October 2008
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An "orphan precinct" is one that lacks a regular committee and chair. We have one nearby, and I've been recruited to walk the neighborhood and deliver GOTV flyers to registered Dems. I'm natively shy and I hate knocking on doors, but there are votes to be had and lordy-mercy don't we need every single one.…
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I would have thought that there wasn't a novel by Anthony Trollope that I hadn't read, but browsing the library shelves, I found one that was unfamiliar to me. It's a short, late novel called An Eye for an Eye. It dates from 1878 (Trollope, born in 1815, died in 1882. Trollope wrote forty-seven fluent novels…
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Out here in the west, social services are administered by the county commissioners. At a candidate forum last night, libertarians running for commissioner opposed a .05% (i.e. a penny on a $20 purchase) extension of a sales tax that would go to support battered women, the alcohol recovery facility, mental health, walk-in clinics for the…
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Although I’m not a particularly sociable individual, I have friends all over the U.S and a few in other parts of the planet. I have friends of various interests and complexions and ethnicities and ages and of both (or all) the genders. Although religion is said to be great divider, and I’m not in any…
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We enjoyed In Bruges for its black humor, its witty profanity, and the unpredictability of its plot (that is, until the mandatory chase scene). And especially for the lovely views of medieval Bruges, an old Hanseatic town. In Bruges contains a film-within-a-film which is described by Chloe, the handsome drug dealer and thief, as an…
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Rutherford B. Hayes, whose biography (by Hans J. Trefousse) I have just read, was a an intelligent, well-meaning, but not very imaginative president. It’s a blemish on his record that he compromised his principles and allowed ex-Confederate leaders in the southern states to install Jim Crow policies that would take a hundred years to undo. …