The Schrug

As I saw the headline about today’s arguments regarding lethal injection, it occurred to me that this year’s campaign has been uncharacteristically quiet about the judicial branch. Where are all the questions about activist judges, litmus tests, strict constructionists, and so on? Just because none of the current SCOTUS justices are currently in intensive care doesn’t mean there won’t be a vacancy or two in the next four years. And we’ve got oodles of openings in lower courts. Why is nobody talking about this?

I am so tired of seeing pundit after pundit and reporter after reporter use the same canned analysis during the primary season. It feels more like they are covering each other’s coverage than covering the campaigns themselves. I think there should be a one-month moratorium on the following words and phrases.

• Candidate of change
• Inevitability
• Phenomenon
• Movement
• Reinvent himself / herself
• Tapped into
• Momentum
• Rock star
• Strong organization
• Appeals to the base
• Values voters (thanks for this suggestion, Lori)

It would be interesting to see if the talking heads could come up with anything original to say.

Looks like the handy red envelopes are not Post-Office-friendly. ZDNet has the story.

Pandora is very, very cool. I got a surprise today, though, while listening to a radio station I had seeded with the Crash Test Dummies and other rather mellow bands. Pandora decided that I like music with “basic rock song structures, a subtle use of paired vocal harmony, extensive vamping, paired vocal harmony and minor key tonality.” The song it played was “Strip 4 Me” by Gravy Train!!!!. The lyrics to this song are available here. WARNING: Definitely TV-MA stuff, and again, not exactly what I was expecting to hear after a steady stream of Tom Petty, The Police, Counting Crows, etc.

On the other hand, I suppose Pandora did its job by exposing me to a band I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, and it did give me the option not to hear it again.

Here’s how I would have done it.

1. Find a precinct where the poll workers don’t check IDs before handing out ballots. (This probably applies to the vast majority of precincts in the country.)
2. Obtain a list of all registered voters in that precinct. (This is freely available to all candidates.)
3. Station a volunteer at the voter check-in desk to mark down who has come in to vote. (This is perfectly legal.)
4. An hour or so before the polls close, send the list of who has voted and, by extension, who hasn’t, back to campaign headquarters. (Again, perfectly legal.)
5. Send out a group of new volunteers to the precinct to impersonate the voters who hadn’t shown up yet and vote on their behalf. (Not so legal.)

This scheme can only fail if (a) the poll workers happen to know the no-show voters and recognize my volunteers as imposters, (b) my volunteers have incredibly bad timing and show up at the same time as the people whose identities they are stealing, or (c) the poll workers suddenly decide to check IDs. I imagine the consequences of getting caught could be severe, but based on my experiences watching the polls the risk seems slight.

Given our country’s recent troubles with elections, it is astonishing to me that people anywhere are still allowed to vote without positive identification.

Disclaimer: this blog entry was written while I was volunteering as a poll observer for a political campaign, but the campaign is in no way associated with this post and I have absolutely no reason to suspect that any of the campaigns participating in this election have engaged in any form of vote fraud.

Sox-Yanks is about as close to nirvana as you can get in sports. But watching last night’s game was something akin to having your yoga class led by Richard Simmons. The role of “Guy you want to hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat” was played by Joe Morgan. Here is a transcript of Morgan’s 63-second description of a collision the previous day between Eric Hinske and Jorge Posada. It was accompanied by some slo-mo replays and telustrations which I can’t reproduce here, but believe me, they did not make Morgan’s analysis any less excruciating.

I want to show you something about that collision, Jon, because Posada got caught in an awkward position. There was no place for Hinske to go. There’s no place for Hinske to go, so he had to hit him. There was no – there was no plate. You know, catchers usually give you some part of the plate to slide towards. There’s no plate. The plate’s back here. So what is Hinske gonna do other than try to bowl him over, you see what I mean? You know, he had no choice but to run into Posada. I don’t think it was a — it wasn’t a bad play, you know, there was no place for him to go. See where the plate is? Now how’s he gonna get to this plate? You can’t slide. There’s no place to slide. Posada’s got it blocked. The only place you can go is try to run over him. And that’s what he did, so I don’t want, you know,  the Yankee fans to think that was a dirty play because there was no place for him to slide, there was no place to go. Posada usually will give you — the catcher will give you someplace to slide, but he got caught in a bad position, and there was no place for Posada to go and no place for Hinske to go.

I’m sending this one off to the “Fire Joe Morgan” blogsters. It’s a classic.

Don’t tell anyone I told you that Not On My Watch is part of the Asphalt Jungle Shorts. Apparently, it’s a secret.

My college classmate and one-time tenant Michael Pahre writes an excellent neighborhood blog. Tonight he informs me that there was a “dungeon” right down the street from me. Its “mistress” and her husband (the master?) were arrested last week for, according to the Allston-Brighton Tab, “sexual conduct for a fee and allowing a premise to be used for immoral purposes.” I guess those are the official terms for prostitution and running a whorehouse in Massachusetts.

After reading the story, my first thought was naturally “how come nobody invited me to the grand opening?” But I am intrigued by the description of the events leading up to the arrest:

Police began investigating [Kara] Rogers when an undercover officer responded to a craiglist ad on Aug. 21 that said “Gorgeous Mistress available to meet submissive men.”

The officer and Rogers reportedly exchanged e-mails before setting up an appointment over the phone. On Thursday, Aug. 23, the officer went to the building, where a tall blond woman dressed in a sheer robe, lingerie and high heels motioned for the officer to come inside an apartment, police said. The officer was brought into a living room that contained several sex toys and rope, police said.

The woman, who identified herself as “Mistress Gorgeous,” reportedly said to the officer, “So you want to be tied? Well, I can do that with a little spanking, what else do you like?” After negotiating the price of $175 for a half-hour, the officer asked if he would receive oral sex as well, reports state. When Rogers said no, the officer left the apartment.

When arrested, Rogers reportedly said she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong, because there was no sexual contact.

I actually think Mistress Gorgeous may have a point. It certainly can’t be against the law simply to cause pain to another consenting adult. If it were, there would be no such thing as a personal trainer. Suppose the services consisted solely of foot massages or verbal humiliation. Services such as these might well elicit a sexual response from some customers, but that’s by no means a certainty. Seems to me that if there’s no exposing, much less touching, of the genitals, there’s no sex. And if there’s no sex for money, I don’t know what other standard you use to determine if someone’s purposes are “immoral.”

This could be an interesting case.

Not On My Watch has been selected for another short play festival, this time on the streets of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. The show runs September 12-15 and 19-22. See http://www.flushink.net/AJSIII.html for more details. My picture and bio will soon be posted here.

The script is available in the Files section on my Facebook page.

As I was gleefully reading the story of Larry Craig’s adventures in the Minneapolis airport, I came across the following paragraphs:

The scandal had already taken a political toll. On Monday, Craig resigned from a prominent role with Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. He had been one of Romney’s top Senate supporters, serving as a liaison for the campaign since February.

Asked about Craig, Romney said, “He’s disappointed the American people.”

“Yeah, I think it reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton. I think it reminds us of the fact that people who are elected to public office continue to disappoint, and they somehow think that if they vote the right way on issues of significance or they can speak a good game, that we’ll just forgive and forget,” Romney said on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company.”

Foley is a former Republican lawmaker who resigned nearly a year ago after being confronted with the computer messages he sent to male teenage pages who had worked on Capitol Hill. Clinton is the former president accused in congressional impeachment proceedings of lying about an affair with a White House intern.

“Accused?!?!” Excuse me, but it’s a FACT that Clinton lied about his affair with Lewinsky. Stuff like this, unfortunately, gives credibility to those on the right who rant and rave about the media’s love affair with the Clintons and other Democratic leaders. Do you think reporters and editors really don’t notice that they’re doing this?