
The other night I got to experience "poppers" at a party...a pretty lame experience overall! They were made in Hong Kong and had their pieces of paper with "jokes."
Ivars' Random and Politically Incorrect Thoughts, Rants, and Observations from sunny San Diego.
In an interview with Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, Schwarzenegger said that "the Republican Party currently covers only the spectrum from the right wing to the middle, and the Democratic Party covers the spectrum from the left to the middle." "I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center," he was quoted as saying. "This would immediately give the party 5% more votes without it losing anything elsewhere."
Schwarzenegger was guarded on suggestions that he harbors presidential ambitions, saying only that a debate on whether the constitution should be amended to allow foreign-born citizens to run was "overdue." Schwarzenegger became an American citizen in 1983, 15 years after he immigrated from Austria. He has said he'd consider running for president if such an amendment passed but also taken pains to say it shouldn't be created specifically for him.
"I would like people to remember me as someone who raised standards, wherever I got involved." he was quoted as saying. "I brought bodybuilding from nothing, I made the action film a genre, and the same goes for politics — I want to do things that no one believed possible. I would like to bring people together as governor."
The ballad, which begins, "Come and listen to a story about a man name Jed/ a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed/ then one day he was shootin' for some food/ and up through the ground came a bubblin' crude," was written by Paul Henning. Scoggins sang the lyrics while bluegrass stars Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs played guitar and banjo. Scoggins came out of retirement to sing the theme again for a 1993 movie based on the TV series.
Scoggins' country and western trio, the Cass County Boys, was hired by Gene Autry for his Melody Ranch radio program in 1946. The group performed in 17 of Autry's movies. The group, whose other members were John "Bert" Dodson and Fred Martin, also performed with Bing Crosby on television in the early 1950s. The Cass County Boys were inducted into the Western Music Hall of Fame in 1996. A memorial service is scheduled Friday.
"For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base," said the e-mail from MoveOn PAC's Eli Pariser. "But we can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers." Under McAuliffe's leadership, the message said, the party coddled the same corporate donors that fund Republicans to bring in money at the expense of vision and integrity.
"In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive," the message continued. "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." Pariser urged MoveOn supporters to help support a DNC chair with a bold vision to represent Democrats outside Washington. Democrats will vote at their February meeting in Washington on a successor to McAuliffe.
DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera declined to engage in a tit-for-tat with MoveOn, but praised McAuliffe's efforts. "Call me crazy, but I think the fact that for the first time in party history we outraised the Republicans, and did so primarily through grass-roots fund raising is something to be proud of," Cabrera said. Among those vying for the party chairmanship is former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean an early darling of MoveOn's cybernetwork of activists when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Excellence
Excellence is never an accident. It is achieved in an organization or institution only as a result of an unrelenting and vigorous insistence on the highest standards of performance. It requires an unswerving expectancy of quality from the staff and volunteers.