Archive for June, 2014
13 Jun 2014


Rep. Kevin McCarthy
When the vote occurs on June 19th to pick Eric Cantor’s replacement as House Majority Leader, it looks like the winner is going to be Rep. Kevin McCarthy, current Republican Chief Whip, who represents California’s 23rd Congressional District, centered around Bakersfield. No one else is currently running.
Politico
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The Financial Times describes McCarthy as a pro-business moderate with strong ties to the GOP establishment.
Kevin McCarthy, a senior California Republican close to the party’s establishment, has emerged as the frontrunner to succeed Eric Cantor as House majority leader, damping business concerns that next week’s big shake-up on Capitol Hill will bring more power to the Tea Party. …
Mr McCarthy would be elevated to the role from his current post of majority whip, bringing a measure of continuity and steadiness to the job that will be of comfort to corporate America, which counted Mr Cantor as one of its biggest allies in Washington.
“The last thing [business people] want is a conservative firebrand in the majority leader’s office giving speaker Boehner headaches in maintaining order”
For instance, Mr McCarthy, along with other California Republicans, is a supporter of immigration reform – a top business priority – in defiance of the Tea Party base. Although his ties to corporate America are less tight than Mr Cantor’s, he still rakes in large contributions from business. In fact, the securities and investment sector was the biggest donor to Mr McCarthy, contributing $355,989 to his campaign this election cycle, even though he does not face a challenger this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The real estate sector came in second, followed by the insurance industry.
Of his top individual corporate donors, Goldman Sachs came in first, while Hewlett-Packard and Blue Cross/Blue Shield were in the top five. Bank of America and Google were in the top 10.
“[Mr McCarthy] is a known quantity to the Street,†says Corey Boles, a US policy analyst at the Eurasia Group. “The last thing they want is a conservative firebrand in the majority leader’s office giving speaker Boehner headaches in maintaining order,†he adds.
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HuffPo took a look at him, and basically concluded that he is a bland professional pol, basically all about “empty ambition.”
And, since he represents a farming district with constituents totally dependent on immigrant labor, he is softer on illegal immigration than Eric Cantor.
So much for the strategic genius of our movement’s great minds, Richard Viguerie, Mark Levin, Micky Kaus, and Laura Ingraham.
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Ann Coulter (no fan of Amnesty herself) warns about investing in “Tea Party” rebellions against establishment Republicans which so frequently wind up electing democrats in the end.
In fact… the tea party had nothing to do with Brat’s victory. Only the small, local tea party groups stand for anything anymore, but they’re as different from the media-recognized “tea party” as lay Catholics are from the Catholic bishops.
National tea party groups did not contribute dime one to Brat. Not Freedom Works, not Club for Growth, not the Tea Party Express, not Tea Party Patriots. They were too busy denouncing Sen. Mitch McConnell — who has consistently voted against amnesty.
As I have been warning you, the big, national tea party groups are mostly shysters and con-men raising money for their own self-aggrandizement. (Today, they’re blast-faxing “media availability” notices to television networks claiming credit for Brat’s victory.)
The Tea Party Express, for example, “represents” the views of ordinary Americans by supporting Chamber of Commerce demands for cheap labor through amnesty.
As Eric Hoffer said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Nonetheless, the claim that Brat’s victory was a win for the tea party is everywhere — pushed with suspicious insistence by people who do not usually wish the Republican Party well. Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz, for example, said: “Tonight’s result in Virginia settles the debate once and for all — the tea party has taken control of the Republican Party. Period.”
13 Jun 2014

The original source seems to be a Russian collection of photographs of sleeping critters.
Via Madame Scherzo.
13 Jun 2014


Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014)
Jonathan Meiburg managed to get in a last interview with Peter Matthiessen shortly before his death from leukemia last April at age 86.
At first, the cab driver couldn’t find it; the empty fields to the left and the low trees to the right were covered in snow, and there was no looming Hamptons mansion at the end of the road. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else here,†he said. But then it appeared: a modest, low-slung house glimpsed through a tunnel in the trees. As we pulled into the drive, it was clear that Peter Matthiessen’s home for the last six decades wouldn’t be considered a normal home anywhere. An enormous skull—the cranium of a fin whale—was braced against a wall of the house, and clusters of other artifacts rested half-buried in the snow: driftwood, stumps, shells, small boulders, sculptures. I rang the doorbell and no one answered, and for a moment it was completely quiet: rain dripped off a row of icicles hanging from the roof. And then a kindly, deeply lined face peered through the glare in a pane of the front door.
What to say about Peter Matthiessen? There was no one quite like him: a writer and thinker, a naturalist and activist, and a fifty-year student of Zen Buddhism who, as his publicist put it, “lived so large, and so wild, for so long.†He was the only person ever to win the National Book Award for both fiction (Shadow Country, 2008) and nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979), along with a bushel of medals and prizes for his elegant but unsentimental books (of which there are at least thirty), most of which concern the wild places, animals, and people “on the edge,†as he said, of the farthest parts of the globe, where pre-human landscapes and premodern pasts are (or were) still visible.
These edges are, more or less, where he spent his adult life. A précis of his travels is a bewildering list, and includes the Himalayas, the islands of the South Pacific and the Caribbean, the Mongolian steppe, Africa from the Serengeti to the Congo basin, South America from the Andes to the Amazon, the boreal forests of North America and Siberia, and a “musk ox island in the Bering Seaâ€â€”and that’s far from exhaustive. These travels would be remarkable enough, but he also cofounded the Paris Review, in 1953 (while working undercover for the nascent CIA); a few years later he was a struggling novelist and commercial fisherman using nets and dories off Long Island’s South Shore. …
Above all, Matthiessen followed his own muse, and though he avoided repeating himself, all of his books combine his searching, acerbic intelligence with his gift for evoking landscapes and people, and all are shot through with glimpses of a reality beyond human understanding—a bit like what Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.†It’s a marriage of the dignified and the avant that can make his writing seem, at times, like a really good translation from another language. Both nature writing and what’s now called creative nonfiction owe him a huge debt, though his pure fiction tends to be overlooked (Far Tortuga, the experimental novel that preceded The Snow Leopard, doesn’t get the notice it deserves). …
Inside his house, everything was orderly, earth-toned, and wooden, both genteel and rough-hewn. Photographs of the people of the New Guinean highlands he visited in 1961 (vividly recalled in Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea), some of them taken by expedition mate Michael Rockefeller, surrounded a weathered baby grand piano; a pair of binoculars rested on its back on the piano’s lid. Smooth river stones, one of them incised with an elongated face that might be the Buddha’s, lined the sills of tall windows, among potted maidenhair ferns and a blooming Christmas cactus. In the backyard, two wooly-coated deer flecked with ice craned their necks to suck bird seed from a feeder, displacing a little cloud of cardinals and white-throated sparrows.
We sat in a cramped spare room he was using as a study, since the small outbuilding where he’d done the bulk of his writing was losing a battle with mold. He took a swivel chair beside the computer where he was working on yet another book: a memoir. It was a form he regarded with suspicion, and he was still finding its structure, which he compared to the branching leaves of giant kelp. I had to place my recorder close to him to catch his deep, conspiratorial rasp, but there was plenty it didn’t capture: he talked with his face and his hands as much as his voice, widening his eyes in surprise or crinkling them in mirth, fluttering his fingers to dismiss the encrustations of “lush writing†or opening his palms in surrender to a great line of prose. Or he enlisted all his features in sudden imitations of people or animals: an Inupiat pilot swatting a mosquito, a grizzly bear recoiling at the sight of a human, a white shark trying to swallow an outboard motor. The landscape of his creased forehead, wild eyebrows, and silver hair suggested stormy weather, but his eyes were a surprisingly mild, even innocent, blue. Only a month before his death, at the age of eighty-six, he was still clearly the man from the jacket flap of The Snow Leopard, and his memory for the smallest details of books he wrote half a century ago was ironclad. The pad of his right thumb was stained with green ink.
A great interview moment:
PM: My great question, I would say, comes from Turgenev, from Virgin Soil. One of the characters kills himself, but he leaves a note, and the note says: “I could not simplify myself.†[Drops jaw] Boy, that’s like that Akhmatova line, the epigraph from In Paradise—
BLVR: “Something not known to anyone at all—â€
PM: “—but wild in our breast for centuries.†Yes, you know. Oh! [Groans as if smacked in the chest] I know that feeling so well. It’s been my great, great aim in life, simplification. Total failure.
Read the whole thing.
12 Jun 2014


Funeral of my grandmother’s brother, Joseph Skarnulis, killed in Tunnel Ridge Colliery, Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1905. While crossing the breast to see if the manway was open, a fall of coal caught him, killing him instantly. My Aunt Rose (born 1901 — died 1988) is the little girl at the head of the coffin. My Aunt Ann (born 1900 — died 2000) is the little girl peeping over the coffin to her left. My grandmother, Martha, is the lady with the big hat cut in half by the break in the photo. My grandfather, George Zincavage, is the fellow with the droopy mustache to her right.
Commenter Chris writes:
1. We control our border. If we cannot do this what’s the point of being a nation
“Controlling our borders” is a slogan. In reality, the United States has thousands and thousands of miles of border passing through uninhabited, empty wilderness which any really determined person can cross. We can’t control those borders completely because the economic cost of doing so would be ridiculous and the benefit trivial. We can’t control our borders perfectly for the same reason nobody can conquer Afghanistan: It would be a tremendous waste of money, so no one is ever going to do it.
Some loons want to built a barbed wire fence all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. What a noxious symbol of statist irrationality and inhumanity that would be! We’d have our own Berlin Wall, but enormously longer, where we could shoot people for trying to come here in order to better their lives, instead of for trying to escape.
2. We DO NOT implement Amnesty. What point is having laws on the books if we’re going to abrogate them whenever we please?
The problem with this argument is that existing immigration rules embody no real principles, serve no specific purposes, and reflect no real national consensus. They represent only this particular edition of bureaucratic modification cobbled together during a period of national confusion and bitter political division.
Why should anybody give a rat’s rear end if somebody else violates a basically unprincipled, ill-considered, and fundamentally pointless regulation? Personally, I want to see my lawn mowed, my roof fixed, and the world’s work in general done as well and as economically as possible. I don’t really care about the genealogy or national origin of the guy cutting my grass or picking the apples I buy. If the steak I buy at the local Bistro is more affordable because the busboy and the guy washing the dishes snuck into the country to take those jobs, I think that’s just great, and I wish those Hispanic gentlemen the best.
3. Deport those illegals involved in Criminal activity.
I can go along with that one, though I’d personally prefer no laws on the books criminalizing victimless crimes.
4. Prosecute any company paying less than minimum wage to their employees (not sure that’s even an issue)
If I were on the Supreme Court, I’d write you a ruling explaining why government interference with voluntary contracts between one American or one business entity an another are unconstitutional and are economically deleterious to society. There is no such thing as a just price other than a price voluntarily agreed to between to parties. The imposition of fixed pricing by law represents the illegitimate intrusion of governmental force on behalf of one party to the injury of another and of the whole of the rest of society.
Do those 4 things there won’t be a need for amnesty, because in a generation everyone here illegally will be eligible for some form of legal immigration, either through anchor babies, marriage etc.
My wife immigrated here from Canada. We got caught in the 86 amnesty legalization surge and a process that took 3 months ended up taking 3 years because of the volume of illegals that gained legal status. That’s BS of the first order that!
This has nothing to do with race but with FAIRNESS. What you are advocating is unfair to those that cannot run, jump, or swim the border. Why should Hispanic illegals get any preferential treatment? Get in line if you want to come here…. everyone else had to.
This is the Michelle Malkin argument. The problem with it is that compliance with unprincipled and essentially useless regulations really benefits nobody. What we ought to want is what’s good for the country. What’s good for the country is the free flow of willing and affordable labor and all benefits of a continued population increase comprised of the most dedicated, energetic, and ambitious citizens of foreign lands. I want my lawn mowed. I want my fruit and vegetables picked. I want low-skill jobs done cheap. I don’t care if the guy doing them said “Simon says” or stood in the proper line or filled out the right forms.
Even my 9th great grandfather that came over from Wales in 1658.
He stood in line to get here in 1658? I do not understand what you mean.
12 Jun 2014


Funeral of my great great uncle Frank Petrusky [Lith.: Pranas Petrauskas], killed in the mines, May 3, 1892, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
If you want to identify the proper American policy, the sensible and correct way of doing things, I commonly observe, all you need to do is go back a bit in history to a point in time before Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism, Reformism, Statism, and Goo-Goo-ism had hijacked the American Experiment and messed everything up.
What, then, was the real, traditional American policy on Immigration?
Well, boys and girls, before 1875, immigration to the United States was utterly and totally unrestricted. The Page Act of 1875 was the very first US law restricting immigration in any way. The Page Act was aimed at restricting the immigration of cheap Chinese labor and “immoral” Chinese women. This was the first of a series of laws aimed at restricting Oriental Immigration, based on philosophically questionable principles (excluding cheap labor competition, racism) as well as more reasonable practical considerations (the disinclination of Oriental immigrants at that time to assimilate and their continued loyalty to alien cultures, polities, and princes).
There was no federal role in naturalizing immigrants at all before 1906. Prior to the Naturalization Act of that year, naturalizing people was entirely up to the individual states. The 1906 Law federalized, and standardized, the naturalization process (and, for the first time, insisted on recording the names of wives and children of immigrant men becoming naturalized as citizens). Things were a lot more informal before 1906.
Additional legislation followed, in 1907 and 1908, and in 1917 and 1918, banning the entry of the disabled and diseased, requiring literacy on the part of non-elderly immigrants over 14 years of age, and placing more barriers to immigration from Asian countries. But, there remained no quotas at all on non-Asian immigration until 1921. In 1921, a national negative reaction to the recent arrival of people like my Lithuanian grandparents, all the Italians, the Poles and Slovaks, and the Eastern European Jews produced the Emergency Quota Act, which restricted the number of immigrants admitted from any country annually to 3% of the number of residents from that same country living in the United States as of the U.S. Census of 1910. This was, we need to recall, the great era of the second creation of the Ku Klux Klan, not to be confused with the original Reconstruction era Klan which was dissolved in the 1870s, whose membership peaked in the mid-1920s at 4-5 million men (roughly 15% of the eligible, non-Negro, non-Jewish, non-Catholic population). The quota system of the 1921 Act remained in place until 1965.
Restricting immigration is a Progressive Era policy constituting a radical break with earlier American practices and, I would argue, with the philosophy the country was founded upon.
The 13 colonies which united to become the United States were not culturally or ethnically uniform. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and the Cavaliers of Virginia both originated from England, but they had been cultural opponents, blood enemies, and opposing parties in a Civil War in their home country. Rhode Island was founded by religious radicals who would not live under Massachusetts law. Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers; Maryland by Roman Catholics. New York had originally been a Dutch colony. The Swedes first settled Delaware Bay. The original colonies, before the Revolution, contained significant populations as well of Scots Irish, German religious dissenters, French Huguenots, Scots Highlanders, and various other European groups.
Benjamin Franklin famously complained about Germans with “swarthy complexions” coming over, settling in Pennsylvania, refusing to learn English and not assimilating.
Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation…and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertained. Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it. I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties…In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.
Those rascally Germans, in some well-known cases, have never assimilated and it isn’t hard, even today, to find in Pennsylvania Amish, Mennonites, Dunkards, Schwenkfelders, and so on who still speak German. But Franklin was obviously wrong. They never did take over culturally or politically. Most of their descendants did assimilate, and the ones who didn’t we look upon today as quaint and think that they make an excellent tourist attraction.
Attempting to restrict the free movement of people, proposing to restrict the supply of labor in order to prevent competition, undertaking to have government favor a particular culture, and attempts to exclude hopelessly inferior people are all classic Progressive policies.
Hispanic immigrants come here because Americans need affordable low-skilled labor not otherwise available and we hire them. I would contend that the federal government has no business trying to come between me and Jose the Mexican, if I want to hire Jose to mow my lawn and Jose wants to take the job.
I’ve gotten around a good deal in the last decade, and my own experience persuades me that, in much of the country, all the low skill manual labor these days is being done by illegal Hispanic immigrants.
People who think that the government can stop illegal immigration (when Americans need and want to hire affordable low skill labor) are just as crazy as the people who think the government could successfully ban private gun ownership or who suppose that the government can win the War on Drugs.
In the first year of law school, they teach students the difference between things which are malum in se, things like theft and murder, which are wrong in themselves, and things which are malum prohibitum, things which are wrong only because the government says so.
It’s pretty easy to enforce laws against things which are malum in se. Even the criminals who break those kinds of laws know they are in the wrong. But malum prohibitum matters are different. Normal people just perform a mental calculus about how likely they actually are to get caught, and when they recognize that the state is in no position to catch them, they commonly just ignore those kinds of laws and do as they like.
People who get bent out of shape because somebody crossed the border illegally to come here to do honest work are crazy. They suffer from an excess of law worship.
Wake up and smell the coffee. There are something like 12 million illegal immigrants living in this country. This is exactly like guns. We are never going to go from door to door, searching through every innocent, law-abiding person’s house to confiscate all the guns. And we are never going to go door to door and round up 12 million, mostly honest and hard working people, then march them off, with women and children crying, at bayonet point to the cattle cars to be deported. Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union under Stalin, could pull off that kind of thing, but it is not in the American character.
I agree that we should not be providing welfare to illegal aliens, but straightening out our domestic politics and policies is our responsibility, not theirs.
Ever see my traditional memorial day posting? This country let my grandparents in. My grandparents were Roman Catholics (shudder!). They were Lithuanian, representatives of a people with a lot fewer ties (Thaddeus Kosciusko built West Point!) to American history and culture than the Mexicans, whose ancestors owned, settled, and explored what? 8 or 9 states before the first Anglo-Saxon ever set foot in them. What did the US get in return? They got labor in the coal mines, dangerous work that most Americans didn’t want to do, which labor played a key role in building industrial America and keeping the offices and homes in American cities lighted and heated for generations. America also got from my paternal grandparents three sons and one daughter who served in uniform during WWII.
If this country ever has another serious war, it will be damned glad it failed to deport all those illegal alien Hispanics, whose children will probably actually serve (unlike our privileged elite intelligentsia).
12 Jun 2014

And you won’t be able to visit this Polare Bookstore, formerly located in a 13th Century Dominican Church in Maastricht, Netherlands. Polare went bankrupt last January.
But, even so, gush and misuse of “literally” notwithstanding, I recommend this Buzzfeed feature. I had not known myself that Brattle’s, in Boston, had actually reopened after the disastrous 1980 fire. Had I realized it still existed, I would definitely have dropped in every time I was in Boston.
11 Jun 2014


Let’s hear it for the Tea Party and the Conservative Movement. Led by political geniuses like Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, and Micky Kaus, we just succeeded in tossing out of office for sins of ideological impurity almost certainly the most competent and conservative political leader in the House of Representatives.
Old John McCain betrayed the GOP on more crucial occasions and vital Senate votes than I can count, and we ran him for president against the most glamorous and most radical democrat party nominee in a generation. The Third Senator from New York, Lindsey Graham coasted easily to victory yesterday, having “more fun than any time I’ve been in politics,” kicking the crap out of the Tea Party.
But GOP great minds are today patting themselves on the back for successfully joining with liberal democrats in Virginia’s 7th District to eject from James Madison’s former seat the single congressman representing the greatest institutional threat to the Left.
Cantor’s crimes consisted, of course, merely of being an effective majority leader and operating as part of a system. Cantor wound up a target for a unfocused animosity against the system, while being additionally singled out for special blame for trying to negotiate with our adversaries to resolve the immigration mess.
Cantor’s loss is a particularly bitter one because it was, in significant part, produced by passionate enthusiasm over the only issue on which many conservatives and Republicans are dead wrong.
I was reflecting about all this unhappily today, and I found myself wondering how it is possible for Republicans to traffic commonly so openly in false and obviously bigoted stereotypes of Hispanic immigrants, to indulge so frequently and so loudly in xenophobia and nativism in a society in which the heavy hand of political correctness so typically enforces strict censorship of un-PC speech and condign punishment for conspicuous violations. I think that Republicans actually get to be bigots and racists about the Beaners because the liberals indulgently stand back and avoid criticizing that kind of Republican argumentation, knowing perfectly well just how electorally suicidal it is.
I know personally a lot of people, I actually have cousins, of fairly recent immigrant background, whose grandparents came to this country roughly a century ago, who talk like they think they came over on the Mayflower, and who self-indulgently like to believe that the Mexican illegal working as a laborer on construction, doing agricultural work, or making peanuts washing dishes is taking something away from them and spoiling their view of the landscape. These people seem to have no idea what earlier arrived Americans thought of their own exotic and uncouth ancestors back in the day when those ancestors arrived here –just like today’s Mexicans– to take jobs Americans wouldn’t do.
Cantor was right to want to do something to straighten out the unenforceable immigration legal mess, and the loudmouth, low IQ conservative leadership which took hold of an cheap and easily exploited emotional issue to attack him actually merely organized the proverbial circular firing squad. They knocked off one of our absolutely best political leaders, and they did it using an issue on which they were wrong and an issue whose exploitation is certain to harm Republican prospects. We used to win elections in California. We elected Ronald Reagan governor of that state, and then gained the presidency. Then, the same kind of bright thinkers devoted their political energies to bitching about the presence of the Hispanic immigrants who mow their lawns and do all the other manual labor in California, and they gave the state away to the insanely radical California democrats. Keep it up, and we can count on the same process working nationally.
11 Jun 2014


How did Cantor actually lose?
Andrew Sullivan’s gloating readers are this morning offering some clues.
Reader 1:
I live in the 7th District in Virginia, and I am a Democrat who voted for David Brat in the open primary. There has been a whisper campaign going on among the Democrats in the district for the last few weeks and it resulted in many Democrats coming out to vote for Brat. We felt especially encouraged after the 7th District committee nominated Jack Trammell to be the Democratic candidate for the seat last Sunday. We now feel we at least have a fair chance at winning it. (By the way, Jack Trammell is a professor at the same small college as Brat, Randolph-Macon.)
Reader 2:
Here’s a theory to support your reader who, though a Democrat, voted for Brat: in 2012, roughly 47,000 people voted in the 7th District Republican primary. This time, roughly 65,000. Now let’s assume that of those 18,000 new voters, 16,000 were Democrats voting to axe Cantor, then rework the numbers if they hadn’t voted: Cantor would then have had around 29,000+ votes, and Brat would have had around 20,000+. Which would have worked out to approximately 59% for Cantor, which is where he was at in 2012 and much closer to his internal polling showing him with a lead of 34% among likely REPUBLICAN voters.
I’m thinking time will show that Democrats in his district were fed up with him, and decided to do something about it.
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Cantor should just run, and win, as an independent in November, rather than giving up. What would a left-wing democrat (sandbagged in a primary by the opposition party) do?
And Virginia should get rid on non-party-registration and open primaries.
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CORRECTION: Damn! Cantor actually cannot run as an independent. Commenter JKB points out that Virginia not only has open primaries, it has a “sore-loser” law preventing candidates defeated in a primary from entering the race as independents.
WSLS10:
According to the Code of Virginia’s section on candidates and elections (24.2-520), candidates filing for a primary must sign a statement agreeing that if they lose, their names cannot be printed on ballots for the general election. Meaning, if a candidate in the Republican primary for the 5th District loses on June 8, he or she cannot run as a third-party candidate in November.
The deadline for filing as an independent, however, is June 8 at 7 p.m. – the same time the primary polls close.
10 Jun 2014

(Image: Museum of Victoria)
earthstory: This is the Welcome Stranger Nugget.
Discovered in 1869 by Cornishmen John Deason and Richard Oates in Victoria, Australia, it is the largest gold nugget ever discovered.
It weighed in at 69kg (152.1 lb.) and measured 61x31cm (24×12.2″) and it was found just a couple of metres below the surface.
At the time no scale was big enough to weight the nugget so it was broken into 3 pieces and each piece weighed separately.
At today’s Gold Value the nugget would be worth
$3,786,257.01 AUD (Correct 21/09/2012 Perth Royal Mint)
To read more:
Museum Victoria
Australia Historical Finds and Discoveries
Australian Gold
VisitMaryBorough.com
Via Ratak Monodosico.
10 Jun 2014

Jacob Riis, Bandits’ Roost — 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, 1888.
I wouldn’t go in there, if I were you.
09 Jun 2014

The most self-important airhead of them all: Thomas Friedman
Everyone laughed on reading Maureen Dowd’s naive and self-important account of her bad experience and inability to handle the effects produced by nibbling a caramel-flavored candy bar containing marijuana during a recent trip to Denver.
What did these bozos do back when they were at college in the 1970s? we wondered.
MoDo’s hyperbolic account of her horrible ordeal, the paralysis! the paranoia! the disorientation! the failure to maintain, Man! has inspired inquiring minds on the Internet to wonder what would it be like if other self-important, windbag, journalist airheads got stoned.
What if, for instance, his emminence, the New York Times’s own Tom Friedman were to become unaccustomedly wrecked?
Sarah Jeong took on the task of imagining Tom Friedman pulling a Maureen Dowd and produced a masterpiece of satire in the haiku-like-form of a series of Tweets (happily collected at Twitchy).

Via The Dish.
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