Supposed to be cooler today, we’ll see. Crazy hot yesterday.
Wildfires burning Malibu and surrounds, murderous crazies, and all the usual nonsense too. Looks like Cali’s time in the barrel.
I’m feeling a bit more human, with the cough syrup on board, but it doesn’t cure, only hides. Sleep is the best medicine, so I’m going to endulge in some….
N
27º and snowing. It’s lake effect, which means bands of snowfall. Go 50′ or so and you’ll have a different pattern. Go one mile and you could have 5′, but here have 3″.
That snow fence I bought? I had planned to put it up this weekend because snow was forecast for Monday. Yep. Fail.
Power went out twice last night, but came back on quickly. It was the power coming back on that woke me. And the computer was off when I got up.
Gun control is a non-starter with a lot of the population. Barring that (because we cannot do anything RIGHT NOW), what can we do to effect positive change?
This is how gun control works:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/britain-struggles-with-rise-in-knife-attacks-1541759400
Off to ebay for a zombie knife.
I’m shocked! Shocked!
For the uninitiated, The Times is affectionately known as “Pravda West” in our house. If this is the story in that rag, the truth is probably much worse.
https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2018/11/10/uh-oh-broward-mixed-rejected-ballots-with-valid-ones/
The Sun-Sentinel isn’t exactly right wing either.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/editorials/fl-op-editorial-snipes-20181110-story.html
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – Brace For Impact”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-brace-for-impact/
“Funny how recounts and last minute ballot discoveries always seem to benefit the Democrats. This isn’t the first time there have been election shenanigans by Brenda Snipes in Broward Co Florida. Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2018.”
“Funny how recounts and last minute ballot discoveries always seem to benefit the Democrats. This isn’t the first time there have been election shenanigans by Brenda Snipes in Broward Co Florida. Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2018.”
Yes. Rick Scott should have fired Snipes earlier this year when irregularities popped up in the primary which Debbie Wasserman Schultz won.
Scott didn’t fire Snipes because he didn’t want to look bad and create what would be spun as a racial incident. He has the authority now, but terminating her would look *really* bad.
Of course, Scott will have the authority to fire Snipes right up until the moment his successor is inaugurated.
Thank You Jeb! for another fine election mess.
For the uninitiated, The Times is affectionately known as “Pravda West” in our house. If this is the story in that rag, the truth is probably much worse.
https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2018/11/10/uh-oh-broward-mixed-rejected-ballots-with-valid-ones/
Somebody needs to be arrested over this. This was obviously done on purpose.
Yes. Rick Scott should have fired Snipes earlier this year when irregularities popped up in the primary which Debbie Wasserman Schultz won.
Why was Snipes still in charge after being convicted of throwing away republican votesin 2016 ?
https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2017/12/15/experts-browards-elections-chief-broke-law-in-destroying-ballots-150258
Why was Snipes still in charge after being convicted of throwing away republican votesin 2016 ?
Jeb! Bush still wields political power in the state, particularly in Dade and Broward counties where his business interests are concentrated. Bush’s appointees were generally off limits unless they did something really bad. She only started attracting attention recently going up against the Nova-Southeastern professor.
Many politicians in S. Florida went to NSU Law School. It probably ranks right up there with Gainesville and Tallahassee in terms of representation in the Legislature.
My wife went to NSU med school. Since she graduated, the school purchased the “Caddyshack” resort across the street for professional student housing.
Be the ball. Ba na na na na na na.
We stayed at the resort for the med school graduation week. I kick myself for not taking pictures (pre digital camera days) since many of the movie locations are now gone or changed in a significant way. Things were pretty much the same in 1997 as they were in … damn, 1978. Forty years!
Why was Snipes still in charge after being convicted of throwing away republican votesin 2016 ?
A memory popped on Snipes — her bungling of the 2002 election prevented Janet Reno from moving on to challenge Jeb! for reelection. Given the mood of the electorate at the time, following the 2000 fiasco, Bush may have lost the race.
Instead, the Democrats ran the doughy punching bag/sacrificial animal Bill McBride, managing partner of Tampa’s largest law firm. He failed and took a bunch of the state’s teachers’ union money with him — another win for the Republicans.
FL works in strange ways.
Any place that has that much money, and only 50% high school graduation rate is gonna be weird….
N
Update — My bad. Brenda Snipes was not in charge of the 2002 primary fiasco which arguably cost Janet Reno a shot at the Governor’s Mansion.
Fewer Brazilians here at Hollywood Studios, plenty at epcot. Los of tattoos and even a few of the giant holes in ears. I thought those were over years ago.
Nothing so queer as folks…..n
Any place that has that much money, and only 50% high school graduation rate is gonna be weird….
Whenever someone asks about what Florida is like, I suggest reading Carl Hiaasen. Any book, but the even number books usually have “Skink” the insane (?) former Governor.
Hiaasen’s day job is working as a columnist for the Miami Herald. He claims that he takes the material he receives for his column and tones down the strangeness when working it into the novels.
The three heavily populated counties in southeast Florida (Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade, from north to south) are the fiefdom of one particular party, and they continue to get things wrong. With that in mind, I’d like to take a moment to applaud those parts of Florida that get their voting process right. My home county got blasted by a hurricane 4 weeks before Election Day, but we managed to have a higher % of our registered voters make it to the polls than did so four years ago. There were *no* voting problems reported, despite the reduction in the number of available polling sites from 44 to 6. I’ll grant you the raw number of votes cast is much smaller than the 3 big SE FL counties, but those folks should be ashamed. And on a partisan basis, they don’t seem to grasp that the continuing foul ups in their system almost always hurt their particular party!
A brief history of my county’s voting methodology: In 1990, we had very long wait times to vote. At that point, we had for many years used the old fashioned, mechanical, lever actuated voting machines. You went into a booth and closed the curtain, and were presented with a grid. To use a spreadsheet analogy, each row was an office, and each column was a candidate for that office. Having made your choices, you pulled a big red lever which registered the votes and then opened the curtain. But that year we had a heavy turnout and a complex ballot. So when it was over, the woman who was our Supervisor of Elections (and who held that position for 36 years) said that the problems were intolerable, and she told the County Commission that they were going to cough up the money to fix it. So for the 1992 & 1994 elections we tried several different systems at different sites, and she wound up buying what seemed to work best.
We were using that system during the infamous 2000 elections. When you got a ballot, you filled in the shaft of an arrow to cast a vote for a particular candidate, and the ballot was then put into an optical scanner. It would look something like this (and I do have a scan somewhere in my system of the 2000 ballot):
Chang <=====<
Gomez < <
In all the endless to and fro with the 2000 elections, we never had a single change in the vote totals. Neither did any of the counties in Florida which were using that system! Since that election, we have changed to a system where you fill in a bubble to indicate your choice.
Jones ( )
Smith (*)
In the end, the failure of 3 counties in Florida to get it right continues to plague all of us. It's shameful, but unless and until the population of those 3 counties decide to clean house, hire someone who can get it right and give him or her the money to do so, it's not going to change. As it stands, any attempt by the State government to change things is met with "You're just partisan" or the even more stale "You're a racist!". As another Florida based contributor here notes, neither Scott nor DeSantis are long time Republican insiders. But nothing will get the Rs more agitated than losing those seats to what they see as never ending D shenanigans.
Kill a whole lot of people.
Yes, I know that’s my answer to almost everything. Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work, though.
That is standard fare for when a particular group or individual does not get their way or an individual is losing a discussion (argument).
It has to be the right people. Unfortunately, there are too many of “them” and as soon as you eliminate one another pops into their place. And “labels” are no indicator of who must go. Many people labeled as “x” are really “y” and vice versa. They are just followers who just want to go along to get along with the least possible effort.
So the conundrum, are followers of any value? No. But you also can’t have all leaders. You must have an educated population of people with values and respect. The key is the values basis. So far all the groups that have had a values basis of some supreme deity have actually failed and whimper as victims; “if only they would follow our way”.
You have to have to be a leader yourself and not in the ruler sense. How do you live your life? Is your life self-centered? Are you intolerant of the “right” things? Without an unbiased education of the earth’s history (you must go back many Millenium), you will just be repeating the mistakes of the past. Sound like a familiar quote?
Anymore I have very little compassion for people. They have made their bed and they have to lay in it; like it or not. I can have compassion for an animal much more than a human being (too many should actually be called inhuman beings).
If you are a person that wants things handed to you, well then, get ye to a prison camp. Oh wait, are we not already there.
Is it just me or does Ben Nelson look like a zombie ? His picture is on the Drudge Report right now. Or, he looks like a vampire from Buffy.
https://drudgereport.com/
If violence isn’t solving your problems, then you aren’t using enough of it.
Is it just me or does Ben Nelson look like a zombie ? His picture is on the Drudge Report right now.
Bill Nelson? He should have retired years ago, but the Dems didn’t have an alternative who could win on a statewide level. Maybe the new Ag Commissioner if the recount totals hold.
I’m itching to get rid of stuff.
I filled a feed sack a few days ago with “clutter”. Like the votive candle with a turkey on it? For Thanksgiving? The one I can’t find until Easter? I found it. Bye bye. I’ve been looking for the dang thing for the last twenty years or so.
I have two four drawer file cabinets full of “valuable stuff”. Perhaps. One drawer is full of pictures. It’s about half full now. Store bought slides? From Hawaii and Washington DC and other places? When the projector went away 20 years ago? Into a new feed sack. Twenty copies of every nephew and niece picture sent to me ever? One is enough. Years and years of birthday cards? No…. turning 30 was like 30 years ago and I’ve never looked at the cards since.
Yeah, I tend to hoard.
The next pass through the drawer will take more than half…. that trip to Hawaii in ’89? With all the pictures of mountains and trees? And double prints, too. That I have no clue of location? Going away. Pictures with people, I’ll keep. A picture, no doubles and no negatives. Ditto for trips to DC and the Grand Canyon. I estimate I’ll have about a shoebox left.
And dayam…. I was skinny AF 30 years ago…. cuter, too. Maybe.
“SpaceX’s ‘Starman’ and Its Tesla Roadster Are Now Beyond Mars”
https://www.space.com/42337-spacex-tesla-roadster-starman-beyond-mars.html
OK, that is just totally cool !
@Paul, we were ALL skinnier 30 years ago!
N
@Paul, we were ALL skinnier 30 years ago!
Nope, I weighed 15 lbs more than I do now. Now I need to lose the 40 lbs my cardiologist wants me to lose. Right during the silly season, so not going to happen.
Dunno why, but weight has never been an issue for me. I weighed 178 in high school, granted that was 10-15 lbs over an ideal weight. Now I’m around 165 or so. One theory is that I’m a fidgety type. Also, if I gain a couple of pounds (as happens on vacation or over the holidays), I actually feel uncomfortable, which is an incentive to eat less for a while.