Linkmeister

Where was the outrage in 2000?

I see the cable shows are wringing their collective hands about the return of some Clinton-era Democrats to actual policy-making jobs in the Obama Administration.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when GWB brought John Negroponte and Elliot Abrams into his Administration I don't recall any such kerfuffle, despite their dirty hands in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration. Their activities bordered on the criminal in their earlier careers (Abrams was actually convicted of several misdemeanors having to do with the Iran-Contra affair), while none of the people being discussed as possible members of Obama's team have any blots.

Does the media have a set of double standards?

Coin of the realm

A 46oz pickle jar can hold about $15 worth of pennies.

I know this because, thanks to my friend Kate's post, I learned about a coin-counting machine maker named Coinstar. I found a credit union at the bottom of my hill which has one of their machines installed, and I took my accumulated pennies in their Vlasic jar down there today. I paid a 10% fee off the top to the credit union, but I could equally have donated the cash to a charity like the American Red Cross or the March of Dimes, among others, or gotten a full-value gift certificate from a whole bunch of web retailers, including Amazon, Lowes, Disney, Pier 1, Borders and iTunes.

It's pretty slick. You just enter your zip code into the machine locator box in the navigation bar at the Coinstar website and you're provided with a list of locations in your neighborhood. There's no need to roll the coins and take them to a bank; you just pour your loose coins into a hopper and it whirs away, giving you a running total of the amount by type of coin on the display screen.

University presidents are money-grubbers

ESPN has paid $125 million for the rights to broadcast the Bowl Championship Series from 2011-2014.

ESPN’s president, George Bodenheimer, said the network planned to keep all of the games on ESPN and not broadcast any on ABC, but would not charge cable providers a premium. ESPN is available to about 98 million homes on an extended basic-cable tier. Disney owns ESPN and ABC.

Lessee, if there are 300 million-plus citizens of the United States, then there may be 150 million homes (obviously a S.W.A.G.). That would mean that up to 50 million homes have no access to ESPN and thus no way to see the Bowl Championship games unless the residents all go to sports bars or neighbors' homes on New Year's Day and the following weekend.

Way to go, university presidents. You've just cut off many of your potential customers from the biggest college football games of that four-year period. Ah, but Greed is Good, right?

Failure to recognize

A final thought on Lieberman: you know that phrase people use about a guy "on their side" even though he's a jerk? "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB?"

Lieberman campaigned for the other side, raised money for the other side, and fretted publicly that the guy leading our side might be a Marxist. He's not even "our SOB."

Take that, netroots!

For those bloggers who thought they had some influence over Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats in the Senate, guess again.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) easily won a vote to remain chairman of a key committee today and will stay in the Democratic caucus despite his high-profile criticism of President-elect Barack Obama and his support of Sen. John McCain during the presidential campaign.

The vote was 42-13 (remember this was a Democrats-only vote).

I imagine this is only the first of what will be many disappointments to come from the US Senate, Democratically-controlled or not. There will be no Profiles in Courage from most of that bunch.

Pithy

A letter in the print edition of the Nov. 24 issue of Time, received this week:

To the supporters of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage: 1963 called; it wants its bigotry back.

John Adams, Episodes 3 & 4

These segments were important to the biography, but I thought neither was particularly compelling. There were moments, though.

As Abigail was riding up to the chateau where her husband had been living for over a year, her facial expressions were wonderful. She wouldn't have been human had she not been thinking "I've been working my tail off farming that rocky soil in Massachusetts, and you've been living this luxurious existence with servants and enough room to swing a cat in?"

I'm thinking we're going to have to watch the included "Making Of" documentary just to learn how and where they filmed all these opulent diplomatic scenes.

The case for an auto industry bailout

Jonathan Cohn makes it better than I can: it's not just the immediate job losses that would occur if the companies were allowed to fail, it's the downstream losses at suppliers and all the businesses and towns that depend on the taxes and spending revenue from those that are conveniently forgotten (tellingly, by many Republican Senators from the South, which never had a purely American car plant located there). Cohn argues that the economic losses suffered in those places would dwarf the $25B the companies are asking for.

That makes sense to me. It also makes sense to Paul Krugman.

You're an accident witness. Now what?

Jim Macdonald is an EMT in New England and a moderator at Making Light. For some time now he's been writing up "how-to" responses to medical emergencies for laymen. An index to them can be found here. Everyone should read both the posts and the comments (because the comments have specific instances of emergencies and the appropriate responses to them). Maybe read only one a day, but read them. The life you save may be a stranger or a loved one, or you may never have to use the techniques at all, but you ought to know them.

Besides, they're fascinating.

John Adams, Episode 2

Congress is Congress, whether it's the Continental one in 1775 or the current edition. Horse trading and large egos are the norm.

We were amused to learn that the rock-ribbed and principled John Dickinson of Pennsylvania was played by . . . a Slovenian named Zeljko Ivanek.

Five semi-interesting things

I usually manage to escape memes, but not this time.

Step #1 - From Liz:

Step #2 - write five fun/interesting facts about yourself.

1. "I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, A poet, a pawn and a king."

   Not quite. However, I've been a newspaper deliverer, a janitor, a grocery-bagger, a radio-teletype operator, a movie projectionist, a work-study college student, a computer systems manager, an accountant, and a free-lance researcher.

2. "just can't wait to get on the road again"

   I like driving vacations. In 1986 I drove from Vancouver BC to Seattle and then all over Washington and Oregon, stopping when and where I wanted. In 1985 I drove from LA to Yosemite and on to San Francisco before returning to LA. In 1992 I drove from Albuquerque all over New Mexico and then into southern Arizona, passing through Chiricahua National Monument. Even within the state I drive: in 1983 I went to Maui and Kauai, driving to Hana on Maui and to Waimea Canyon on Kauai.

3. "Memory"

   I have a very good memory for song lyrics. I hear a phrase and will often think of a song in which the phrase appears. It may take a while, but I get there.

4. "I'll drown my book."

   Ha! Not a chance! It's nearly impossible for me to throw a book away. Thus, this.

5. "'Cause she's playing all night
   And the music's alright
   Mama's got a squeeze box"

   The first musical instrument I ever owned was an accordion. I don't know why I expressed an interest in it, but back in 1959 I began taking lessons and playing a full-sized Piano accordion. I played it for several years, but I never got very good. It travelled with the family across country to Northern Virginia, and it went along on my high school senior class trip to New York. I finally gave it up to someone in the early 1980s; I don't think I ever learned "Lady of Spain". In the meantime I'd picked up a guitar and became reasonably proficient at it. I still own two, an acoustic Spanish-style Höfner and an electric six-string Rickenbacker. I bought the latter when I was practicing with some friends in the Navy in 1973. They were playing country music at various Navy clubs because that's what the market wanted, but they had higher aspirations (Hey! Dave Oppelt! Are you still playing that Fender Bass?).

Phew! That was hard work!

John Adams, Episode 1

When I requested the DVD of this film there were 98 people in front of me, and each had only a week to watch all ten episodes. Six months later we finally got it.

We watched the first episode this afternoon, and if the rest are as good as this one we're going to enjoy it a lot. Abigail (Laura Linney) has a wonderfully wicked smile, and she utilizes it very well when she knows (even before John) what her husband is going to do. John (Paul Giamatti), trying to balance the law and the hotheads (not least of whom is his cousin Sam), is excellent.

Bond film songs

From Worst to First

You get a License to Kill if you can name the men who wrote "Goldeneye." The names surprised the heck out of me.

Bigotry

I left Roman Catholicism when I got to college, not out of theological differences but because I had other things I wanted to do with my Sundays. I've seen no reason to change my mind and go back into the fold since, and this is one of the reasons why.

A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

The idea that some guy in a black cassock can tell me that I'm cooperating with evil simply because I voted a particular way is repellent. He can tell me he thinks I'm wrong; that's his privilege. But telling me I can't participate in a religious act because of my civic action? Church and state, Father; church and state.

Do-gooders descend on church

Hey, Bostonians! Read this.

We're having a "flash-mob" cataloging party November 15th, Saturday, in Beverly, MA (just north of Boston). We'll descend on St. John's Episcopal Church, catalog their 1,200-odd books, eat some pizza, talk some talk and leave them with a gleaming new LibraryThing catalog. Books, bibliophiles, conversation, barcode scanners, pizza!

Beauty's where you find it

(click here to view)

John Sherffius Nov 12, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com