[Patti] Blagojevich told MSNBC Thursday that viewers of reality show "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here" will expect her to use obscenities. But she says they'll be disappointed.While some need to publish or perish, Patti will need to swear or fail at being a bankable celebrity. It’s called branding.
Blagojevich spoke from Costa Rica, where the NBC series is being filmed.
When Rod first got busted last winter, I said that his only path to continued prosperity was to take the crazy-corrupt-politician-with-chutzpah act to the extreme. He’s been doing a pretty good job of it and if he can stay out of jail, he might be able to cash in.
White House life means Malia and Sasha now see their dad practically every day, which wasn't the case for most of their lives, [Michelle Obama] said. [Barack] Obama was a five-hour drive away from their Chicago home when he served in the Illinois state Senate in Springfield, before he became a U.S. senator and spent weekdays in Washington.Uh...if you can't make it to Chicago's south side from Springfield in 3.5 hours, you must be stopping off somewhere for something. Or driving like 50 mph. I bet Obama stopped at the Dixie for some fine dining.
CARBONDALE - The May 8 wind storm left about 3,100 trees downed in the Carbondale. In the wake of that loss, city officials announced last week that the city would launch an effort to plant trees throughout town.And Carbondale is what - a fifth the size of Springfield?
I'm testing Zoho Writer from Zoho.com and I plan to publish this post to my blog directly from the Zoho Writer application.
Zoho Writer is an online, word processing application that offers me the advantage of being able to retrieve my documents anywhere. And that would matter if I had any documents I wanted to retrieve anywhere. Still it's intriguing.
OK, now to publish.
Wow, it even published the graphic.
Armed with a study by the legislature's research office, state Sen. Martin Sandoval, D-Cicero, said that between 1999 and 2007, road fund expenditures in the Chicago area ranged from about 32 percent of the statewide total to 44 percent.
That comes despite the region having about 63 percent of the state's population and 57 percent of the cars.
Whaaaaaaaa! It’s unfair! Chicago gets everything and we get nothing! Whaaaaaaaa!
Oh, what? We get more road per capita than they do? Well, ahem, never mind. Let’s talk about something else, like corrupt politicians! Whaaaaaaaa!
Now, of course this may make some sense in that the distances between destinations are greater downstate than they are in the greater Chicago area. There’s economy of scale up there. But there are also other circumstances where it might make more sense to spend more there than here.
This has been another message from the Downstaters Against Provincial Whiney-Ass Babies.
Understanding "broader categories" — the context into which individual pieces of knowledge fit — requires you to read books. Full stop. Maybe someday it won't, but it does now.
...I'm generally a scourge of cranky elders who always kvetching about how ill educated kids are today compared to the golden age they used to live in. Spare me. But that doesn't mean the opposite is true either. Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it's reasonable to draw from it. That's because they don't know the context. They don't know the rest of the story. And that's because they don't read enough books.
This seems like a silly argument Kevin is making. You can read as little or as much as you want on a subject via the internet. Information doesn’t have to come in book form. I’m 48 years old and read plenty of books up until a few years ago. But I find the aggregate “context” of many different items on the web as informative and often more so, than the lengthy writings in a single book. Now, obviously, if you really want to become well-versed in a subject you need to consume (not necessarily just read) a lot of information on the subject. I think that can be done through a variety of media. Also, back in the day, I don’t remember lots of people buying lots of informative books. I think more people know more about more things, even if they aren’t experts, because of things like the internet and narrowcasting cable channels.Ok, technically it was not a hurricane that ravaged Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, it was an event known as a derecho (Spanish for the word "straight"). The long-lived, violent straight-line windstorm killed six people, damaged hundreds of homes and knocked out power to more than 200,000 residents.Also, look at this amazing animation of the storm. Notice we here in Springfield were recipients of rain from the northern and less violent portion of the storm.
Kevan Kavanaugh’s commentaries can be heard regularly on AM 970 WMAY.
According to the latest state figures, through September 2008, there had been 12,167 same-sex marriages in Massachusetts — 64 percent of them between women — out of 170,209 marriages in all.Maybe there are just more lesbians than gay men, but what I think this really means is that men of any sexual orientation are more adverse to marriage than their female counterparts.
More importantly, this gives me an opportunity to post a picture of two women kissing.
Number of Gitmo detainees that the GOP hopes to keep off mainland U.S. soil with its "Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act": roughly 250.
Number of Axis POWs detained in camps on the U.S. mainland at the end of WWII: roughly 425,000.
I really don’t understand the fear some people (read: wingnuts) say they have about having alleged terrorists housed in detention centers, prisons, what have you in the United States. I’m not talking about legal complications, real or imagined, I’m talking about a fear that these guys will somehow escape and run amok terrorizing the nation.
First, even a hardcore, America-hating terrorist isn’t superhuman. They can’t turn into The Hulk and smash (Smash!) their way out of a prison. If they could, they would have left Gitmo years ago. They don’t have super powers. And I guarantee you, there are far more dangerous and often deranged individuals already behind prison walls right here in the good ol’ USA. Hell, I used to live right down the highway from what was at the time the nation’s most secure prison in Marion, IL. The worst of the worst were there and I never missed a minute of sleep over their presence.
Secondly, we've already successfully housed hardcore terrorists in this country. Remember Timothy McVeigh? Or the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993? Some of the WTC attackers are still in U.S. prisons.
Frankly, if they wanted to build a terrorist super-max prison right in Sangamon County, I’d be all for it. More jobs for us.OMG! If he smashed (Mustafa Smash!) his way out of prison he would probably roam the countryside spreading bad financial advice! The terror!Mustafa al-Hawsawi
One of two key financial facilitators entrusted by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) to manage the funding for the hijackings. Met with Osama Bin Laden and his top lieutenant soon after the 9/11 attacks.
Dennis Hof is the owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, made famous on the HBO series "Cathouse." Hof says he wanted to hire Rod Blagojevich as his apprentice, whatever that means, but Blago's people turned him down.But some people don’t:
Hof told WBBM-AM, "I think I'm going to go after Drew Peterson. He doesn't have an old lady now. At least they can't find her. He might as well be on my show and have some fun with the girls."
Peterson's publicist says "this might be something he might be interested in exploring."
All of that came to an end when they started making “sold state” televisions. That is, TVs without tubes (other than the picture tube). By 1972 we had a solid state TV that didn’t need to be serviced as often (there were still some tubes but by then, at age 12, I was a master of the tube tester). Not only was it low-maintenance, but it was color! The old black and white tube monster became a second TV for the house (first time that had ever happened in our home) and lasted many more years...I think until about the time the tube tester machines were removed from the drug store.
Now that the “swine flu” epidemic is maybe looking not-so-bad, there are signs in the air of a backlash against the speed with which the US government, the World Health Organization, and other government agencies worked to ring the alarm bell. I think that would be a big mistake. Part of the essence of the emergence of a new flu strain is that you can’t get a solid, statistically valid sense of how deadly it is until it’s already infected tons and tons of people. But by then it’s way too late to ring the alarm. You need to act, in the first instance, on the fact that a new flu strain could be extremely dangerous so it’s highly desirable to stop it from spreading widely.
Second, the way you stop a flu virus from spreading widely is that you’ve got to raise the level of public concern.
Right from the beginning I figured if this outbreak of flu wasn’t a “big one”, the backlash would come and probably be translated to other potential disasters and even disasters already in the making like global climate change. This seems like such an obvious point, but still there are those who insist that their instinct (or political biases or whatever) are more reliable than science and concerted preventative action.
You don’t break out the fire extinguisher after you see how much damage the fire has done. And you don’t put out the stove fire and then declare that it was never any big deal. As Yglesias says, with a new strain of virus you can’t KNOW what to expect. Better safe than sorry. Or dead. We can live with the “hype”, it's the ignorance that will kill us. Note too, that by limiting the the number of people exposed to this not-so-deadly virus, we reduce the chance of it mutating into something far more deadly. This is a NEW virus that we have no immunity to, so anything can happen.
Update: Or as someone else put it:…the irony of good public health planning is that if it works, you might not know you needed it.
