The WeekEnder: July 20-22, 2007

With exactly eighteen months until the end of one of the most diatrous Presidencies in American history, I welcome you to the fourth installment of The WeekEnder! The WeekEnder is a weekly series that will provide a hodgepodge of information to fill your soul, make you laugh, make you cry, and inspire you.

• Congressional Dems support students
• State court to voters: you need ID
• Oops - forgot about that
• A pricier alternative
• Achieving your goals
• Who needs work when you can vacation?
• Tim Ryan, champion of students
• Arnold Bennett dispenses some advice
• Cows and Enron
• Not a victim to what's popular

Good news: Congress passes relief for students

Thank you Democrats in Congress!

On Wednesday, July 11th, the House passed the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, and the Senate has now followed suit. The bill will provide the single largest increase in college aid since the GI bill in 1944. The legislation invests about $18 billion dollars over the next five years in reducing college costs, helping millions of students and families. It comes at no new cost to taxpayers, and is funded by cutting excess subsidies paid by the federal government to lenders in the student loan industry.

It's great to see a majority in Congress that actually cares about students!

Bad news: Michigan Supreme Court moves to disenfranchise voters

In case you needed a reminder of where Republicans stand when it comes to election reform:

The high court split along party lines in a 5-2 decision, with Republican justices voting to uphold the ID requirement and Democrats dissenting.
The Michigan Democratic Party is weighing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Having a driver's license is a luxury not a right," said Pete Vargas, chairman of the Lansing school board's Chicano/Latino Advisory Committee. "Voting is a right."

City Commission candidate forgets about debate
Well, at least he's honest.

Second Ward residents hoping for a rip-roaring debate among the four candidates for their City Commission seat were disappointed Thursday.

Only two candidates -- David LaGrand and Ruth Kelly -- showed up at Clancy Street Ministries for the 90-minute televised forum, and both went out of their way to be polite to each other and the no-shows.

Contacted at home afterward, candidate Michael Booker said, "I just plain forgot about it." (emphasis added)

Blog highlight of the week: How much more do you want to pay?
I don't know anyone who loves paying taxes. But as former Michigan House candidate Dan Scripps reminds us, taxes are preferable to the alternative:

The choice in the ongoing budget debate is not whether our costs will go up, but how. Are we willing to pay a modest increase in taxes that all of us share in to build our future and get Michigan moving again, or are we going to pass the buck to make the skills we know we need to compete that much more expensive to obtain? How our representatives answer that question will tell the citizens of this state much about where our priorities are and whether we care more about our children's future than our present situation.

Link of the week: 43Things
So what do you want to do with your life?

Recently (i.e. less than 24 hours ago!) I discovered 43things.com. Create an account on 43Things, and you will be able to list things you would like to do during the course of your life (i.e. get married, write a book, visit a certain place). You can also see how many other people want to do the same thing, and hear from people who have done it.

Photo of the Week: Senators On Vacation
This photo won me $25 on a recent contest on Michigan Liberal:








Video of the Week: Tim Ryan speaks out for ordinary Americans
You go Congressman Ryan:



Quote of the week: Arnold Bennett
"The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else."

Joke of the Week: Economics explained
Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.

Communism: You have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

Enron Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt-equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred through an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The Enron annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.

Final thought
I don’t care about Harry Potter. There, I said it.

The WeekEnder: July 13-15, 2007

Bonjour! Happy Bastille Day, and welcome to the third installment of The WeekEnder! The WeekEnder is a weekly series that will provide a hodgepodge of information to fill your soul, make you laugh, make you cry, and inspire you.

• Victory for election integrity!
• Poor bear brunt of housing crunch
• Can't we all just get along?
• What national security really means
• Keeping yourself organized
• Call him LonelyBoy08
• Ask George
• Thoughts from a dearly departed Lady Bird
• Convent
• Something magical

Good news: Judge orders revote in 2004 county race

Three cheers for voting integrity!

Late news this afternoon, sent to The BRAD BLOG moments ago, reveals that a judge in an Alameda County, California election contest is set to rule that a contested ballot measure election from 2004 must now be reheld since the county destroyed data from the election when they sent the Diebold DRE voting systems back to the company in Plano, Texas.

All but 4% of election data, records and audit logs was overwritten in subsequent contests, according to the following release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation which has supported the plaintiffs in the contest.

The unprecedented decision to re-hold an election after plaintiffs were denied the right for a proper recount could have reverberations around the country.

May this signal the demise of unverifiable electronic voting.

Bad news: Nation's poor hit by housing crunch

Once again, Michigan is NOT in a "single-state recession."

Growing numbers of the nation's poorest households are using more than half their earnings for rent while waiting years for federal housing assistance that may never come.

The phenomenon is largely playing out in urban and suburban locales, but has exploded recently in rural areas as coveted rental assistance becomes harder to get due to high demand and scant funding from Congress.

The lack of affordable homes for poor families is the nation's No. 1 housing problem and undermines the stability and security of families and communities nationwide.

A new report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development describes the startling growth of the problem since 2003. It found that 6 million impoverished households used most of their monthly earnings for housing or lived in substandard conditions in 2005. That’s an increase of 16 percent, or 817,000 families, since 2003.

Attempted robbery ends in bear hug
Aww, how lovely.

"Give me your money, or I'll start shooting," he said, according to D.C. police and witnesses.

Everyone froze, including the girl's parents. Then one guest spoke.

"We were just finishing dinner," Cristina Cha Cha Rowan, 43, told the man. Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?

The intruder had a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupery and said, "Damn, that's good wine."

Blog highlight of the week: The Party of National Security
Nail, meet head. Turkana at Daily Kos concludes a diary on national security as such:

We are not fear-mongers. We are speaking calmly about real threats. The risk of terrorism should not be misconstrued as excuses for militancy, Constitutional abuses or the undermining of individual liberty. That was Bush's way. It didn't work. It was, in fact, counter-productive. That's what we need to talk about. That simple fact creates one of the greatest political opportunities Democrats have had in decades. This is a political paradigm shift. The Republicans have long been the party people turned to, when they were afraid. We can tell them to stop being afraid. Because we have a better way.

Strength does not mean staggering around like a drunken frat boy with a sledgehammer. It means being smart. On national security issues, it means being surgeons with scalpels. Having the world's greatest weapons arsenal means nothing if we are inept at diplomacy and intelligence. The facts speak for themselves. The Bush Administration is an utter failure and a continuing danger. The Democratic Party is now the party of national security.

Link of the week: Google Docs and Spreadsheets
Ever wish you could save your documents easily and access the from any computer with Internet access? Whether analyzing the results of last November's election or writing a paper, Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been an important tool for me. Anyone with a Google account can use it, so give it a try! ;-)

Photo of the Week: All alone
With a hat tip to Jeffrey Feldman, I am pleased to introduce you to:


Tom Tancredo. Tancredo was the only Republican to attend the presidential candidates forum held by the NAACP in Detroit this week. That's right - the same Tancredo who is considered the most anti-immigrant of the 2008 candidates.

Video of the Week: Ask George
Rep. Geeorge Miller (D-CA) is seeking your questions regarding Iraq policy:



Quote of the week: Lady Bird Johnson, 1912-2007
"I'm optimistic that the world of native plants will not only survive, but will thrive for environmental and economic reasons, and for reasons of the heart. Beauty in nature nourishes us and brings joy to the human spirit."

Joke of the Week: Leaving the convent
In the convent a young nun went to see the mother superior.
"Mother, I want to quit the veil."
"But why, my child?"
"To become a prostitute."
"What? What are you saying?"
"I said I want to become a prostitute, Mother."
"Oh. You had me worried for a moment. I thought you said Protestant!"

Final thought
As of tonight, the Detroit Tigers' magic number for winning the American League Central pennant is 74. In other words, if the Tigers won 74 more games this season, they would win the division. If your favorite team is in first place, it's easy to determine its magic number. Simply add your team's number of wins with the second-place team's number of losses, and subtract that from 163 (the total number of games played plus one).

From Media Mouse: Ehlers Introduces Voting "Reform" Legislation

Media Mouse has the scoop:

Last month, Grand Rapids area Congressional Representative Vern Ehlers Republican) introduced the Voting Enhancement and Security Act of 2007 (HR 2360) in the House of Representatives. The bill would amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to establish state guidelines for an independent and verifiable voting record on electronic machines, require state auditors to certify audit plans, and require states to develop contingency plans and emergency ballot protocols.

Republicans on the House Administration committee--on which Ehlers is a ranking member--are urging their colleagues in the House to vote for Ehlers' bill instead of another popular voting reform bill known as HR 811. That bill would require that electronic voting machines generate voter-verified paper trails and require them to be in place by 2008 and would require mandatory audits of a portion of precincts in federal races. A key difference is that Ehlers' bill does not require changes by the 2008 election, nor does it require the paper trails that many voting reform organizations have sought. Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice Under Law of New York University said that Ehlers' bill "does nothing to address the serious voting system security vulnerabilities experts have identified" and cites it as an example of Republicans using the tough deadline imposed under HR 811 to ensure that Congress does not address the security and accuracy of voting machines.

However, some critics of HR 811's deadlines have introduced legislation calling for paper trails. On May 25, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Ballot Integrity Act of 2007 that would implement safeguards to prevent errors and tampering at the polls, require states to use voting systems with voter-verified paper records subject to public manual audits in the 2010 federal elections, and ensure that voters are not denied the right to vote by faulty purges of voting rolls.