Saturday, January 30, 2010

Weekend Assignment: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Karen has a weekly assignment at Outpost Mâvarin. This week's assignment is pretty straightforward...
Weekend Assignment #302: Do you Tweet? Why or why not?
Yes, I am a Tweeter...or a Twitterer...or a Twit, whatever the people who use Twitter are calling themselves, and you can find me here

I was avoiding social networking sites like the plague; they just didn't seem like my cup of tea.  Several people told me I needed to get on Twitter, but I kept putting them off.  One evening, my wife basically just put me on Facebook, and within a day or two, I finally decided to take the Twitter plunge.  Both have worked out pretty well for me.  On Facebook, I've managed to reconnect with several friends I lost track of over the years.  Twitter has turned out to be a pretty useful tool to quickly get an overview of the day's news events, keep up with the few friends I've found on the site, and occasionally promote my blog.  And although I'm not sure that I could repeat the process, I somehow managed to link my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that anything I tweet shows up on Facebook as a status update.
Extra Credit: If you do use Twitter, how many people follow you? How many do you follow?
It's not my goal to get on Twitter and interact for hours at a time, so I only follow 20 people.  Some are not "people" at all.  I follow MSNBC's and National Public Radio's News and Politics tweets, as well as tweets from AlterNet, ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post.  There are also a few liberal individuals I follow, like Rachel Maddow, Bill Mahre and Thom Hartmann.  Andy Borowitz has funny tweets about the day's events.  I follow a couple of sites that cover NASCAR news, one that was tweeting pretty regularly about the health care debate, and John Scalzi.  The remaining handful are personal online friends.

I'm trying to keep it from getting out of hand.  I like being able to log on to the site and work my way through the tweets that have accumulated since the last time I was on in about half an hour, including time to check out interesting links.  But I'm looking for more people to follow.  I'm interested in useful information, not necessarily what you're having for lunch (unless you're a friend -- then I might be interested).  I like people that tweet often, but not obsessively.  I like people who retweet useful information from the people they follow.

I have 14 followers so far.

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

A Spending Freeze?

I'm trying hard not to buy into all this voter anger directed at Obama.  I'm trying to be optimistic that he is going to learn from his first year mistakes and the economy is going to improve and the next three years are going to be better, but a spending freeze?  That's what you're going with?  A spending freeze?

To get the proper level of disdain I feel about this proposal, watch this short clip of Jim Mora.  Every time he says "playoffs" replace it with the words "a spending freeze."




Rachel Maddow lays out how Obama and the Democrats have driven all the way down the field to the one-yard line and are now ready to punt..

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


And by all means, yes, if you're going to have a spending freeze, don't dare mess with the bloated Pentagon budget. Jeez!

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Sunday, January 24, 2010

For Your Consideration

I filed the link to this NY Times story away in my bookmarks and forgot about it until just recently -- about twenty minutes ago. The article talks about Danny MacAskill and how he "can divide his life in two: before his YouTube video and after." I can understand that. I've been able to ride a bicycle for most of my life and can still ride one now when the need arises. I've seen a lot of people ride bikes, but I've never seen anything like this, the video the Times was talking about...


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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Obama Responds to the Supreme Court

In a followup to my previous post, President Obama devoted this week's weekly radio and Internet address to discussing the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, vowing that "as long as I am your president, I'll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you."

Transcript:
One of the reasons I ran for President was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington. And the result was a national agenda too often skewed in favor of those with the power to tilt the tables.

In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests. On my first day in office, we closed the revolving door between lobbying firms and the government so that no one in my administration would make decisions based on the interests of former or future employers. We barred gifts from federal lobbyists to executive branch officials. We imposed tough restrictions to prevent funds for our recovery from lining the pockets of the well-connected, instead of creating jobs for Americans. And for the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House – the people’s house.

We’ve been making steady progress. But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. By a 5-4 vote, the Court overturned more than a century of law – including a bipartisan campaign finance law written by Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold that had barred corporations from using their financial clout to directly interfere with elections by running advertisements for or against candidates in the crucial closing weeks.

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.
(more of the transcript and the video of the address after the jump)

A FRESH HELL or How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America Democracy

The current United States Supreme Court, the h...Image via Wikipedia
My friend Carly likes to discuss politics with me and sent me an email Thursday night with the subject line, "And what about this FRESH HELL?"  She was talking about the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and FRESH HELL (in all caps) is one of the best descriptions I've heard so far on the decision.  The conservative justices on the Roberts Court in their infinite wisdom...oops, sorry, that should be infinitesimal wisdom...decided that biggest problem with American politics was that there just wasn't enough corporate money involved.

You see, in today's Orwellian world, money is speech and corporations are people with all the rights you and I enjoy with none of the responsibilities, and the conservative majority, those damned judicial activists, went far beyond the limited legal questions of the case before them and overturned decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations in political campaigns, including a large part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act that the same court, albeit with a different lineup, declared constitutional just six years ago in McConnell v. FEC, and even broadened the scope of the case to include constitutional questions raised by a 1990 case (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce), which they also managed to overturn. The decision also threatens many state laws.

In the minority dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens declared, "Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law."  Later, he declared, "Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech."  Perhaps that's next.  Stevens concluded his dissent with...
"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
For a fascinating look at how far this court overreached and how badly they managed to subvert American democracy call up the .pdf file of the decision and skip ahead to page 88 where Justice Stevens's dissent begins, then read until you feel your head start to explode.  If you're not that ambitious or masochistic, the Progressive Review has a very small excerpt.

The Roberts court struck down a law dating back to 1947 which prohibits corporations and labor unions from using money from their general treasuries to produce and air campaign aids in congressional and presidential races, and struck down a McCain-Feingold provision that prohibits corporations and unions from airing campaign ads in the 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. They did manage to retain a century-old ban on donations from corporations from their general treasuries directly to federal candidates and upheld disclosure requirements on campaign activities.

So why is this such a big deal?  In 2008, the Fortune 100 companies amassed $600 billion in profits.  Just 1% of that enormous total ($6 billion) would double the amount spent by Obama, McCain, and every candidate for the House and Senate in 2008 combined.  The Roberts Court expressed concern that the free speech rights of corporations were being suppressed, but even with the restrictions that were in place, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still managed to spend $123 million in lobbying efforts in 2009, the financial sector invested $5 billion in influence peddling in the past decade, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent $26 million in 2009 alone to influence health care reform, with the individual drug companies ponying up tens of millions more in the effort.

Monday, January 18, 2010

The Legacy of MLK

This NBC News clip tells the story of the final days of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "I must confess that that dream that I had that day has at many points turned into a nightmare."




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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Tennessee Finally Finds a Coach

The official logo for the University of Tennes...Image via Wikipedia
In the interest of proper disclosure, I should begin by saying that my two favorite college football teams are Alabama and whoever is playing Tennessee, but the Volunteers have a rich, storied tradition and deserved better than they got from Lane Kiffin who bolted with five years left on a six-year contract when Southern Cal came calling.

It was a rough few days up in Knoxville.  Kiffin, after promising Tennessee fans the moon, suddenly announced that he was leaving.  I understand.  He was a So Cal assistant for many years and jumped at the chance to return home to accept his dream job.  Tennessee fans thought he already had a dream job and didn't understand.  Students, players and others surrounded the athletic buildings on campus and burned mattresses and T-shirts with Kiffin's "It's Time" slogan, painted obscenities on The Rock, and forced Kiffin and his family to spend their last night in Knoxville under police protection.

The most troubling aspect of the whole kerfuffle was that Tennessee was now without a head football coach (although they could have just made interim coach Kippy Brown's title more permanent) less than three weeks before National Signing Day.  They needed a new coach before the weekend when potential recruits would be visiting the campus.  They tried to woo Will Muschamp away from Texas, but the defensive coordinator is just waiting on Mack Brown to retire so that he can take his place as head coach; his dream job.

David Cutcliffe, the head coach at Duke and a two-time former assistant at Tennessee, was also wooed but he passed on the job.  I was amazed.  I know that the head coaching job at Tennessee is his dream job, but he honored the commitment he had made to Duke...
"You follow your heart in big decisions," Cutcliffe told ESPN.com's Heather Dinich. "I have a lot of ties and a lot of people that I'm very close to, and a lot of respect for the University of Tennessee, but my heart is here. We've worked very hard these two years to change the culture, to change the team physically. You feel like the job's not done, and in this era, it bothers me, what we do as coaches, moving here and there. This is mid-January. Nothing about that felt right to me as a person."
Utah's Kyle Whittingham also reportedly turned down the job.  The final interviews were with Temple's Al Golden, Houston's Kevin Sumlin, and Louisiana Tech's Derek Dooley.  The Vols settled on Derek Dooley, the son of legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley. Dooley, like Kiffen, comes to Knoxville with a very thin head coaching record. He was just 17-20 in three seasons at La Tech, but won the Independence Bowl in 2008.  He also served as the school's athletic director and worked as an assistant under Nick Saban for seven seasons at LSU and with the Miami Dolphins.

It's a big jump from the WAC to the SEC, and Dooley's first task was to settle Vols fans down.  He offered some reassuring words in his introductory press conference...
"The times of worrying about what happened is over," Dooley said.

Dooley talked about how he learned early that Tennessee represented the essence of college football, and remembers watching the weekly television shows of former coaches Johnny Majors and Phillip Fulmer. He also promised he will not try to sell Tennessee in a sound bite, perhaps taking a shot at Kiffin, who was reprimanded by the Southeastern Conference for brash comments.

"Everything we're going to do is going to be done with a foundation of integrity with every aspect of the program," Dooley said. "We're going to represent this institution with class on and off the field."
The restless nights are finally over in Knoxville...or maybe they're just beginning.

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Ed Stein
Ed Stein, Rocky Mountain News

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Quotable

Writing in the New Yorker, Calvin Trillian claims to have predicted the Underwear Bomber...
In a book I published in 2006 called “A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme,” here is what I said, in one of the non-rhyming passages, about the so-called Shoe Bomber of 2001: “I’m convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as ‘very, very impressionable.’ I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, ‘I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.’ So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his M.O., referred to in the press as the underwear bomber, you’ll know I was onto something.”

That’s right: I predicted the Underwear Bomber in 2006. You could look it up. Around the same time, I repeated the prediction in public appearances and, as I remember, a couple of times on television. (I firmly believe that, in this world of ever-diminishing irreplaceable resources, using a line only once represents the sort of wastefulness our society can ill afford.) And what transpired on Christmas Day three years later? Another bozo tries to blow a hole in an airplane and succeeds only in setting his underpants aflame in a manner that might have rendered him ill equipped for the seventy-two heavenly virgins who were to be his reward if he succeeded. And how is this bozo described by friends and family? Naïve. And where was this bozo educated? University College London, within commuting distance of that diabolical trickster Khalid the Droll.



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Tales of the NBC Pinheads

 David Letterman comments on the situation at NBC.  I especially love his dream for American television:  "I want everyone who wants a show to have a show."

Sunday, January 10, 2010

What About Sarah Palin?

On 60 Minutes this weekend they ran a story that delved into Game Changer, a new book on the 2008 presidential campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.  In "Revelations from the Campaign," they talk to Halperin and Heilemann and focus on the Republican side of the campaign, specifically, how did they decide on Palin for vice president.  Funny stuff...


Watch CBS News Videos Online

I also got a kick out of the bit about Senator O'Biden.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Alabama Wins!

PASADENA, CA - JANUARY 07:  Quarterback Garret...Image by Getty Images via Daylife
More than 24 hours later, and I'm still giddy over the Alabama Crimson Tide's 37-21 victory over the Texas Longhorns in the BCS National Championship Game.  It's Alabama's first championship since 1992, and either their eighth or twelfth or thirteenth or seventeenth national championship -- it all depends on who's doing the counting and what they're counting.

The eight championships are from the Poll Era (1936-present) and include AP and UPI polls, and not necessarily both in the same year.  The College Football Data Warehouse says that Alabama has twelve championships dating back to 1925.  The school claims thirteen championships and has the merchandise to prove it.  If you count every championship recognized by any sort of reputable source, whether it was a consensus pick or not, you can count seventeen for the Crimson Tide.  The school picked up four trophies for their Thursday night win -- the crystal BCS trophy along with others from the Associated Press, the National Football Foundation, and the Football Writers Association.

The SEC is now 6-0 in BCS Championship games and has won the last four straight.  Florida won in 2006 and 2008, LSU won in 2007.  Coach Nick Saben became the second coach (Urban Meyer) to win two BCS championships and the first to win two at different schools (LSU in 2003).  Running back Mark Ingram is the second player (Matt Leinart) to win the Heisman Trophy and the BCS championship in the same season, and just the second running back (Tony Dorsett) in the Poll Era to win the Heisman and any kind of championship in the same year.

The game was a little closer than the final score would indicate.  Alabama started slow and made a serious early mistake when they threw up an interception on an fake punt attempt, but the defense limited Texas to just two field goals.  Alabama woke up and took over and was ready to go into the locker room with a 17-6 halftime lead, but with the seconds winding down in the first half, Texas tried a little shuttle pass.  The receiver showed off his juggling skills until Alabama lineman Marcell Dareus snatched it and ran 28 yards for the score.

The play gave Alabama a 24-6 halftime lead and almost cost them the game.  They came out flat in the second half and let Texas's high-powered offense cut the lead to just three.  Another great Alabama defensive play settled it.  Linebacker Eryk Anders got a blindside sack on freshman QB Garrett Gilbert.  The ball came loose and Courtney Upshaw recovered it on the Texas three.  Three plays later, Ingram punched it in to get the lead back to ten.  Alabama got another turnover and scored another last-minute touchdown.  Kicker Leigh Tiffin capped a record-setting career at Alabama by missing the extra point for the 16-point win.

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About This Blog

Douglas Adams in his first Monty Python appear...Image via Wikipedia
This blog breaks one of the biggest cardinal rules of blogging; it doesn't just deal with one topic. That's what they tell you to do when you start blogging; pick a topic and focus in on it like a laser. When I first started blogging, that's what I did, focusing almost solely on politics on AOL Journals.

I also tried the bit about focusing on one topic when I left AOL and started blogging here on Blogspot. At "sotto voce USA" it was blogging politics all over again.  Then I decided I wanted to write about other topics as well. I started a now defunct sports blog, and a Civil War blog, and a photo journal

Since I'm barely motivated enough to maintain one blog on a consistent basis, you can imagine what a chore it was to manage four.  Then I started blogging about politics with a bunch of other AOL journeymen at "The Blue Voice."  By the way, that's still an ongoing concern and I still contribute to it on a much too infrequent basis.  The group blog confused things by robbing my main blog, the first one, of its focus...politics.

During a long Internet layoff, I decided to start anew and consolidate everything here.  So here it is: a blog that encompasses almost everything I'm interested in.  I've always been interested in politics to one degree or another.  I've been pretty apathetic about it of late, but occasionally get motivated enough to offer my two cents about one thing or another and usually cross-post anything political at "The Blue Voice."  I became interested in the Civil War from spending most of my life in the Chattanooga area where a good chunk of it actually happened.  I've been a sports fan all my life...also to varying degrees at different times.  I used to watch almost anything that was on, even Australian Rules Football when that was all I could get.  I'm more selective these days, focusing mainly on NASCAR, SEC football, and the Braves, Falcons, and Titans (and mainly in that order).  I've also had an on-again-off-again affair with photography over the years. 

So its all here -- all the stuff that I like to blog about.  Pick a topic on the sidebar to the right or start at the top and read straight down.  Whatever.  That's what I'm here for.  Keep in mind that a lot of the topics to the right take you to series of posts that are sometimes works in progress.

I made the blog's domain name fdtate.blogspot.com because I didn't want the domain name to be the title.  I envisioned changing the blog's title from time to time just to shake things up a bit.  I've changed names exactly once.  This blog was originally called "life...the universe (and everything)," a title borrowed from Douglas Adams and indicating the wide range of topics that would be here.  After another long Internet layoff, I sorta did a system reboot -- changing the template and changing the title to "Meanwhile..."  I saw it as akin to Monty Python's "and now for something completely different" line.  As in, the last post was about the Civil War, meanwhile here's something else.

I've probably told you most of this stuff before...mostly in the first post back in September of 2007.  It just seems appropriate to refresh the mission statement from time to time.
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