Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 135 of 176)

I’d expect this from Soldier of Fortune, not the state’s job site:

WorkSource Job Number: WS151442030
Listed By: United States Army on Jan 27, 2006
Last Modified on: Nov 4, 2006
Closes on: Continuous Recruitment

Description
“You have One Shot, one scoped sight, one compressed controlled breath, one squeeze of a trigger. In twenty one- hundreths of a second, you will either be a “hero” who saved an innocent life or an incompetent who caused the death of a helpless hostage. Life or death, sucess (sic) or failure is only one sensitive squeeze away” …………..Major John Plaster, Sniper Instructor

If you are between 17 and 29 years old and have a US Citizenship call 877-832-6346 or email james.veach@usarec.army.mil

And, just in case they take it down, a screen grab:

Military service is an honorable calling. Service of any kind is, so to focus on the most base and violent aspects of it is troubling to say the least.

I heard somewhere that when you blog, you should say six nice things for every bad thing you say. I’m not anywhere near that, but I do have something nice to say about someone that balances out getting on Terry Thompson and Susan Owens recently.

Stuart Elway is the unfortunately named pollster who helped the governor put together her civic engagement section of her GMAP program. In addition to a series of open town hall meetings, they also held some citizen jury type meetings where they asked random, yet screened voters to decide how you could tell if government was doing the right thing. (He talked about this during another podcast I downloaded from TVW… thank God for podcasts).

What they did was give people the space for conversation and the indication that what they said would matter. And, it worked, people listened to each other and moved beyond their immediate wants:

They hear issues framed in ways they didn’t hear before… They had to work at the table to winnow down the 10 or 12 ideas to just four, and that process alone opened up peoples eyes to these other perspectives. It was very rewarding to watch

…once people have to take other person’s into account, its pretty amazing to watch.

Download the entire episode (August 14, 2006) to listen to his entire answer, but he gets blogs because he understands the importance of bringing people together, civil conversation and how normal regular people (not politicians or bureaucrats) can give you the best answers. Which, of course, is what self government is all about.

In the best sense, the kind of effect blogs would have, is that they bring people together like this.

This will eventually happen, that whoever spends the most on tv ads is spending the most on something that will not actually get them elected. By Randy over at Ridenbaugh has two solid examples:

Today’s Oregonian/KATU-TV poll, which falls in line wth several recent polls (one exception being a Zogby outlier), provides one bit of evidence. It gives Democratic incumbent Governor Ted Kulongoski a seven-point lead, more or less tracking what most polls over the last month have shown: A modest but discernible, and very slightly growing, lead over Republican challenger Ron Saxton. What’s remarkable is that this happened after one of the biggest TV ad barrages Oregon has ever seen, in which Saxton outspent Kulongoski during the general election campaign by about two to one. If TV were the key to the election, Saxton would be comfortably ahead by now.

So you say that Oregon is Democratic-leaning anyway? Apart from the debatability of that proposition, consider Idaho’s first congressional district, where Republican Bill Sali has nearly two-to-one outspent Democrat Larry Grant; when third-party efforts are factored in, Grant may be outspent nearly three to one. And yet two solid polls put the race at a dead heat, with Grant on the move. Same story in the Idaho governor’s race, where Republican Butch Otter has outraised Democrat Jerry Brady more than two to one, and likewise finds himself a in a dead heat. Same, as well, in Washington’s 5th district, where Republican incumbent Cathy McMorris is outspending Democrat Peter Goldmark two to one, only to see Goldmark rising rapidly into shooting range.

Terry Thompson, a local Democratic political consultant, the man behind TR Strategies, pretty much doesn’t know blogs. During a recent discussion on Inside Olympia on TVW (God bless podcasts), Thompson morphs from a lesson on the differences between the political generations to a discussion on why blogs are spreading untruths. And, that no on ever challenges anything on blogs.

Not that blogs are really just everyone challenging everyone else. Or some kind of conversation.

According to Thompson, blogs are:

encouraging the polarization of politics in this country. Right wing blogs talk to right wing people, left wing blogs talk to left wing people. There is no fact checking. When a statement is made, it is accepted as fact, when there is no evidence of it what so ever. And there is no one challenging this stuff.

If you get in a political discussion, sitting down in a cafe somewhere, and you’re arguing back and forth, and someone in the next table would overhear you and say “excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear, that’s not true.” That doesn’t even happen, on these blogs it is fact.

Which, of course, isn’t fact.

Thompson’s analogy about overhearing a conversation in a cafe and someone butting in to disagree is much less realistic that someone coming onto a blog and doing the same thing. This is especially in Washington State, where people are much too polite to disagree with strangers in public.

Good blogs foster conversation. In his example, he’s tells how a young activist being confused about the length of the Vietnam War after learning about it wrongly on a blog. Well, if it was a decent blog, someone would have come along and posted a comment, explaining how wrong they were.

You can post a comment here to tell me how wrong I am. That’s how it works.

Far be it for me to disagree with a sine-yan-tist, but what utter nonsense:

Scientists around the country are logging the emotional and physical effects of negative political ads. Iacoboni tracked parts of the middle brain that lighted up in brain scans when people watched their favorite candidates come under attack. Other scientists hooked up wires to measure frowns and smiles before the meaning of the ads’ words sunk in. Mostly, researchers found that negative ads tend to polarize and make it less likely that supporters of an attacked candidate will vote.

“Everyone says: ‘We hate them. They’re terrible,’ ” said George Bizer, a psychology professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.

But, he added, “They seem to work.”

If the choice people are making after viewing negative ads is not to vote, then the ads aren’t working.

I have a feeling that the noon meeting on Wednesday will be crowded. Or not, you never know.

Be warned. I left around 4:20 p.m. before Cantwell even made an appearance. I had a faucet cover to buy, otherwise I probably would have stuck around longer.

I got to the Olympia Center a bit early, waiting around for folks to show up, I was mostly curious to see people mill around before the event.

I was sitting down, underneath the “Salmon Run” statues, a local Democrat I know came up to me. “I’m not happy, we shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. Turns out he had been recruited as a “bouncer” to make sure no one came into the event with any hand-made or McGavick signs. I agreed with him, but there didn’t end up being much of a chance of that happening.

I guess they still think keeping folks with competing large print words out of their events is a good idea.

The only non-Democratic folks that came around that I could see where a nice slug of Green Party members carrying those nice small Aaron Dixon signs. After milling around the lobby talking to a handful of interested folks, they politely ditched their signs before they went inside.

Before I went inside, I knocked my head accidentally on the legendary Wishupona Fish statue. Ouch, I was showing a fellow Young Dem who I hadn’t seen in awhile pictures of my son on my cell phone and I got excited. Ouch.

Also, I chatted with a Black Hills High School student out in the lobby who was there to see her sister. She said she liked government, but not politics. She takes part in a club/class at her school were she helps write mock legislation, and she hates politics. Likes the practice of participation, but hates how the campaigns tear each other down.

I got into the event, listened to Rep. Sam Hunt, Thurston County Commissioner Bob Macleod and state Sen. Karen Frasier, and then I took off. Oh yeah, I also met Particle Man from Washblog. And, its true what they say: the water got him instead. Particle Man.

UPDATE: In the comments, Particle Man picks up where I left off and the Olympian covers the event.

This is a great song I’ve been enjoying for awhile off of Son Volt’s best album since “Trace.” Maybe even better than Trace.

Anyway, Jet Pilot is about GW. Rock it:

NPR Roots Rock has a nice mp3 of a concert Son Volt did in Washington DC over a year ago.

Be there or be square:

Cantwell’s Checklist for Change Tour in Olympia

When

Thursday, November 2, 2006 at 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM

Where

The Olympia Center 222 Columbia St. NW Olympia, WA 98501

Description Join Maria Cantwell for the Checklist for Change tour stop in Olympia. Maria is spending the final week before Election Day crisscrossing the state in a biodiesel bus, talking to supporters and voters about her ten-point checklist to change the agenda in Washington DC to reflect our Northwest values. We hope you can join us in Olympia for this great event. Please email comment@cantwell.com with any questions. Host Andrea Johnson

Pierce County is well on the way to deploying wifi county wide, even in such small burbs as Orting and Eatonville.

Spokane built their downtown network so long ago it isn’t even news anymore.

Now, Bellevue is putting their’s up.

What the heck in wrong with Olympia?

The last time anyone seriously talked about wifi within our city government, they took a “wait and see” position.

CIRGO, even though everyone mentions to me that they’re going to get us going in this direction, is still very very quiet about what they’re even going to do. Low cost wifi? Public wifi?