YouTube: Young El Paso County CO Voter Registration Volunteer Fails Civics

This story kicked off the whole “Nathan Sproul, GOP Vote Fraudster, At It Again” narrative. All the old stories came out from 2004 and other years. And the national GOP was forced to fire him after the Florida registration fraud story made it clear that the GOP was paying for Republican voter registrations again (and pretty much NOT paying for Democratic registrations). Then some state GOP organizations fired him some more. Time to create a new name, eh? It’s a reliable predictor of Republican shenanigans: whatever accusation they make against Democrats, they are surely doing more of it. ACORN registration fraud? Their registrars were paid by registration too, but they never threw away completed forms from real people. The Sproul registrars were incentivized to register only Republican voters, MUCH more likely to “untrue the vote” than Mickey Mouse actually showing up to cast a ballot.

What else have Republicans accused the Democrats of doing? Then look for them doing it too, and to much worse effect. Republicans are so in denial and deep in the coils of cognitive dissonance that projection is one way they cope. Now they’re complaining about supposedly “skewed” polls, so what do they do? Skew their polls even more than Rasmussen, a pollster famous for weighting his polls to GOP advantage, is comfortable with. Don’t miss Lee Fang’s overview, which links to more dirty details. Link: YouTube video spurs voter registration flap Colorado Springs Gazette

Smallest Jewish congregation in U.S. fights for survival in Mattoon IL

MATTOON, IL—

Proud to be known as the heart of the Illinois Bible Belt, the residents of Mattoon fill dozens of Christian churches. Theres also one Jewish congregation, which has the distinction of being the smallest Reform synagogue in North America. The membership? Four households.

The Mattoon Jewish Community Center isnt a center at all but a group of dedicated congregants who meet in Trinity Episcopal Church. Even at Yom Kippur — the holiest of Holy Days, when this week synagogues in Chicago were packed — the worshippers at this prairie outpost strained to hit double digits.

via Smallest Jewish congregation in U.S. fights for survival in Illinois – chicagotribune.com

One of my favorite family members lives south of Mattoon. Aside from occasional visits home, she rarely gets to attend services or events in her Jewish heritage. It’s kind of sad and frustrating; she was raised in a Jewish home but was never able to participate fully in all the milestone events, other than as an observer.

There’s no way she could travel to Mattoon to attend the occasional Sabbath service; the logistics just don’t work. But it was interesting to read about this small Reform congregation in her part of the state, and I’m glad that an Episcopal congregation has given them a home when it became impossible to maintain their building.

If You Want To Understand Mitt Romney, read Glenden Brown at OneUtah.org

Also cross posted at Daily Kos, Glenden Brown offers a perspective on Mitt Romney from behind the Zion Curtain.

In Mormon culture, hierarchical status confers respect.  Authority in Mormonism is rarely questioned.  Mormon authorities are bad at explaining why they’re doing what they’re doing because within Mormonism they have the ultimate conversation stopper – “God said so.”  I think Romney is genuinely confused when his public assurances aren’t simply accepted as fact.  Why should people want to see his taxes when he’s said there’s nothing illegal in them?  His odd, robotic public persona is the political version of the Mormon church leader who speaks in a near monotone the “church voice” which is designed to comfort by its very blandness.  The histrionics of the pulpit pounding evangelical are totally alien to the Mormon church.

Haglund’s thesis – that Mormon masculinity gets knocked out equilibrium by the larger culture – can be expanded.  It’s not just Mormon masculinity, it’s the Mormon personality in general.  Mitt Romney is an exemplary Mormon with all that implies.  The  contemporary public square has knocked Mitt out of his equilibrium and he’s wobbling.  The collapsing of boundaries between public and private, the refusal to casually accept his authority, the jostling of different groups, standards and rules all feel anarchic to a good Mormon who is accustomed to the order and tidiness of Mormon life.

Living most of my life in Utah and in the shadow of Mormon culture, I see Mitt’s troubles as a near perfect reflection of what happens when Mormons encounter the wider world.  They feel adrift, lost, unsure and they feel their sense of self wobble; and then return with relief to the orderly and organized world of Mormonism.  Mitt Romney is experiencing this dynamic on the national stage.  His missteps, mistakes, and organizational problems all reflect his personal disequilibrium.

via Mitt Romney: Wobbling From His Carefully Constructed Equilibrium | One Utah

Glenden Brown’s starting point was this essay by Kristine Haglund:

The performance of Mormon masculinity is a difficult balancing act, a tightrope walk between poles established by a brutish, hyper-masculine “natural man” and an effeminate gay man. It is perhaps unsurprising that Mormon patriarchs—as well as Mormon men running for high elected office—wobble from their carefully constructed equilibrium when buffeted by the cultural winds of feminism and the gay rights movement.

Her byline reads Kristine Haglund is the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. She lives and goes to church in Belmont, MA. She’s a Mormon scholar and an intellectual; a difficult position to hold in the authority-unquestioning culture of Mormonism. So she knows a little something about high wire acts — but she also may know Mitt Romney from church (he was a bishop and then a stake president in Belmont) or she knows people who do. I think for insight Glenden is on the right track as far as parsing “the public vs. private Mitt Romney.”

However, his experience living “in the shadow” in Utah is a lot like mine, and one thing to consider is that Utah Mormon culture is quite different from… I guess you’d call it “outside-Utah Mormon culture.” It’s MUCH more insular, much more frustrating to the “not-Mormon” person who encounters it at school, in the neighborhood, at the store, at work in Utah. Mom used to get so irritated trying to shop at big Salt Lake retail stores, with NO sales people available; invariably she’d look all over for someone to help with a purchase or a question, and find a huddle of men at the back, deep in conversation. What anybody else would call a male “bull session,” like guys at the automotive score discussing sports or whatever, she’d call a “priesthood meeting.”

On the other hand, LDS friends of Mom’s that were Outside Mormons were much more like any other American family. They complained about Utah Mormon culture, too!

Mitt Romney is a rich big shot in a church that has the unquestioned power to look at your financial statement to determine your worthiness to enter their Holy of Holies. In fact, the church probably knows EXACTLY what’s in the last 20 years of Mitt’s tax returns. It’s funny how quiet the hierarchy has been about the tax return issue. Maybe Harry Reid has a friend “on the inside” who has no love for Romney.

If Huntsman had done better in the primaries, I don’t think I’d have as much of a problem. He went to my high school and some of my younger family members knew some of the family. By all accounts he seems to have been a pretty good governor, and he’s fairly moderate (and moderately fair). I’d have been a little weirded out, but not deeply uneasy and worried about some dumb apocalypse.

That Romney has a private vs. public persona, I think is accurate. I’ve known friends with just the same serious demeanor for church, with a goofy and utterly unserious face for “not-church.”

Anyway, his sense of Noblesse NOT Oblige (n’oblige?) probably comes just as much from being wealthy and privileged as it does from being the closest thing to an LDS prince or god-king on earth.

I highly doubt Romney was into “Church Ball” but he seemed to mix it up pretty well with his hair-cutting and teacher-trapping in school. I do agree that he’s completely baffled by the refusal of We the (Little) People to take him at his ever-shifting word.

One last thing – I spent some time Sunday watching some videos shot inside an LDS temple (not all at the Salt Lake Temple, but some of them. They were surprisingly boring and repetitive – the 1:20-long one with the endowment movie is eye-stingingly dull.

My Tammy Duckworth Yard Signs Look Great! @Tammy4Congress #IL08 #itsmybirthday

UPDATE: Fixed my dumb typo in the title. Also too, added the latest poll for the district:
Joe Walsh, Flailing in the Polls, Sticks it to the 47 Percent

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) probably could have picked a better time to come rushing to the defense of Mitt Romney. On Tuesday, a new survey from Public Policy Polling showed the first-term tea partier trailing Democratic challenger and Iraq war vet Tammy Duckworth by 14 points (52–38) in his Chicagoland district. Just 35 percent of voters said they approved of his job performance.

Oooh, BURN. What a delicious update.

Flickr

Hee!! I forgot that I’d emailed her campaign office with our address asking for these, they came by and put them up like magic. AND it’s my birthday. Thank you, campaign workers!

We’re on a corner, so there’s that. 😉

Via: Flickr
Title: My Tammy Duckworth Yard Signs Look Great! @Tammy4Duckworth #IL08 #itsmybirthday
By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 24 Sep ’12, 6.47pm CDT

Can Haz Beep? Illinois I-PASS Transponders May Bring Back the BEEP! BEEP!

We both have transponders, and the original one used to make a cheerful BEEP! as we passed through the old-style I-PASS tollbooths. A few years ago, while Blago was still governor, Illinois started installing high speed scan lanes, and phased out the old transponders as they were no longer being made.

I admit, we used to say BEEP back to the transponder. We also meow at each other like a certain pair of actors in an obscure science fiction show, but that’s another post.

When the time comes to replace either transponder (one in each of our two cars) we’ll see if we can haz the BEEP! BEEP! again.

Do you ever feel that you and your I-PASS transponder just aren’t talking anymore? Are you tired of those tense, icy silences on drives?The Illinois tollway could have the solution to get you and your device on speaking terms again. Plans are under way to reintroduce transponders that beep when drivers successfully pay tolls and also communicate the status of I-PASS accounts, administrators said at a Thursday meeting.

via I-PASS transponders may be breaking their silence – DailyHerald.com

Listening, listening, listening: will probably get things set up perfectly just before Last.fm quits working.

It’s not easy getting Last.fm to work on an iPad… there’s only partial functionality (I suspect that due to Apple’s well known aversion to all things Flash, and also to their reluctance to grant control of the iTunes player to third parties).

Now that I’m working from home, music is becoming more and more a necessity. I couldn’t listen before in the office environment, which could have helped me tune out distractions. Now I can listen, and it helps me stay focused while working on records in “waiting for calls” mode. I have a normal clock radio in my home office that can dock with my iPhone 4 (but not charge it, it’s an older model radio) and play either iTunes or streaming radio via various iPhone apps. Then  I realized from this post  that my iPad has more capable built in speakers, and tons more options for streaming radio.

Anyway, there are various ways to listen to music on the iPad, and I’ve tried most of them. Only a couple integrate with the Last.fm “scrobbling” feature, which compiles lists of music tracks played. I seem to finally have settled on 2 iPad internet radio apps in addition to iTunes, which are something called Radio.com and the one that works best for me, Tunemark. This is in addition to at least 2 other radio apps that I use (radioBOX and Tuner), but that don’t get “scrobbled” by Last.fm to keep a running list of songs played via streaming radio. There’s Pandora, too, but I ended up deleting it, may try it again later but it wasn’t coordinating with Last.fm any more. Why do I keep the non-scrobbling ones? Mostly because they have different lists of streaming internet radio stations, some unique or hard to find. Some are easy to set up. So they’re not worth dumping.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to get the Last.fm “custom stations” or “create your station from an artist, song, or genre” feature working on the iPad, because that seems to be kicked off only using a browser version of Last.fm that requires Flash, which Apple refuses to support. Meh. The only other way to get this feature is to install the Last.fm desktop client, which of course can’t be done on the iPad, because APPLE. Grr.

On the other hand, I was playing around on the old laptop and there I have tons of options.

  • Had previously installed a cross-platform player called Clementine that scrobbles tracks and streaming radio. It’s simple, easy to work with, it just works.
  • Installed the latest beta version of the desktop Last.fm client, which is reportedly buggy, but working more or less fine for me on Ye Olde Lap-Top Computer (it may help that it’s still WinXP, don’t know). But the fabulous custom radio feature works, and the integrated plugins for Winamp work, whoo hoo! I can even “love” songsI
  • Installed the latest Winamp, ditto whoo hoo, especially as I had never bothered to import my iTunes library… and it seems I should have, because my laptop has the oldest and most complete version of my much neglected and out of date music database. I found tons of music that hasn’t survived the leaps to my old pre-Gateway computer, let alone to my old Gateway and the current custom-built with the blue blinky whirry lights. AND the Winamp plugin works – I could never get that working before. Oh, maybe I should check to see if it detects streaming radio tracks… the inability of Winamp to scrobble on my desktop on the old version is, heh heh heh, ,what got me kind of in this musical obsession death-spiral in the first place. And… there we have it, Winamp does NOT scrobble streaming radio, but it starts to scrobble saved podcasts (I have a copy of This American Life’s “Pools of Money” show on the economic crisis, and the Last.fm client detected it and the audio tracks I’d imported from iTunes
  • Tested a different Last.fm plugin, Adaba’s Last.fm Pages and widget. Didn’t work, too bad, it hadn’t been updated in 2 years, and it had the ability to create pages with latest tracks, favorites, etc.
  • Installed another plugin called Last.fm Tabs, which adds interesting features below the current one, WPLast.fm. So now I can show favorites, top rated, and so on. Not quite as good as an entire page of recent tracks, but okay for now. I may explore a different method to put that on its own page later.

So: on the iPad, I can scrobble tracks from iTunes, and scrobble some streamed radio from the Radio.com app (which has a pretty nice interface, but a lot of dead Yahoo radio links, because CBS Radio killed them or something). My iPad streaming Radio.com app (which has a pretty nice interface, but a lot of dead Yahoo radio links, because CBS Radio killed them or something). My iPad streaming radio app of choice is Tunemark, which I think was a 0.99 BARGAIN.”>radio app of choice is Tunemark, which I think was a 0.99 BARGAIN.

Radio.com was HARD to configure for Last.fm. For some reason I couldn’t get signed in for a day. Then when I thought I had turned it on, I hadn’t actually clicked a little green user icon dingus and REALLY complete the connection to Last.fm. Once that was done, the generic user icon (which looked like a Plamobil wee-people) turned into a faint AS (which scrobblers know stands not for Arne Saknussemm but for Audioscrobbler, the precursor software Last.fm bought). It took me 2 whole days to stumble into the solution – not found in any FAQ that I could find.

Yet Tunemark is a pleasure to use and configure. It comes with the stock Shoutcast directory of internet radio stations, but it’s easy to add a stream URL (Winamp is awful for adding URLs, but I grumbled and got along for years). I had to look up some of the harder to find URLs (for some reason, CBS is a major thorn in the sides of internet radio listners, they hid their high-bandwidth URLs well).

A couple of really cool features on Tunemark (and now I finally get to use the fancy new Twitter embed) are the ability to Tweet a track title and artist, or to post it as a status update to Facebook. Also, it has a way to “tunemark” or bookmark a track, which adds it to a local list which can be exported. Pretty cool, eh? I’m still figuring out what other features are hidden behind little icons.

Oh, lookit that, that’s so cute! Yep, it’s cool functionality… and similar to a nifty little thing that the old, old, old offline WordPress client ecto used to have. Just push the little “musical note” button while iTunes was playing, and it would insert a “currently listening” thing into the post. Le sigh, ecto or whatever it’s called now has been dead for Windows users for years… shame, that. Anyway, the thing is, all this fun musical woolgathering is dependent on one single piece of software – that old Audioscrobbler that Last.fm bought 6 years ago that they’ve gradually let get long in the tooth until now, it seems, it’s easier for them to update for everything BUT Apple products. There must be some longstanding fued or something. If they ever break the functionality for scrobbling to Last.fm or any other site from iTunes or from Apple products, a scream of rage will go up from thousands and thousands of hardcore music-track collectors. Reading some of the years-old pleas in the Last.fm community support pages these last few days, I’ve gotten a sense of how bored the Last.fm folks are with answering the same question over and over again: “WHEN WILL LAST.FM HAVE ITS OWN iPAD APP? WHEN? THE iPHONE VERSION LOOKS TERRIBLE ON THE TABLET!”

The beta version of their software is working. I’m hoping that a website redesign is coming (without the horrible Flash that means I can’t work all the music, video, “play” or radio buttons on the iPad or iPhone). But I have a horrible feeling that I’ve finally figured out how to make a record of all the great music I’m listening to now, only to probably lose this ability at any time, at Last.fm’s whim. You see, CBS Radio bought Last.fm a few years ago. Not long after that, they took their best streaming URLs behind a kind of content wall (forcing listeners to listen to high-bandwith WXRT HD via their website, for example) and they also appear to have simply turned off a lot of Yahoo! radio streams, after taking them over. So it’s not known how long CBS might be okay with the whole “scrobbling via API to various third-party players and blog plugins” concept, unless they see significant purchase revenue from incoming links to scrobblers’ pages. I dunno.

Anyway, I’ve listened to a lot of old and new music tonight playing around on the iPad and Ye Olde Laptop, the Dull Uninspiron. While it lasts, I’ll enjoy listening during the day, too.

More music later. And more tweets.

So,

Gobekli Tepe: Amazing 11,000-year-old site predates Stonehenge by thousands of years

I’m watching an H2 program called Civilization Lost, covering little-known sites that hint at entire civilizations that have been lost to history, the segment on the Turkish site Gobekli Tepe was striking to me. The History 2 channel seems to be slightly more “woo-woo ancient aliens!1!” than the regular History channel. Also covered: Varna, Tel Hamoukar, the Minoan culture, and others.

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced its the site of the worlds oldest temple.

via Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

The Olding Of America – Retailers Brace For The Silver Tsunami

20120916-092640.jpg

The future will be brighter, more colorful, and easier to navigate for all us Baby Boomers, so we’d better start thinking about the custom paint jobs and pinstriping we want on our Hoverrounds and Rascals. Oy.

CHARLOTTE, N.C — CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Easier-to-chew foods, brighter lights in stores and bigger, clearer fonts on packaging: Those are a few of the changes marketers discussed at a conference Friday about how to sell to aging consumers.

via Companies set sights on aging consumers | McClatchy