The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Todd Larason:

I just finished Kage Baker's The Life of the World to Come, for which I'd been waiting almost a year; as enjoyable as expected, but nearly as many new questions added as answered.

Eventually, she'll have to answer the questions, surely.

*Some* of the exceptions are for semi-reasonably beurocratic reasons -- different agencies regulate some of the industries, and the FTC doesn't have (or arguably doesn't have) the authority to regulate them. For at least some of the industry-based loopholes, the FCC has or is in the process of doing their bit to close the holes.

The "survey" hole, on the other hand, looks to me like a huge hole. I've been on the Oregon do-not-call list, which has a similar exception, for the past year; I'm now getting two to four 'survey' calls a week.

1556 to 0. And yes, I voted no.

The original quote has some other problems, too; surely the interesting ratio for that question is (number of mexican immigrants in state : number of mexican immigrants in US), not (number of mexican immigrants in state : number of people in state). Even then, that would answer where mexican immigrants *do* live, not where mexican immigrants *prefer to* live.

Oh, silly me, look at the URLs not just the names.

I've also got Timothy Burke (www_swarthmore_edu_SocSci_tburke1.rss) and Daniel Davies (d-squareddigest_blogspot_com.rss) feeds, from that list. And Vicki Rosenzweig (www_panix_com__vr_yawl_html.rss) who wasn't on the list but is probably of interest to folks here.

I have an entirely unofficial & unauthorized Pigs & Fishes (Avram Grumer) RSS feed running; folks who are actually reading this are welcome to use it (& the others found nearby, if there's interest), but I'd rather automated tools not discover it...

http colon slash slash www.molehill.org slash ~jtl slash rss slash www_pigsandfishes_org_links_weblog.rss

http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/13/reno.mcbride/index.html
"Former U.S. Attorney Janet Reno Friday requested a statewide manual recount of ballots cast in Tuesday's problem-plagued Democratic primary for governor"

"Reno campaign officials ... are requesting only a review of ballot counts on electronic voting machines in about 330 precincts Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, not a statewide recount"

Can someone offer an interpretation of those bits such that they don't contradict each other?

Another article, not *quite* as extreme as the CoR one (it apparently doesn't explicitely condone spanking that produces welts) has surfaced, this one undeniably written by Regier.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020823/ap_to_po/florida_child_agency_4

I grew up in Oklahoma City, and lived in Norman for a few years too. I've been in Portland, OR for about 5 years now.

If you were involved in democratic politics in Muskogee or Norman, we probably know people in common. Laura Boyd's running for Lt. Governor this year, and from what I hear she's got a pretty good shot at it.

Teresa: nope, no teeth

Mary Kay: hey, me too! Where in OK were you, and when did you escape?

There seem to be two very different readings of the second half of 19:18. The KJV and some of its derivatives roughly say "don't stop just because he's crying", while the others say "don't try to do serious harm". Am I misreading the KJV language, or is there an explanation for the difference?

Thanks for the followup, Patrick. And since, as Teresa said, retractions should be as public as claims are -- I retract everything I said, except as regards to the Stipe quote. I still think the story should have given more background on that relationship.

Yes, a bug report -- trying to post a comment without an email address fails, but does send mail to subscribers, so if you don't actually *read* the browser screen, it looks like it succeeded. That doesn't explain not getting Teresa's comment in mail, though.

(First, a bug report, I assume: a comment I made, and which was mailed to my subscribed address, is now missing; and I never got email for Teresa's comment)

As I said in the missing comment, the main thing that set my alarm bells ringing in that article was the Stipe quote, without any explanation at all of the background between the two; Stipe is hardly an impartial observer, or even your run-of-the-mill Democratic partison observer.

I didn't mean to imply Regier was unfamiliar with the paper -- if he was, then yes, that's even more disturbing.

I've seen enough blue-ribbon committees work to have little trouble believing a final report could be issued which a co-chairman disagrees with; sometimes they resign rather than allow their name to be used, sometimes they decide for whatever reason not to. In this case, *according to Regier*, he decided not to, but had a change of heart a year later.

And as to public retractions -- you're absolutely right. And hopefully reporters are asking him if he did anything publically in 1990 when he claims to have broken with the CoR, and are trying to verify it.


And moving even more off-topic (wait, are there topics?), for a non-political example of the chair vs. author thing: the ISO/IEC 9899-1999 document, updating the standard C language, lists Jim Brodie and Rex Jaeschke as chairs and Thomas Plum and Tom MacDonald as vice-chairs; I don't think anyone would assume that those four agree with every decision that went into the standard, though, nor necessarily actually wrote any of it.

A political document for an individual candidate is an opposite extreme; a religious document for a supposedly ecumenical organization looks to me to be somewhere between those two.

Given the quality of the rest of the article, it could well be that the quote was just taken out of context or misquoted.

Most of the piece rests on the fact/belief/assumption that Regier wrote or co-wrote the paper in question[1], which he denies[2]. The paper lists him as "Co-chairman", with an implication he was co-author, but it seems believable to me that it was really written by CoR staff, likely Jay Grimstead.

It also assumes Regier agrees with everything in the paper, which surely is rarely the case in committee-written documents.

Then there's the Gene Stipe quote...in one sentence, Regier's work dealing with the patronage scandal in the OK health department is mentioned, and OK senator Gene Stipe is quoted, without mentioning that Stipe was apparently the sponsor of several of the ghost employees in question.

[1] http://www.reformation.net/COR/cordocs/family.pdf
[2] http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2002/08/16/gov_bush/index.html

Comment statistics for Todd Larason on the Electrolite blog

Total: 16 comments. View all these comments on a single page.