lollardfish

Borderlands Reunion - Sort of!

Ann, Dave, Jeff, Kurt, Scott
June 10th - THIS SATURDAY!
7-11 (Kurt's set 7-8:15, Dave's 8:30-9:45, Everyone 10-11)
Gingko Coffee Shop
721 N. Snelling Avenue, St. Paul, MN
(651) 645-2647
http://www.ginkgocoffee.com/

( FAQ )

Premise: Democrats win elections when they are about health care, education, environment. Republicans win elections when they are about gay marriage, abortion.

National security right now is a toss-up (typically Republican, but support on Iraq extremely low).
Taxes are a toss-up (everyone likes lower taxes, but deficits high enough to raise concern for fiscal conservatives.

Problem: The gay-marriage ammendment is clearly an attempt to push the debate into a Republican side.

Solution: Democrats should say, when asked about gay-marriage, "The founding fathers wrote the Constitution to protect freedoms, not take them away. No further comment."

Better one-line answers?

The Villa Gorilla is online! More later.

Happy birthday to me. I bought the new Springsteen album. All Pete Seeger songs. It's making me happy.

So all of Chipotle's (at least in Minnesota) pork and chicken are local, non-antibiotic, good meats. They are working on beef. They are improving the percentage of their beans that are organic. They are part owned by MacDonald's, which makes them somewhat evil. Except MacDonald's hired that keen autistic woman who understands animals to make their slaughtering houses more humane, which makes it more complicated.

But there's one thing I know, and that's I try to buy burritos from local shops in the Mercado Central and such places instead of the big conglomerate. But is La Loma's chicken "raised without antibiotics, without growth hormones, on 100 percent vegetarian feed without any animal by-products, in humane and free-ranging situations."? I don't know. I'm a little afraid to ask.

This is a pretty good article by local reviewer Dara Moskowitz, talking about good meet locally, and the importance of selling the whole animal. Of particular interest is the Cafe Barbette/Bryant Lake Bowl combo, where Barbette gets the good spendy meat of a steer, and Bryant LAke the rest for its burgers and such.

I met Coleen Rowley tonight at a small function in Northfield (mostly for St. Olaf people). Rowley was the FBI agent/legal advisor who wrote a memo on Moussaoui discussing the governmental failures that kept higher ups from being aware of the 9/11 plot. Among the most telling features, an agent said to her, in August, that "this is a guy who would fly a plane into the World Trade Center." Washington ignored it. She was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, and now is running for congress in Minnesota's second district. You can learn more about her campaign at:

Coleen Rowley for U.S. Congress..

She was very compelling in person. Her best line was about the NSA wiretapping and the massive collection of data. She says that "when you are looking for a needle in a haystack, the last thing you need to do is add more hay." She believes in the power of our criminal justice system, does not believe in most of the Patriot Act (barring a few streamlining features), and certainly not ignoring the FISA court.

She told a good joke about Bush. She linked oil, health care, jobs, immigration, and other issues to national security. And otherwise was very interesting to meet.

Now she was talking to a group of academics, so we're a tough audience. And she didn't need to sell us, but she did need to fire us up. She's not really a great speaker to a group, although she is in a small group. She not a career politician, and that's great. She can beat Klein, who is radically conservative, by convincing titular, educated, swing voters in Lakeville and Burnsville to vote for her. But she needs to work on her pitch.

Every sentence needs to begin, "Well, when I was in the FBI ..."
She needs to link Klein to the culture of corruption, to say frequently and clearly that Klein took $30,000 from Delay's PAC, and so is part of the whole Ney-Abramoff-Delay corrupt system and needs to go.

It'll be interesting to watch.

Off to talk to a guy. then maybe make some squid ink pasta. Or some red wine pasta. But I lack red wine to use.

While it's no surprise that Bush doesn't "get" the whole separation of powers thing, it is interesting (in the usual tear your hair out sort of way) to watch the nomination of a military officer for the head of the C.I.A. The whole point is to have a civilian intelligence agency to match up with the military intelligence branch.

I am looking for a copy of the game Credo. It's cheap, by Chaosium, and from '93. No copies to be found on the internet as far as I can see. If you find or have a copy, I will buy it off you.

Amazon link the game.
A random review.

And then I'm gonna have to find someone to make a new version that doesn't suck (in terms of quality).