Because we can never get enough thread. Pet and kid pics, and what games you’re playing and books you’re reading and what new kitchen appliance that costs more than a mortgage payment you have are all great subjects of discussion.
Sunday Morning Open Thread
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Any odds on Willard Romney offering Herman Cain a VP slot in return for his endorsement? I thought, going back to May, that Cain was angling for the “Mr. Palin 2012” role all along. Heavy media fluffing got a lot of GOP primary voters prematurely overexcited, but now that Cain has “suspended” his grab for the top ticket, I doubt he’s too proud to accept second best and I’m sure Romney’s not above making the offer. Mitt doesn’t need Cain to raise money for him, but he certainly could use some help in the “connecting with actual humans” part, and Cain seems to please those voters least susceptible to the Romneybot’s advances. Of course it will grind Mitt’s gears to be forced into faking bonhomie with someone who represents everything Romney isn’t, but then, if Mitt had an interest in retaining any last shreds of dignity he’d never have gotten on the 2012 primary train…
Saturday Night Open Thread
Been a sedate but football filled weekend here, and I just watched MSU shit the bed against Wisconsin. Why was anyone withing 40 yards of the punter? Watching Boss on demand and chilling with the pets. You?
Night shift
Whoa, we are way overdue for an open thread. I’ll put some real posts up in a little bit.
Update. Random interesting fact I learned on Johnny Cash’s wiki page after listening to American Routes:
President Nixon became acquainted with Johnny Cash through their mutual friend Billy Graham. On 17 April 1970, at the President’s invitation, the Man in Black gave a concert for an invited audience in the East Room of the White House.
[….]The appearance became the subject of a press-created controversy after a member of the White House staff —presumably someone from the East Wing’s social office— wrote to Cash’s management asking if he would perform three of the most popular cross-over country music songs of the day: Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac,” Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and Cash’s own “A Boy Named Sue.”
When the requests were passed along to Cash, he said that he would be glad to sing “Sue,” but that the other two songs presented a problem.
Cash demurred that he didn’t know the other two songs, but it sounds as though he was just being polite.
You’re in suspension
“As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign,” Mr. Cain said. “Because of the continued distractions, the continued hurt caused on me and my family, not because we are not fighters. Not because I’m not a fighter.”
I’ll post Mark Halperin’s point-by-point analysis of this important event when it becomes available.
Update. Standard Newtcentric pap from Halperin. But also too, there’s this exciting news:
Update. Why does Halperin always refer to Rick Perry as “Texas Topper”?
Cain Announcement and College Football Open Thread
Because let’s face it, both of these are little more than entertainment.
Go BEARCATS!
*** Update ***
I love it. Cain hasn’t spoken yet, but this sure looks like they snookered everyone and Cain is going to keep on keeping on. DougJ must be ecstatic.
Cain Announcement and College Football Open ThreadPost + Comments (193)
Occupy Boston, Humming Along
Perhaps because Boston has a historical memory of how well overzealous security crackdowns don’t work IRL (/snark), Occupy Boston is still in tenuous possession of a public-private patch of land. Quinn Norton, at Wired‘s Threat Level blog, has a thoughtful scene-of-the-story article on “Defying Police Blockade, Boston’s Occupy Builds a City“:
Between the 19th and the 21st of November, Occupy Boston had two teach-ins, a street-theater training, a reggae concert, and countless meetings — managing to use one of those as a cover to sneak a large weatherized tent past the ever-present Boston Police.
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It was a member of the Occupy Boston’s Women’s caucus that told me they’d managed it, grinning widely, just as the tent was being set up as a dry, safe, and relatively warm place for women to shelter in the Occupy.
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“It’s considered contraband,” she said, though she was gone before I could ask who considered it so. It was my introduction to the problems faced by these new residents of Dewey Square, in Boston’s Financial District, where it plays out its particular flavor of protest camp in the shadow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston…
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Occupy Boston is cacophonous day and night, dense and messy with enthusiastic humanity. Volunteers feed a thousand people a day.
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The camp has a library, media tent, clothing tent, a place to make art and protest signs, and a sacred tent littered with the holy texts and statues of many faiths. It has a dozen or so events per day, managed by its 57 working groups, who do everything from taking care of animal safety and planning direct actions to documenting and improving pedal powered generators — a favorite of their MIT contingent…
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By night Occupy deals with the flip side of Boston life; the poor and hungry, the homeless, those with untreated medical problems, and those addicted to drugs. It sleeps around 230 to 250 people in an uneasy snooze punctuated by late-night talks, the quarrels of recent and ill-advised love affairs, drunken stumbles, and fights between men used to fighting — all the usual night demons that plague the troubled…
In theory, Occupy Boston will be there at least through December 15. On Thursday, per local news station WCBV-TV, “… After a four-hour hearing, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Frances McIntyre took both sides’ arguments under advisement and said she would issue a ruling in two weeks time. Until then, she said, an injunction that bars the city from booting the protesters remains in place.”
In practice, while it was the second-warmest November on record, below-freezing temperatures are past due already, and the city is working really, really hard to prevent the Occupiers from bringing in heating equipment (“fire hazards”), winterized tents (“permanent structures”), or anything that might mitigate the “sanitary violations” inseparable from preparing food for a thousand people every day without running water. (There’s video clips at the news link of the cops “confiscating” (destroying) a professional-grade camp sink setup designed to run on bottled water.) Police Commissioner Davis has gravely pronounced crime within the area “out of control“, and warned of the “drain on our financial resources… money much better spent in neighborhoods where there is firearm violence” for the overtime paid to keep phalanxes of uniformed officers alert against the incursion of contraband camping supplies.
Mayor Menino, who’s basically NYC Mayor Bloomberg without the private fortune or the ready patter (even his boosters call him ‘May-ah Mumbles’), has two great bugaboos in his quest to become mayor-for-life: Litterbugs, and Rich Back Bay Fvcks. Occupy Boston is a nightmare fusion of the two, in his perception — Rich BB Lawyer Fvcks defending Litterbugs (some of them Rich BB Fvck offspring). But until some combination of inclement weather and unsympathetic authority manages to disperse these unruly settlers, I think they’re creating new forms of urban community that would have fascinated Jane Jacobs.