel bad for people in CA, I thought days of temps from 100 – 105 were bad!
Doc Sardonic
@Kristine: Glad to help. Carl Brown’s channel can be found if you search guitar 365 on YouTube, Marty is I believe Marty music. They both do song lessons and techniques. Their strong points are breaking down the song in bits. Another I just thought of is Ben Eller, also Tim Pierce. Pierce is a fairly well known session hired gun, and a really good teacher. Now I need to heed my own advice and pick mine up again and accept the loss of dexterity in my hands and wring all the joy out of them I can and just get over the fact that my skills are very much diminished
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
About the same time LA County moved to voting centers, we also moved to our own, custom-designed voting machines. They’re basically ballot printers. When you sign in, the people who check you in look up your information and print a little QR code on the corner of a blank ballot to tell the voting machine which precinct you’re from.
You put the ballot into the machine, and it looks up your ballot information. You’re presented with the choices on a computer screen. You choose one* and confirm your choice. Then the machine moves on to the next space on the ballot. When you’ve voted on everything, it shows you your choices and gives you a chance to go back and change any that are wrong. When you’re satisfied, it prints your choices and gives you a chance to read the ballot. If you’re happy, it swallows the ballot into a ballot box. If you aren’t, you can take the ballot back to the front and get a new one.
There are a variety of other nice features. You can get an app for your smart phone that lets you look through the ballot at your leisure and pick your choices. When you get to the polling place, the app creates a QR code the machine can read to get your choices and print the ballot. And, as I said above, everything can be done in any valid ballot language. There’s a headphone jack that lets it read the ballot for visually impaired people.
The really nice thing, IMO, is the whole project was done by the county. They worked with an existing voting machine company on the design and manufacturing, but the IP is all ours rather than the company’s. That means we can share it with other places that want to use the system. I think it also means we can get a different manufacturer to make more if we want, and we can have our own programmers extend the code.
*Or more. The machine is capable of running elections for positions where voters select multiple candidates.
Martin
@trollhattan: It’s not so much the tech – lots of other states have the tech, it’s the laws and culture surrounding the tech. The single most important policy point that I think California got right was ‘we don’t have to rush the results, just because the networks want them immediately’.
The result of that was a system which rather than report a number and then run around and validate that number through a bunch of lawsuits, making the original number look suspect, the state does all of these checks before reporting. So your elections office will sometimes call you and ask ‘hey, it’s unclear which box you checked on the ballot – did you mean to vote for x or y’ and have you clarify it before they count it. This is why it takes a month to certify the ballots.
On the tech side, the most important introduction, and CA might have been first with this, I’m not sure, is the anonymized ballot ID. Every voter gets a random ID assigned to them (possibly unique for each election) and that ID is tracked throughout the voting process to make sure that nobody does an early vote and then a mail-in vote trying to double-vote. And here again, they’ll call you up and ask – did you mean for the mail-in ballot to supersede the early ballot, etc. That ID is tracked in the election database and nowhere else.
I don’t think anyone was using this kind of anonymized voter ID prior to about 15 years ago, which opened the door to multiple, overlapping voting methods safe from double-voting. A lot of Republicans don’t understand how this system works, or even that it exists, which is why they believe that double-voting is so rampant, and why they keep trying to prove systems are insecure by double voting and then are shocked when they are caught. A lot of Democrats are equally unaware of it, but trust that the election officials know what they’re doing, so don’t spin up conspiracy theories around it.
The added notification around voting is a very good public trust mechanism, one of the things I think CA is increasingly exceptional about. I notice that this week with CAISO on social media with their messages ‘if we all do our part with these Flex Alerts, the grid will be fine’ and then frequent attaboys and feedback. Yesterday we cut demand by about 1GW over their forecast which helped keep the grid going. Those are really good ‘good government/we’re in this together’ kinds of efforts.
Doc Sardonic
@Immanentize: Echoing The Moar You Know, if that is an 80’s MIJ Tokai, it is an excellent guitar. Given a proper setup for the player, it will be a fine instrument.
The Albert King show in a small venue makes me very envious. Recently saw Jeff Beck with 15000 of my closest friends.
Craig
@Amir Khalid: I used to have a bunch of Gibson guitars, never a LP though. My favorites were a Bicentennial issue Firebird, and a ratty old ES225. Now I just have an old SG Junior in cherry red. Ripping guitar, that P-90 cuts through everything.
Soprano2
@Roger Moore: They’ve started experimenting with that here. There are two polling places that are “central” – anyone can go there and vote. I don’t know why we can’t do that now that we have computers to tell them which ballot we should get. Many people would find it more convenient to vote near their workplace (as long as they live in the same city where they work).
Martin
@Roger Moore: Not enough praise can be heaped on LA county’s efforts on that.
Having a government designed and built voting machine that they make available to anyone who wants it is a huge, huge thing. Audited code by government officials, selected vendors who can build the hardware, etc. Much, much better than trusting the whole thing to a corporation. All the more impressive that a county pulled it off where a state or the nation couldn’t.
The machines seem affordable, they are tailored to serve a population that might speak 100 different languages, they are well designed for people with disabilities, etc. Just A+ governmenting there.
CaseyL
@Jay: Hah! But they need to eat from the top level down, so no one notices the missing reports .
@Tony Jay: Happy B-day week! I look forward to your commentary on Truss. She strikes me as such a compendium of blandness and buzzword speak that I’m not sure she’ll provoke your usual heights of vituperation, though.
Are the Tories trying to get around ever having general elections again by changing out their PM every three years?
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: Will?
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I think that is also the case in Colorado. Ohio, Wyoming and several other states allow anyone to reregister their party affiliation on primary day. Others are more strict about keeping their primaries closed.
South Carolina and Virginia do not register voters by party, so all the primaries are open. Virginia Republicans often get around this by choosing candidates by caucuses and then conventions.
These take more time and tend to engage the more conservative voters and leave out the less zealous. As former Republican Congressman Tom Davis observed, conservatives have passion, moderates have lives.
Virginia Republicans blew a good chance to win the Governor race in 2013 when they picked their candidate through a convention. The hard-right Attorney General went on to lose narrowly to Terry McAuliffe. Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling had won 8 straight elections, but he knew the tea party radicals would control the convention and he didn’t even run. Bolling would have beaten McAuliffe.
Virginia Democrats have largely avoided caucuses and select candidates by primary. I think this is a smart move in a state where ~33% of registered voters self-describe as Independents.
Tony Jay
@The Moar You Know:
Oh, it has been. Many treats and Flobalob turfed out. Huzzah!
Granted, they’re playing Coldplay while we wait for Tim, but a perfect life is a bland life.
Baud
@Tony Jay:
Merry birthday!
Tony G
Sorry. Only fat, lazy grifters are allowed to cover their asses by claiming Executive Privilege. No Privilege for you!
Splitting Image
@trollhattan:
Frenchmen?
Brachiator
A recap of Biden’s judicial nominees. From Pew Research
I ran across a pundit who claimed that only Biden’s legislative record mattered. Nonsense. Biden clearly needs to fill vacancies, but also help maintain a pool of liberal judges to be moved up by future presidents.
ETA. Presidential trivia. Before a constitutional change during the FDR administration, the president was inaugurated on March 4.
BC in Illinois
@Tony Jay:
I, also, am looking forward to the Tony Jay take on the Liz Truss “address.” It was notable for its emptiness. She will apparently cut taxes, figure out something to do on energy, and get right to work doing great things to make Britain great. Utterly flat, utterly boring. A predominance of vacancy.
Many years ago (when BC in Illinois was still in Illinois), I had the opportunity to hear Rod Blagojevich speak at the opening of the World Shooting and Recreational Complex in Sparta, IL. (Not being a trapshooter myself, I’m not sure why I was there. I might have come simply because I knew people in the band.)
It was a remarkable experience. This was a big occasion. You had corporate speakers, local politicians, I think a congressman or two — all happy for the opportunity to make their little speech. Then Governor Blagojevich stood up to speak and you could tell that you had left the minor leagues for the majors. A Chicago politician speaking to a Southern Illinois crowd, he knew he was not the choice of all of his listeners, but he handled the occasion with charm and good humor. He hammered the employment and tourism points that everyone could cheer for, spoke well of the other people on the stage, and left people — or, at least, me — with the impression of “Okay, he’s a corrupt scumbag, but I can see why he’s made it this far. He’s good at this.”
Liz Truss is not good at this.
Paul in KY
@JoyceH: Very sad with the plot bowdlerization. Finrod Felagund died in Sauron’s dungeons saving a mortal man. Not just in some rando battle.
Galadriel was banned from returning to Valinor, unless she submitted to the Doom of Mandos and Judgement of Manwe.
What the fuck was the dude in the meteor!!!
The visuals were very nice, tho.
SteveinPHX
@Dorothy A. Winsor: i had cataracts removed from both eyes in 2005. Best move I ever made.
I hope yours go as well.
Wish you the best!
Martin
@Soprano2: The computer work is substantial to do it properly. You look at CA counties that led the charge and they’re bigger than many states, so they can easily afford to hire the capable tech folks, and the state put in a fair bit of effort to support the smaller counties. The state was also very forward looking on this. We could have gone to a flat ‘vote by mail’ approach like Oregon, but we chose to do a ‘we can do it all simultaneously’ approach, which kind of makes sense for such a large state where our rural areas are about as rural as they get in the US and our urban areas aren’t quite NYC urban, but close.
In some ways it probably also helped that CA wasn’t responding to its own disaster. We were responding to Floridas and recognizing that CA’s system wasn’t materially better than FLs at the time. That gave us time to plan it. LA county’s VSAP started in 2009 and fully implemented in 2020, so 11 years. And that was just one counties initiative on top of the larger state plan.
JoyceH
@Paul in KY:
I probably enjoyed it more because I didn’t know all that stuff – I read LOTR multiple times as a teenager, but could never make it through the appendices and the Silmarillion. But honestly, most of the online griping has been about the color question.
Geminid
@Martin: What do think of California’s open, “jungle” primary system?
Tony Jay
@CaseyL:
@Baud:
Thankee Mucho
@BC in Illinois:
I think I have my post title.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Tony Jay:
Happy Birthday Week, TJ! Sounds like that will be an interesting talk
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
Happy birthday to you! Getting a chance to attend a talk by an astronaut is seriously cool.
Anotherlurker
@Jay: During their meals, one of the dining party would always state: “I’m having a ball!” His friend and meal partner would always respond: “You’re eating too fast!”
I’ll show myself out.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
I survived my night in Death Valley, it only got down below 100℉ just before sunrise. It was a rather unsatisfying trip for astrophotography mainly due to more cloud cover than I expected.
Baud
@Brachiator:
Probably said before the pundit realized how good Biden’s legislative record would end up being. Now something else is the only thing that matters.
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Wow.
trollhattan
@Paul in KY: Yup.
Apologies, affirmative.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Geminid:
Can confirm that’s how it works here in Ohio. You don’t register with a party, partisanship is determined by the party ballot you choose in a primary election
Wanderer
@UncleEbeneezer: Well done. Really fun to listen to.
trollhattan
@Geminid: Like the redistricting commission, a Republican idea that blew up in their faces. The result is dumb statewide races between Popular Democrat and Other Democrat in the general.
See, also, term limits, the Republican scheme to get rid of that pesky Willie Brown.
BC in Illinois
@trollhattan:
Oh, wow. Roy Buchanan. That brings back memories.
I heard Roy Buchanan and the Snake Stretchers twice in the early ’70s in the Washington DC area. He was phenomenal.
I will now devote some time this evening, looking up Roy B tracks.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
Holy shit! Were you sleeping in ice?
Kelly
Much sympathy to the residents of the current heat wave.
I’ve camped in Grand Canyon at 120 degrees but somehow 117 here in western Oregon in our air conditioned house was far more oppressive and weird. The leaves on the south and west facing sides of many trees were scorched brown. What a year, record heat waves in Europe, China, India+Pakistan, now California. Any I’ve missed?
narya
Dave Barry once described Will as looking like someone who had inadvertently licked bus station plumbing.
glc
@catclub: That would be May.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Best wishes on your bday, Tony. Can’t wait to read the next dispatch. All the best to the missus.
Immanentize
@kalakal:
@The Moar You Know:
@Doc Sardonic:
Thanks Jackals, as you can tell, I am not a guitar guy. But I will pass along the info. to my son. He paid, I think 350 or so for it (he is working and actually getting paid!) I can’t imagine his friend who sold it to him wouldn’t know, but we shall see….
Brachiator
@JoyceH:
I may take a look, as I’ve read that the production design is amazing.
But clearly the show runners have failed if they cannot get the elves right! // snark
ETA. I really cannot understand the pouty outrage over fantasy beings. And I am a guy, but even when I started reading science fiction back in the literary Stone Age, I thought that the lack of all kinds of diversity represented a failure of imagination.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think a huge part of it is that for the most parts states and the nation don’t actually do the nuts and bolts election administration. It’s almost all handled at the county level, and most counties are just too small to think about doing something like this. LA County is by far the largest county in the country, and it’s in a state that has put a lot of effort into getting elections right. It makes sense it would be the place that tried.
Paul in KY
@JoyceH: No problem at all with actors of different races doing the parts. It is cinema, Prof. Tolkien wouldn’t mind at all about that.
Now the things I’m ranting on, I expect he’d be very disappointed…at least till he saw the check.
kalakal
@Immanentize: At $350 if he’s got an early 80s Tokai Breezy Sound (Tokai make great guitars but in the 70s & Early 80s were really bad at naming*) he’s got an absolute bargain and a really, really good guitar.
*Springy Sound, I ask you
Brachiator
@Baud:
This was from a Business Insider story about Biden’s judicial nominees. The pundit (I think) was just being churlish and his comments seemed to be recent.
This also brings to mind those in the past who claimed that the Supreme Court really was not that important.
Ksmiami
@trollhattan: Andrew Sullivan? Or Bobo Brooks?
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
Happy birthday. Given that the recent run of Tory PMs have all been abject failures, I’m not expecting much from Liz Truss. In fact, I’m wondering how soon she has her first train wreck.
UncleEbeneezer
@Wanderer: Thank you so much! Despite the heat it was a really fun time and we had a blast playing.
Mallard Filmore
@Anotherlurker:
Slightly forgetting his manners the cannibal frowns … Eating is fun.
Medicine Munday, by Rupert Hine
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: The ‘dungarees’ line was a dead giveaway!
kalakal
The BBC provide the perfect metaphor for Liz Truss’ first day
https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/1567178413647040514/photo/1
Anotherlurker
@Mallard Filmore: I love it! Thanks!
frosty
@Amir Khalid: Congratulations on your NGD! Nothing like new gear to fire you up for playing more.
Ruckus
@Immanentize:
“too many guitars.”
I understood that is an oxymoron, one can never have too many guitars. Also the opposite is true, one is never enough…..
kalakal
@UncleEbeneezer: Well done. Sounds good to me, looks life fun
frosty
@JCJ: Haven’t been to the gravesite but I saw him at the Iridium in the early 90s (I think). He was playing what I think was a LP Studio; lots of knobs and gadgets. And yes, Les could really play!
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I think I’ll make my next trip there during the Spring, but I had a 3 day weekend(Sunday-today).
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t sleep on my astrophotography shoots.
frosty
@Doc Sardonic: Marty Schwartz is a good YouTube guitar teacher. He walked me through the solos in All Along The Watchtower. Which I converted to Open D with a slide because I’m hopeless at bending.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The Cult of Tax Cuts is a conservative club from around the world. They want to pay less and they don’t care that governments will have to do less because they don’t want what we call a government. They want someone who revels in money and stays out of the way of the wealthy conservatives in stealing everything not tied down and much that is.
kalakal
@Ruckus: Indeed. ‘Tis a thing impossible
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I agree that the voting system is pretty cool. But when there are multiple pages of candidates for a particular office, or a lot of offices and ballot Propositions, things can get a little complicated. Once I think I got confused when I wanted to go to the next page, but instead went to the next office. Fortunately, there are well trained people to help you if necessary.
I don’t think I have yet tried the option of doing all my voting at home and then completing the ballot by QR code at the polling place.
WhatsMyNym
@Ruckus:
Until they come for your money.
Ruckus
@Doc Sardonic:
It’s always better to have diminished skills than none at all….
Doc Sardonic
@frosty: Bending can be a chore. I was always amazed by Stevie Ray Vaughn’s playing with his setup(any heavier gauge on the strings and he would have been playing the bottom half of a piano) and the way he could bend. Myself, I use light strings and that helps the arthritic fingers bend. In fact on the current project guitar I’m going to take a page out of Billy Gibbons book and put Mexican Lottery 7’s on it.
Doc Sardonic
@Ruckus: I agree, it is just the acceptance of the diminishing of the skills that was the problem.
Martin
@Geminid: I think it’s good. I’d prefer ranked choice and just do away with primaries – let everyone run in the general.
The downside to jungle is that a party is really incentivized to run as few candidates as possible, which seems a bit counterproductive. Basically your primary will run the best if you narrow the field before the primary. The upside is that candidates really do best if they are in good alignment with the district. That’s not always the case (increasingly so now) with traditional primaries.
Ranked choice eliminates a lot of these meta strategies.
dr. luba
Never mind.
James E Powell
@Immanentize:
Not sure where you are or what the market’s like there, but a good condition 80s Tokai Tele is like $1000 or more, comparable to a Fender USA.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Don’t forget that LA county has a larger population than 40 states. That’s just a few people……
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: My wife just said the same thing and it occurred to me that generally, proposals for ranked-choice voting don’t eliminate the primary system, they just have ranked choices for all the elections.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now that many people think of ranked choice as an alternative to party primaries (even as an alternative to the party system as we know it), though of course it could fill that role.
eclare
@UncleEbeneezer: Cool! Kind of has a Steely Dan vibe to me.
Timill
@dr. luba: I just had that with the Atlantic too, and I didn’t think I was close to my limit.
Cleared relevant cookies, and straight back in…
trollhattan
@kalakal: Oh boy {chef’s kiss}
trollhattan
@Ruckus: Applies also to bicycles and camera lenses.
Uncle Cosmo
The two phenomena kind of go together. After sundown, the water vapor in clouds blocks infrared from being radiated into space from the surface that was heated during the day.
Chief Oshkosh
@Matt McIrvin:
So is Prince Charles.
dr. luba
@Matt McIrvin: Doesn’t California have a primary which chooses the top two candidates who then run against each other in the general, regardless of party?
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: I am leery of any kind of voting machine for a variety of reasons out of history. But it sounds like they ended up with decent ones. And California ballots are so complicated that that level of automation probably helps.
I think we’re not allowed to even use smartphones in the polling place.
Matt McIrvin
@dr. luba: Yes, that’s the jungle primary they were talking about. And in that case you could just as easily have an “instant runoff” from the ranked-choice results as a real runoff.
dr. luba
@Timill: I’ll try that. I do think I clicked on a bunch of articles there when I got bored one night, though.
NYT problem was that I hadn’t signed in with my free account, so I deleted the comment.
Ruckus
@Doc Sardonic:
It always is.
As we get a lot older it seems to be a bit more acceptable to be diminishing. At least I fucking hope so…..
dr. luba
@Matt McIrvin: So no ranked choice in the jungle primary? Just the two top vote getters?
There is so much variety in elections now that I’ve lost track…..
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m intrigued by RCV primarily has a replacement for party primaries where there is a large field and one person wins with a relatively low plurality of the vote (where there is no runoff). I’m secondarily interested in it because it seems to discourage spoiler third party candidates in the general election. But RCV has other benefits (as well as drawbacks), and could eliminate primaries altogether depending on how it’s implemented.
Chief Oshkosh
@trollhattan:
The hell you say. Your country was built by stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, coming back with a stolen hammer to prize up the nails to steal what had formerly been nailed down, and then pocketing the nails on your way out the door.
Tony Jay
Thank You all for the birthday toasts. Can’t believe I’ve got the big 50. I’m finally a proper BJ whippersnapper!
Tim Peake is seriously interesting. I’m now terrified of my boy becoming an astronaut!
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
I only have one bicycle. Left that is. I used to have a hell of a lot more but then I did own a bicycle shop……
I do have 3 or 4 lenses for my Nikon. Is that enough?
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Here, early voting works that way. You can go to the early-voting place at City Hall, tell them your address and get a ballot for your precinct, and the procedure from there is basically the same as mail voting–you just hand them the ballot envelope in person. But there are only one or two early-voting locations in town; generally your regular polling place will be closer.
trollhattan
“Attention women and girls: you have not been punished sufficiently.”
–South Carolina
“Rape and incest? Too bad, you’re not skating away that easy, harlots.”
trollhattan
If you have to ask. :-)
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ve lived in other states with voting machines and I hated them. But the LA county system works a hell of a lot better than the other one’s I’ve used and the location I vote at has 20 or more machines. When I last voted in OH the then fucking gov pulled out 2 of the 3 machines at our Democratic area precincts so voting took me 4 hrs, on a rainy day. Good times.
UncleEbeneezer
@eclare: Thanks! I had even’t thought of that! I was consciously going for a Billy Cobham Spectrum or Michael McDonald/Doobies kind of vibe, but Steely Dan also makes a lot of sense.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
Always the same comeback for the same question….. including the punctuation.
UncleEbeneezer
@kalakal: Muchas gracias :)
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: That’s what you do in MA if you haven’t registered a party preference, otherwise they give you the ballot you registered for. It’s like a preference cookie.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think something needs to be done to winnow down the field a bit. An election with 20 candidates is unmanageable no matter how it’s run. If anything, I’d think a RCV election with more candidates would be even harder just because it’s so hard to do a decent job of ranking that many people.
dr. luba
Trying again. I deleted because I thought I had fixed the problem (by logging in to my free account), but…..
I can’t access the NYT. I try, but keep getting told I’ve reached my limit of my (ten) free articles. I did read one article earlier this month, but no more. Done.
I rarely try to access the NYT (because it’s the NYT and FTFNYT), but once in a while someone links to an article and I try and….no. This has been going on for several months. I wrote it off before because it was later in the month and maybe I did read 10 articles, but on September 3rd?
I wonder if they’re pissed off at me for cancelling my subscription earlier this year?
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: Yeah, my impression was that voting machines were usually a way to make voting in urban precincts more difficult by undersupplying them to make the lines super long. But of course that’s a system where you have to vote at a fixed polling place.
In the current MA system, the bottleneck is just the speed at which the poll workers can check people in, since all you need to fill out the ballot is a cardboard cubby set up on a folding table and a black Sharpie. Then you stick the paper ballot into a scanner at the end.
Ken
@Roger Moore: Using the primary to reduce the number of candidates for the general also helps voters do their research. It’s a lot easier to learn about, and rank, four candidates than two dozen.
That said, I’m sure all of 2% of voters bother to do that. But it’s useful for them.
trollhattan
@Ruckus: re. Bikes, was served by two–commuter bike and road bike–until we had a return-to-work only “work” moved to the burbs and is an hour, not 15 minutes away. Commuter bike needed work and the shop needed to order parts, so the road bike became the commuter bike until a bad, really bad chain drop broke the rear derailleur and destroyed the back wheel.
So going from two to zero bikes I went to the boneyard and restored two old bikes in pieces, gathering dust, figuring the Antibike Gods can’t slay four at once–we’ll see how that dare goes.
My observation which is mine: road bike parts seem available in perpetuity but mountain bike parts only go back two generations–older than that and you’re hosed.
Kelly
@Ruckus: I’m down to 7 Whitewater boats I had 10 going into the 2020 Beachie fire three burned up and I only replaced one
Gravenstone
You do realize that he’s now found his own personal “dealer” for the new vice?
Kelly
I had 8 boats this spring. I gave one away to a friend that’s taking up whitewater kayaking
JoyceH
Not sure if this thread is deceased by now, but just want to go on the record as not really minding the elves’ pointy ears. Because I do see the problem with translating the stories to screen. In print, the elves seem to be about the same size and shape as humans, but nobody who met them were ever confused, they just knew these were elves – partly apparently some sort of ineffable aura, and also because elves are always incredibly beautiful. Well – film that. Ineffable aura doesn’t come across on screen, and incredibly beautiful is the default. No producer is going to go out and hire a bunch of homely actors to play the humans. Not when they could hire Sean Bean!
Geminid
@Ken: Alaska’s new system interests me. They have a open, “jungle” primary. Then the top four finishers advance to a ranked choice runoff in November.
There is an outfit called “Fight for Five” trying to get a similar system passed by ballot initiative in another western state (I forget which). It would have to pass a second time to become law. Under this system the top five finishers in the primary would advance to the runoff. For reasons I can’t quite articulate, I think Alaska’s system with four candidates advancing might be a good one, but five is too many.
The fourth place finisher in the Alaska House race dropped out, so only Mary Peltola, Nick Begich and Sarah Palin will be on the November ballot. Peltola already won the special election to fill the remainder of the late Don Young’s term. According to Palin, Peltola’s win shows that Begich should drop out. According to Begich, it shows that Palin is “unelectable.”
Munira
@Paul in KY: Have to agree with you. Tolkien’s Galadriel was a much more powerful character. Amazon reduced her to a bad-tempered Wonder woman. The whole getting sent back to Valinor thing was ridiculous. First of all, it’s not up Gilgalad who gets to go back. And then she jumps out of the ship several hundred miles from Middle Earth and we’re supposed to believe she’s going to swim all that way. The dialogue was terrible and the acting sucked. By the end of the first episode, I didn’t care about any of the characters so that’s it for me.
trnc
Pretty cool. A friend of mine had a family connection to Les Paul’s assistant, so he got to visit a few times and got a couple of fun little souvenirs. Then LP signed a 1950’s Les Paul GA-40 amp and gave it to him on his last visit not long before LP died.
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
Clearly, I need to block Politico from all my browsers, immediately. What an ass… obviously a Good Nazi German, as despicable as Goering or any of the SS goons Hitler loved.
surfk9
@Munira: There was a general call for the Noldor to go back to Valinor after the defeat of Morgoth. She basically just said no thanks and went East. However it was the Valar that forgave the Noldor who rebelled and went to Middle Earth to recover the Silmarils. That whole bit of her getting on a boat and changing her mind and jumping off was just ridiculous.
PaulB
A few things you can try:
Another Scott
@frosty: It looks like Mary Ford could “follow along” pretty well, also too.
Zooks!
Cheers,
Scott.
brantl
@trollhattan: George Will is the most pompous dick I have ever had the misfortune to hear. He’s like a bellicose bullfrog. It’s amazing that he doesn’t drown in all that bile.
Cameron
For the people here who love fantasy, either buy this or get your local library branch to order it: https://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Make-Believe-Principal-Britain-dp-0195038061/dp/0195038061/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1662506314
Paul in KY
@Munira: Also, too, the coming to Middle Earth! So much more intrigue & sadness in the books than ‘all the elves got mad & came to Middle Earth’.
Can’t believe Bezos would be happy with this. If he is, it’s because they convinced him it would only make money if they ‘Jacksonized’ it.
Paul in KY
Paul in KY
@surfk9: The Noldor were basically commanded to return at end of War of Wrath. Any who returned would have to be judged by Manwe and probably serve some term in Mandos.
The Noldor who remained decided they did not want to submit in that manner. Galadriel was certainly one of those.