The Last Ephor

I was reminiscing about childhood Halloween costumes yesterday. My Mom was a really good costume maker when I was a kid. Nobody bought costumes because they were expensive or just terrible. If you were unfortunate enough to get one with a mask it was made out of the world's thinnest plastic and had razor sharp edges. The eye and mouth holes were always too small and you couldn't breathe in the damn thing. The result would be many Batmen and Supermen running around with a mask atop their head rather than over their face. Some would pull it down after ringing the bell but no way you could run around in those things on. You'd be in for serious injury. One year I wanted to be the grim reaper. That required a long black robe with a pointed hood, a scythe (made by Dad in the wood shop in the basement) and face paint to look like a skeleton. A week from Halloween I was ready to go. My Mom did a fitting (so I wouldn't be tripping over the robe) and a trial run on the...

TheHill.com : "“We need to raise another $1 million to compete,” his campaign fundraiser Susan O’Neill wrote in the e-mail obtained by The Hill. “We need money immediately.”" I can picture the notepad that Murtha used to write this: "Dear racists , rednecks , rubes , voters, I need cash from you to say in this do nothing job to win against those Swiftboaters. This race has tightened after I let it slip what I really think of you idiots recently. I am one of the greediest piggies at the trough have been working hard to bring pork jobs to nowheresville redneck country our fine state. Please help me or I'll have to get a real job donate so I can keep eating at the Capitol Grill fight for Pennsylvanians."

Bill "Presidue" Clinton was out campaigning against for Obama and recounted this tale of the economic crisis: "He said, 'Tell me what the right thing to do is. What's the right thing for America? Don't tell me what's popular. You tell me what's right -- I'll figure out how to sell it.'" Hey, Tammy, what do you think? "This has got to be probably one of the most passive aggressive attacks I have seen in the political world in a long, long time. So you Hillary Voters, in case you were upset that Bill was 'campaigning' for Obama, let's just say I think he was sending a very strong message that it shouldn't be taken seriously. And neither should Obama." Whoa. I have to hand it to him. Clinton is amazing. I have zero doubt that quote registered with anyone there. They are already fawning over Obama as the candidate and Clinton just for showing up. He sent this message to the Man In The Middle. The undecided. H...

and the New York Times get one right once in a while. This article: Who Lives There - An Urban Dollhouse From Another Time and Place Is what infuriates me about the NYT. They are very capable of excellent reporting. Interesting stories about otherwise mundane topics. I've seen this house a million times and always wondered about it. I had forgotten about it until I saw the article. One cheer for NYT today.

Aerosmith’s Joe Perry walks this way with John McCain - BostonHerald.com : "“I’ve been a hardcore Republican my whole life,” he told the Herald. “My mother and father drilled into me from the very start that if you work hard and be positive, you’ll get what you’re working for. I guess I’m living proof of that.”" -Joe. Friggin. Perry.

If everything is going to hell, then why am I so upbeat? I may not be upbeat but I find his reasoning compelling. Either he (and by extension me) is completely divorced from reality or a brilliant prognosticator of things political. There are scant few of us on this branch but it's nice to have company either way.

that this is my favorite story today? "On Monday, [Shawn Turschak] ran wires from his house and hooked the signs into a power source for an electric pet fence. Then he mounted a surveillance camera in a nearby tree and wired it to a digital recorder."

Everything you need to know about this story is summed up in the comment by a reader calling themselves "likeibelievethat" You know, State Police Superintendent MacLeish is not a very good liar. "The electronic records never posed a threat, MacLeish said. 'The info was in an electronic file that no one did anything with,' MacLeish said." And yet... "An employee in the state police Firearms Transaction Approval Program noticed Vansickle's age and gender, and brought the sale to an immediate halt... MacLeish said the initial call taker 'was concerned this individual never purchased a weapon before.'" So nobody knew about this file and nobody did anything with it... yet this clerk not only knew about it,. but knew how to access it so swiftly and automatically that he was able to bring a sale to an "immediate halt." Superintendent, please be on the lookout for your pants, which are on fire. Liberals don't mind this sort of thi...

And yesterday Biden let slip that he and Obama apparently have a sliding scale to determine who's "super-rich." Obama, after all, has been promising a tax cut for the "middle class" - those making $200,000 a year or less. Biden yesterday lowered that bar. "What we're saying," he told a Pennsylvania TV interviewer, "is that [our] tax break doesn't need to go to people making . . . $1.4 million. It should go to [people] making under $150,000 a year." Oops. That's a 25 percent downward redefinition of "middle class." An Obama mouthpiece quickly dismissed the discrepancy as just another one of Joe the Senator's gaffes. But consider: The campaign has a new TV commercial out declaring that families - not individuals - earning $200,000 or less would qualify for a tax cut. Two incomes - not one. And, as most middle-class wage-earners know, that's a huge difference. This is like an auction in reverse. "Do I hear 25...

"Pilot: We are now arriving in at JFK airport in New York City, home of the Yankees. Met fan: That's not right...(yelling) What about the Mets? Pilot: No one cares. Rest of passengers: (cheering)

Iowahawk is best known as a satirist but has an excellent piece on the pitfalls of polling. Pew and Zogby et al. would have you believe that something as contentious and personal as politics can be controlled by proper application of systemic polling. A sentiment I do not share. We have a few days left. We're in the home stretch but the most interesting part will be the post mortem on polls. People have short memories. I remember polling data from the last two elections used as "proof" that Karl Rove/Diebold/GOP/Bilderbergers stole the election.

William J. H. Boetcker : # You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. # You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. # You cannot help little men by tearing down big men. # You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. # You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. # You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. # You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. # You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. # You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence. # And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Are the polls right? I've been talking about this a bit and we saw it in the last election too. Here's an interesting take on what's going on. I was having dinner a night ago with a friend of mine who is a statistician for a well-regarded private polling company. They do some work for Republicans in California, but most of the work they do is for Democrats or Democrat-leaning operations (Unions, etc.). Anyway, her shop was retained to do a few Presidential polls for targetted states on behalf of a union so the union could decide where to spend their ad dollars for the last week. They did Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Missouri. After mocking the hell out of the voter id spreads used by Rassmussen, Zogby, etc. (and this is coming from a committed Dem who will be voting for Barry O) she said the results of their polling lead her to believe that McCain will definitely win FL, OH, NC, MO and NV. She says Obama...

This is interesting (read: interesting to me and possibly Paul but nobody else), it seems the Synod of Bishops has voted overwhelmingly to add women to the ministry of lectors. That means that women will be allowed/invited/encouraged to read scripture from the pulpit to the congregation. This appears to be some sort of compromise for the liberal wing of the church. Fr. James Martin my favorite liberal Jesuit (no that's not an oxymoron) has a brief albeit spoiler laden look at Catholicism in Mad Men. The show you should be watching but aren't. Unrelated pop culture/TV show stuff. I like Fringe but can't seem to get into it. I never get the sense it's going anywhere. None of the characters are in any real peril. I like the look and feel. The acting is good and so is the writing. The problem is that the whole thing has a "ship in a bottle" feel to it. There is supposed to be some grand story arc about "The Pattern" but it feels too much lik...

What does Winston say about impending defeat? "You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." Remember those words in election day.