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July 11, 2009 03:59 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 24 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”

–Marcel Proust

Comments

24 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread

  1. I do not believe the AG office liked Ritter’s defense yesterday.

    http://www.gjsentinel.com/sear

    Geoff Blue, a spokesman for Suthers, said an attorney for Ritter never asked if there was a conflict of interest.

    “They said, `Look, you’d have to do all the legal work involving stimulus dollars. We need to hire outside help because we don’t think you can do it,'” he said.



    “We said, `OK, fine.’ We didn’t address who was hired, how they were hired or what the contract said,” Blue told The Associated Press.

    Blue said the attorney general’s office could have done the work for $75 an hour instead of the $450 hour Ritter’s office paid for the same work.

    Evan Dreyer, Ritter’s spokesman, said Blue was correct and Suthers did not address the other issues.

    Yesterday: “We’re cool the Republican AG signed off on my boys doing the work.  None story.”

    Today: “They are correct”.  

    I think Colorado history will say Ritter was the first one term Governor in decades because of his reliance on attornies both inside and outside the administration. Not a political bone in the entired administration.  Dreyer must of had a bad day defending this.  

    1. I loved this comment from the Guv’s office:

      Myung Oak Kim, spokeswoman for the governor’s economic-recovery team, said Hogan & Hartson was the right firm for the job.

      “We disagreed with the AG’s position that its staff could provide the help we required,” she said. “We needed deep legal expertise on the most complex federal legislation passed in decades, and we needed it quickly.”

      http://www.denverpost.com/ci_1

      Doesn’t the Gov still have to work with the AG’s office on most legal matters (past, present, and future)?  It seems like, if you want the best representation from your attorney (and for him/her to always have your best legal interest at heart), you shouldn’t say not-so-nice things about your lawyer in the newspaper.

      Ditto for a lawyer re: his client. Does Suthers’ office really have so little work to do that taking on this new, large task would not have been a large strain?  Could the AG have objected to outside counsel and demanded to represent the Gov (in the absence of a conflict of interest, which doesn’t appear)? Did the AG implicitly agree in Feb. that outside counsel was appropriate (even though the AG didn’t agree to H&H necessarily).

      Hmm….crazy things doing on Colfax

      1. Of course most kids think their parents have poor musical taste 🙂

        Don’t speak the language at all, just came across the music on YouTube and grew to really like it. I saw a post once where someone said Russian is a beautiful language for singing. They were another person who does not speak the language but loves the music.

  2. “Consulting an on-line Dictionary, a definition for Sustainability can be retrieved as the ability to perpetuate existence. In the same resource the definition for Development will be given as growth or progress. A concept gathering these two words together forms what the Greeks termed an oxymoron, an idea devoid of logical sense. Can Sustainable Development be sustainable? Naturally not, for merging together two antonymous concepts, it simply cannot exist.

    So why is this oxymoron in the order of the day? Why does it get such attention? Why are so many so willing to discuss it so passionately?

    Sustainable Development is one of several philosophical concepts (having as much eeriness as mythology) that emerged in the wake of a series of decades of breathtaking, unprecedented growth. Growth as in development, the physical expansion of the Human-sphere, its population and interactive processes with nature, harnessing energy and concentrated matter, deploying waste heat and dispersing matter. These mythological concepts are simply a reflex of a society intoxicated with growth in front of the first signs of physical constraints to its development.

    Sustainable Development became the language of those that promise perpetual growth, and more, the profits that should come along with it. It is the language of those that do not want to reconsider their way of life. Of those who expect the XXI century to be the same as the XX century. Of those that expect to run all the cars on french fry oil or firewater. Of those who call Carbon Capture and Sequestration an energy source. Of those who promote the Hydrogen Economy, forgetting about the Nuclear energy system for which it was conceived. Of those touting Nuclear as Salvation. Of those touting Nuclear as Condemnation. Of those who expect Carbon Trading to reduce the OECD’s dependence on OPEC. Of those dreaming with a CO2 atmospheric concentration of 1000 ppm by 2100, accompanied by a 6ВєC global temperature rise. Of those saying that the Earth’s hydrocarbons are not fossil fuels. Of those drilling their way forward. Of those waiting for the Free Market to replace Fossil Fuels. Of those thinking all they need is changing light bulbs to continue living in 400m2 cardboard houses. Of those claiming to be in their hands a reduction of Fossil Fuels consumption.

    Sustainable Development is the philosophy of those fooling themselves, thinking that the Earth is flat, refusing to accept that the planet is a spherical object and thus finite. Of those refusing to face reality, refusing to wake up from their dreams.

    A decade from now Sustainable Development will be out of the agenda. By then the word of the day shall be Survival. The Survival of a Culture, a Social and Political Framework, a Civilization.

    Hopefully some will be able to wake up in time, leave the intoxicating dreams behind and face reality, however grim. Because then they’ll be able to devise a New Future. A Better Future. A Future founded on the real physical entities that run through our Economy, not in abstract, growth dependent, illusions. A Future where each man and woman have their place and are not enslaved by a spiral of virtual accumulation and spending. A Future where having more than the next man isn’t a goal in itself. A Future were work and excellence are rewarded by things that have real physical and meta-physical meaning.

    A Future.”

    h/t theoildrum.com

      1. Yes, humans have managed to muddle through many dire situations. But I would give at least some of the credit for this success to those who have pointed out that “business as usual” will take us over a cliff.

        Such wake up calls may be exactly what gets us humans to assess our current practices and modify them so that we pull back from the cliff directly in front of us and head towards a more distant cliff.

        After all, there are limits. Physics tells us so. What is fun is that we don’t actually know where these limits are and when we will hit them and how fast we’ll be going when we hit them.

        Muddle, thy name is Genius!

        1. when one of the two parties in the most powerful nation (because of the consumer) denies fundamental science about closed systems and the age of that system.  

      2. and need to seriously address these issues:

        Again, from Theoildrum.com:

        An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse”.

        This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing “invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society”.

        The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at “risk of getting worse due to the recession”. The report adds: “Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics.”

  3. Evidently, there is a group of republican congressmen who live and “love” together in a house on C street in DC.  Now, they are all hetero….the “love” is evidently the kind immortalized recently by the governor of South Carolina and the Senator from Nevada.   It makes the trip to Argentina look like a walk in the park, so to speak.

    here is the link to the book which describes The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

    http://jeffsharlet.com/

    There are 38 on the waiting list at DPL….so it will be awhile before I know if any Colorado politicos have been guests at the strategy/confessional sessions…

    my god, this is good stuff….  

    1. BE AFRAID. This far-right Christian fundamentalist boy’s club believes that they are entitled by God to be in office. Entitled. That’s why guys like Ensign and Sanford refuse to resign, no matter how much they sin. God still gives them a pass because He loves them, and they serve Him.

  4. Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”

    Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots’ culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there’s more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples–and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps–Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. –Mari Malcolm

    I was thinking about American Idol and you look at people in their initial audition and then their final performance. And it looks like a demonstration of what Gladwell says is the key to success – focused practice.

    And for those auditioning they have spent thousands of hours already so the intense professional non-stop training they get once they are on Idol then is boosting them up to (or close to) that 10,000 hour metric.

  5. Possibly because of voting in a poll, I have been getting more and more emails from our pals on the right.  This beauty came to me Friday morning from John Cornyn and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  They seem to want me to donate money to stop liberal Dems in Washington from running wild. Hell, I’d give ’em a little if they could somehow get them to START!

    You think if the GOP hadn’t spent so many years cutting education funds and promoting No Child Left Behind, they’d have some interns who knew how to spell ‘reckless’?

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