School of Hard Knocks, Life Lessons 903-905

l.l. 903: USE THE FOOD PUSHER when you want to slice something on your mandoline--other than your thumb!!

l.l. 904: SAVE ALL THE GAUZE PADS AND TAPE from previous injuries!!

l.l. 905: Check out your first aid kit before the stupid hurricane hits and closes all the stores.

Welcome to Off the Porch

Please welcome Off the Porch to XE's "Blogs I Love."  My friend and former coworker, Linda, takes wonderful photographs, and she's begun publishing them in her blog Off the Porch.  It's taken her a while to spend time on photography; that seems to have been a simple hobby before she retired from her job.  She's still working almost as hard as she did before she retired, although she doesn't have to go to the office every day.  (Do you, Linda?  I hope not.) 

She has a great eye for beautiful patterns in nature, and I've shared several of her photos of birds on XE.  My favorite has always been the albino crow, published last September.  I fear the actual photo on this post is gone, and I don't know why.  I'll see if I can fix it.  Maybe Linda knows.  She knows so much about photography.

Welcome, Off the Porch!  Hope you post your photos of the waterfront in VA soon! 

"No Decent Woman or Girl Is Ever Seen Wearing Trousers"

Takin' a break from the hourly horrors of the campaign.  Found this by Maria Popova on brainpickings.org

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/17/1943-iberia-women-list/

Do the rules of conduct in rural Spain still influence us?? (Especially if we're Republicans?  Oops...)

I LOVE brainpickings.org, btw.  It's a gold mine, and NO ADS!!

Mad at Obama? Vote for him, THEN protest.

Digby has a great post today for unhappy progressives by David Atkins, in which he quotes Cornell West about what to do if you're mad at O about the drones, Guantanamo, et al.

VOTE FOR OBAMA....Romney would be MUCH WORSE on all of these issues plus the rest that are driving us nuts.  The time to lean on President Obama is AFTER the election.

You can communicate with him about any and all of this, but don't let Romney into the White House.

Saw It Off and Let It Drift Over Toward Cuba....

Good Monday morning, folks.

Alan Grayson, former Democratic representative from Florida, send me a fund-raising letter today.  This is nothing unusual.  I'd say a good half of my emails come from various parts of the country where people are locked in this election battle.  What's different about Alan's letter, however, is the first part:

Dear Mary:

Question: Who is the largest single contractor of the Republican Party of Florida today?

Answer: Someone whose company, in 2004, shredded Democratic voter registration forms.

And now it's happening again.

Meet Nathan Sproul. His first cause was ending sex education. That catapulted him to the head of the Republican Party of Arizona.

Sproul then set up Sproul & Associates. In 2004, Republicans paid Sproul's firm $7.9 million to go around registering voters under the confusing name of "America Votes," which happens to be the name of a large progressive organization. Then a former employee of Sproul & Associates showed a local TV station shredded voter registration forms - for Democrats only. He said that Sproul's firm faithfully turned in Republican registration forms, and shredded the Democratic ones. Or just refused to register Democrats at all. Another Sproul employee said the same thing.

Fast forward to the 2008 election, in Florida. ACORN registered tens of thousands of new voters, Democratic, Republican and Independent. ACORN was so good at voter registration that Republican leaders in the Florida state government retaliated by criminalizing the voter registration process. The Republicans booby-trapped voter registration so badly that even the Florida League of Women Voters gave up. Virtually any irregularity in the voter registration process can land you in jail. And you know what they did to ACORN.

Fast forward again, to the 2012 election, in Florida. The Republican Party of Florida, the Republican National Committee, and the Romney Campaign all hire a firm called Strategic Allied Consulting to do voter registration in Florida. In fact, Strategic Allied Consulting has become the single largest contractor to the Republican Party of Florida, receiving more than $3 million. It is the sole voter registration operation hired by the Republican National Committee, at the expense of a further $3 million. It has been hired to do the same work in Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia. And the person behind Strategic Allied Consulting is . . . Nathan Sproul.

Which explains the reports, this month, of voter registration fraud by Strategic Allied Consulting in a dozen Florida counties. More than 100 cases in one county alone.

 Make you sick?  Make you feel powerless when you go to your voting place to cast your vote?

What can we do about this NOW? 

From Darlene!

Darlene's blog isn't working, but she sent this out today. She didn't write it herself--a Canadian man named Gary Taylor did. She says "My sentiments exactly!" And I say, "Mine, too!"

Since I am a Canadian,I can't vote for anyone in the upcoming US election; however if Romney is elected with his bullshit policies it will confirm, once again that over half of the US population are as stupid as a sack of hammers. The myth of Horatio Alger is the basis of belief in a system that is designed to favour the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. And by everyone I mean the citizens of the US and many others in the world. MAD AT THE PRESIDENT??? After The 8 Years Of The Bush/Cheney Disaster, Now You Get Mad? You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President. You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq. You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us. You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war. You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined. You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq. You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country. You didn't get mad when they didn't catch Bin Laden. You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits. You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed. You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown. You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the 1%, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks. You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades. You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance. You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values. You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick... Oh, Hell No! Gary Taylor

Something To Think About Other Than Poll #s

One of the commenters I like the most is Professor Juan Cole. He has a wonderful column today about a speech Romney gave recently on US foreign policy at VMI. This is just the first paragraph of Cole's column:

Mitt Romney’s speech at VMI (full text at the link courtesy of Current) on foreign policy has been widely condemned as vague and lacking in substance, sort of like the man who gave it. But the speech is also full of suggestions and criticisms of the Obama administration that are simply not realistic. The speech is Romney’s “Mission Impossible,” only without the cool theme music and also without a prayer of being actually achievable short of launching a series of 5 wars. I’ve decided that my initial assumption that a businessman of Romney’s experience must know something about the world was dead wrong. Apparently it is possible to sit in cushy big offices in companies like Bain, and to remain completely ignorant of foreign affairs. Romney’s speeches are all just a replaying for us of the prejudices of CEOs when they play golf together and complain vaguely about the Chinese, Russians, Arabs, and so forth. Or, maybe Romney has gotten so many campaign contributions from arms manufacturers that he can’t help see foreign affairs through the lens of new wars he wants to fight.

Cole then lists Romney's Five Wars and discusses each. It's an interesting look into Romney's thinking on foreign policy. It's not something I want to see brought to fruition by his election.

Taibbi has it right!

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has a great column today, about how the real news takes a back seat to the hype. And the idea I like the best is this one (emphasis here & there is mine):

The campaign should start and finish in six weeks, and there should be free TV access to both candidates. And it should be illegal to publish poll numbers. This isn't as crazy as it sounds – they actually had such a law in Russia while I lived there, and people were much happier. (Well, they were still miserable, because they were Russian, but at least they weren't stressing about poll numbers.) Think about it: Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. Can you imagine if your favorite news network had to do stories like, "What is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation up to, and what do each of the candidates think about it?" That would be like asking Nineties-era baseball players to take the field without popping greenies – what, you mean play the game sober? Half the on-air talent would have to resign, or do ad work hawking reverse mortgages. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-hype-became-bigger-than-the-presidential-election-20121009#ixzz28q14q2xn

Social Security: President Obama's Biggest Failure in Last Week's Debate

Social Security: President Obama's Biggest Failure in Last Week's Debate

Sorry to post a link, but HAVE YOU SEEN THIS????  

A Nationally-Televised Presidential Fail

A Nationally-Televised Presidential Fail

Let's encourage President Obama to recover from whatever vapors he suffered from last night.   Whose idea was it to let a bully like Romney run all over everything?  Have we come so far to have to endure this?