Julia Rietmulder-Stone's blog | ramblings about poetry, politics, & Harrisburg
cygweb beat me to it (on my own blog!), but Sara Bozich wrote an article for the Patriot about local bloggers. It appeared yesterday; I meant to say something; I didn’t get a copy until it was no longer yesterday.
If you can still somehow get a copy of the print version, you can see a picture of me looking like smiling hurts and note how they butchered my name to make it fit their layout.
The display on my cell phone died a few weeks ago. If you’ve sent me a text message in the last few weeks and I didn’t reply, well, that’s why.
Anyway, I now have a new phone, which I thought was going to fix everything, but it turns out that the vast majority of the numbers I had were stored to the phone itself, rather than to my SIM card. So I now have about five phone numbers.
I’m going through old emails to retrieve as many numbers as I can, but in the meantime, if you want me to have your phone number, please email it to me.
As requested, the pictures from the piano destruction at the Mantis Collective have been posted.
http://www.sunsetchaser.net/gallery/albums/local/mantispiano/
I’m posting from Gathering Grounds, a coffeehouse here in Westminster. It’s a cute little place, consisting of four tables, four couches, and more high school outcasts than I’ve seen since the Wire. It’s nothing like the Wire, except that it does seem to be a “gathering ground” for the aforementioned teenagers. It’s pretty low key and relatively quiet, and no one seems to be doing anything remotely close to crazy. But anyway, I should be working on my novel.
I just wanted to draw your attention to this article about the close of the Dover Intelligent Design trial. The Washington Post also pointed out a few days ago that the Dover school board is up for re-election on Tuesday. I’ll be interested to see how that turns out.
Here’s an interesting take on the current landscape. While I haven’t read anything else by this guy, and have the feeling our perspectives diverge, he (and, perhaps, more relevantly, Bull Moose) raises an important issue. Does the Democratic party really want to cast itself as being gullible and easily manipulated?
Clearly there was misinformation in the months leading up to the war, and it certainly appears that the Bush administration was gathering and presenting information with a clear objective of going into Iraq. But can the Democrats really claim that they weren’t at all responsible for what happened? And how would we be feeling about this if things in Iraq had gone more smoothly?
It should come as no surprise that Bush’s approval ratings continue to drop. However, the fact that Americans are apparently aware enough to disapprove is just about the only bit of good news to be found in this.
That is, of course, very encouraging. For 2008. I can’t believe we have three years to go.
Apparently the PA state legislature is listening to its constituents. Kind of.
After months of angry talk show hosts and voters expressing their, well, anger with the pay raise the PA legislature gave themselves over the summer, both houses have passed bills to repeal it. It ain’t over yet, but it’s a step.
Here are the relevant stats (in my opinion):
Pre-raise, the base pay for a legislator was $69,647; top leaders made $108,722.
Post-raise base pay was $81,050; top leaders made $145,533.
According to the Patriot, the raises made PA legislators the second best paid in the nation.
But wait, you might be thinking, how can they give themselves immediate raises mid-term?
The raises weren’t in the form of actual raises because, you’re right, that would be illegal. Instead, they authorized monthly “unvouchered expenses.” That is, every month a legislator can say, “I spent a bunch of money, you need to reimburse me,” but doesn’t have to provide any kind of proof of that. It’s understood that they don’t actually have to spend any money.
So whether or not the PA legislators deserve raises, this was not a cool way to go about giving them to themselves.
Okay, so the Democrats forced the Senate into a closed session to discuss pre-war intelligence failures. I can’t really not comment. But while it is exciting to see the Dems do something, I’m not sure that they, well, did anything — other than piss off Bill Frist. Not that there’s no satisfaction there.
On the other hand, it is understandable that he would be upset, since he didn’t realize that anyone had been concerned until yesterday.
“Really, I think it was not a good thing to do. … I think we’d have been a lot better off if Democratic Leader Reid had just walked down the hall to Senator Frist’s office and said he had a concern instead of going through that shenanigan yesterday,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions , R-Ala.
A big BOO to the United Methodist Church for its decisions yesterday to defrock a lesbian minister, reinstate (with back pay) a Virginia minister who refused membership in his congregation to a gay man, and reject a declaration that there is a “difference of opinion among faithful Christians regarding sexual orientation and practice.”
The last point is the one that bothers me most. Does rejection of that declaration mean that the UMC is saying that people who hold different opinions on the issue cannot also be faithful Christians?