Historiann

Historiann's parking space

Hee-hee.  I love it.  Finally, I’m benefiting from the nice, shiny new classroom and counseling building they built behind the SpacePod that houses most of the Liberal Arts departments at Baa Ram U.  In the process, they did away with a whole parking lot but they also converted a few of the spaces in the adjacent lot to these spaces.  So although I’ll never get to teach in shiny new building, at least I get preferred parking closer to my building with these spots reserved for smug hybrid drivers.  (And for me, the unsmug hybrid driver who has to teach in unglamorous, un-smart, unrenovated classrooms.  Unbelieveable, isn’t it?)

This is for Sisyphus, who won a postdoc (yay!) and has moved to Postdoc City, only to find that the morning commute and parking is even more difficult than it was back in the Golden State.  Good luck, Sis!  We’re all rooting for you.

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Eat your heart out, Judy Jetson.  I got a new car.  (Thanks, Fratguy!)  Continue Reading »

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Well, you’ve probably heard that “Senator” Wonderbread won his primary, which means that I can no longer refer to him as never having won a vote. And it wasn’t even close!  Andrew Romanoff called to offer his congratulations less than an hour after the polls closed.  Being able to outspend your opponent by nearly 4-1 has its advantages, kids!  Oh well–the guy who is liklier to beat him in November, GOP insurgent candidate Ken Buck, also won his primary narrowly against Jane Norton.  Possible lessons of the Colorado primary?  It looks like the GOPers are more likely to favor insurgencies, whereas there’s enough Dems satisfied with their incumbents (I know–go figure!) that they’re sticking with the status quo.  (Remember, the two sitting senators to lose their primaries were Republican Bob Bennett in Utah, and Democrat-turned-Republican-turned Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, so we’ll count him as a half-Republican who didn’t have the confidence of Penna. Dems, and for good reason.)  Continue Reading »

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• The Bennet campaign is stamping their tiny little feet in frustration at that New York Times story about “Senator” Michael Bennet’s advocacy for taking taxpayer money to the track with him, but the Times sticks by its story.  It published a correction and an addendum this morning, but only on two minor points:  on the history of Bennet’s relationship with Tom Boasberg, and to note that one of the sources is a supporter of Bennet’s primary challenger Andrew Romanoff.  (Apparently, it’s not worth mentioning that Boasberg has been sending out talking points from him office to distract from the NYT story, and is an open supporter and maxed-out donor to his former boss Bennet.)  Sorry, “Senator” Wonderbread:  if your bet had won and you had made money for the Denver Public Schools, you’d be tooting your own horn pretty loudly.  But since you bet on the wrong horse, it’s somehow dirty or wrong to point that out?  That’s not evidence of your poor judgment, somehow?  That’s politics, friends.  Can’t take the heat?  Get the f^&k out of the kitchen, “Senator.”  Big girls don’t cry–we pull up our panties and get $hit done.
• Tenured Radical asks for some advice in dealing with sexual and romantic revelations found in the personal papers of a Famous Feminist in the 1970s.  She asks:  “What to do with past life shockers? Would anyone be shocked by them really? What, if anything, do they contribute the history of radical feminism I am working on? Do they amplify the atmosphere for my reader that will better evoke the period? Do I risk losing the trust of second-wave feminists now collaborating with me if I seem to have bad judgment? (I’m thinking the answer to this is yes.) Should you publish any document about a person of interest that you wouldn’t want published about yourself? And yet, why did these women leave these love notes in their papers if they didn’t want me to know?”  Great questions–especially that last one.
• For-profit colleges and universities are clearly fraudulent peddlers of hope to people who have been ill-served by their public secondary educations and the current U.S. economy–but will anyone do anything about them?  Continue Reading »

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He's a fake and he doesn't know the territory!

NOTE:   Click here only if you’re interested in the latest developments in the Colorado Democratic U.S. Senate primary race between Andrew Romanoff and the Unelected Senator Michael Bennet.  The New York Times has a story that’s superbad for Bennet–some of you easterners may have seen this today shortly after the paper hit your doorsteps.  Otherwise, please read and respond to the previous post in which I ask for advice about how to free up some shelf space. Continue Reading »

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“Welcome to the Recovery!,” shouts Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  (Yeah–you’re welcome to it, pal.)  Running a ponderous description of everything you think you’ve been doing in the New York Times–yeah, that’ll do it.  That’ll make of those jobless folks in the Rust Belt feel better and put money in the pocketbooks of all of those people whose unemployment benefits have run out nationwide.  Former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich has a better handle on, yes, feeling your pain, and acknowledging the gap between Wall Street profits and Main Street realities.

Meanwhile–the Unelected Senator from St. Alban’s Locust Valley Wall Street Colorado Michael Bennet has loaned his struggling primary campaign $300,000!  Yes, friends:  all of that business acumen learned at the feet of right-wing union-busting billionaire Phil Anschutz has led him to run the most expensive U.S. Senate campaign in Colorado history–and all he has to show for it is a 20-point reversal in the polls in six weeks.  I’ve said it before, and you know I’ll say it again:  what a tool.

That Bennet had to give himself cash a week before ballots are counted means his campaign has burned through almost $5.8 million. That figure exceeds all previous spending records in Colorado Senate primaries.

In July alone, the campaign spent $1 million.

How does this compare with what his primary opponent, ”career politician” Andrew Romanoff, has spent so far?  Continue Reading »

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OK, OK–I know it’s getting tiresome to read about me being right all of the time.  But–seriously:  Who ever would have predicted that it’s a bad idea to appoint a man to the U.S. Senate who never ran for office or won a single vote in his entire frikkin’ life?  The Denver Post reports today on a new Survey USA poll on all of our statewide races, but of course the result that is really interesting is the poll showing former Colorado Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff pulling slightly ahead of Unelected Senator Michael Bennet in the August 10 primary, 48 to 45 percent (margin of error 4.1 percent) with 8 percent of Democrats undecided as to how they’ll vote.  (That’s a twenty-point turnaround from where the race was in a mid-June Denver Post poll, with Bennet at 53 and Romanoff at 36.)  ColoradoPols has some analysis here–clearly, they’re crapping their pants because they’ve been mocking and laughing at Romanoff’s campaign all year long and have been shilling pretty hard for Bennet for reasons that are difficult to fathom.  (Strangely, they spin this poll as “a story you already know.”  Well, not if you’ve been following ColoradoPols for the past year!)

The Denver Post article has a pretty good laff line here:  “‘The fact that Bennet has Barack Obama ads on everyone’s television screens multiple times a day right now shows that he’s scrambling to win this primary,’ said Eric Sondermann, a Denver political consultant. ‘That is not an ad you’d run in the general election.’”  Well, no wonder Romanoff is pulling ahead.  If Bennet thinks running ads featuring President Obama here is a good idea even in a Democratic primary, then he’s a bigger idiot than even I would have guessed.  Obama is not popular here, not even among Democrats, and especially not among the kinds of Democrats who are inclined to mail in a vote this week.  Even many liberal Coloradoans go for the “I’m an independent thinker and I’ll represent the people of Colorado against Washington interests” blah blah blah.  This is a state that likes its mavericky Senators, left, right, or center.

Here’s a little recap as to why I think Bennet is such a supreme tool: Continue Reading »

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Triple suicide at fifteen paces!

Here’s your free laugh of the day, friends.  I bring you the return of Colorado’s crazziest Republican politician yet, Tom Tancredo!

Former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo issued an ultimatum Thursday to both Republican gubernatorial candidates: Drop out of the race or I will jump in as a third-party candidate.

Tancredo’s entry as an American Constitution Party candidate likely would create a GOP implosion, splitting the vote in the general election and handing a win to Democrats.

Campaigns for Dan Maes and Scott McInnis said the Republican candidates intended to remain in the race.  Continue Reading »

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Scott McInnis, plagiarist

Perhaps I spoke too soon about Colorado not having any political races this year worth watching.  Two days ago, we awoke to the news that a Republican candidate for Governor, Scott McInnis, whom I described here as the Snidlely Whiplash of Colorado politics, plagiarized articles he was to write as a requirement of a $300,000 fellowship by a private foundation here in Colorado.  (Where can I get that kind of fellowship?)  Then yesterday, the Denver Post reported that McInnis had plagiarized an op-ed that was originally published in the Washington Post back in the 1990s when he was a Congressman, and it called for him to drop out of the Republican primary race.  (Our primary is August 10, but most counties are holding a mail-in ballot election only, and the ballots are being sent out today, so this story breaks at an especially bad time for McInnis.) 

Last night, the octogenarian engineer whom McInnis tried to blame for the original plagiarism said not only that McInnis is lying, but that his campaign tried to force him to sign a false statement taking blame for it!  Today the Post reports that the authors of the plagiarized op-ed, lackeys of the Heritage Foundation, say that they had given McInnis permission to use their words, but most people seem to see it as confirmation of a pattern of Snidely Whiplashian corner-cutting. Continue Reading »

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Stan Cox makes a provocative argument against air conditioning in Washington, D.C.  (He’s plugging a new book on the topic.)  Now this might be a bad time to consider ditching the old A/C, especially for you easterners who “enjoy” suffocating humidity all summer long and have recently suffered through a spate of 100-degree-plus days.  But I think it’s something we should talk about.  I can say with smug (if slightly sweaty) satisfaction that this is what summer at El Rancho Historiann looks like:

Families unplug as many heat-generating appliances as possible. Forget clothes dryers –post-A.C. neighborhoods are crisscrossed with clotheslines. The hot stove is abandoned for the grill, and dinner is eaten on the porch.

Line drying in such a dry climate makes my clean towels look and feel like something a dog chewed up and spit back out–but I’ll make the sacrifice!  Because my house is literally a one-story ranch house with large overhanging eaves, the inside of the house stays at least 20 degrees cooler than the outside.  A strategic use of shades on the South- and West-facing windows helps a lot, too.  We have a bedroom in the basement, in which we could sleep in an emergency since it’s always cool.  But, that hasn’t happened in 8-1/2 summers, so far.  Plus, it’s only really hot one month of the year out here–in July.

At the very least, I think Cox asks a good question:  why shouldn’t we consider shutting down a city in an extreme heat wave, just as we do when snow and ice storms make travel impossible?  We’d at least avoid having to air condition most workplaces and homes, and the absence of commuting would also save fossil fuels.  We westerners should really take the lead on taking out the air conditioning, since aridity is on our side.  Plus, those of us at altitude benefit from 30- to 40-degree swings in temperature from daytime highs to nighttime lows, so opening up the house after 7 p.m. to let in the cool night air makes a big difference. Continue Reading »

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