I’m having a little too much fun setting this up…
“His eyes filled with tears.”
An inside account of the government shutdown negotiations, and John Boehner’s role at the center of them. I’ve already given you the money quote.
Meanwhile, a look ahead to the impending debt ceiling battle. Let me be the first to say, “#PANIC!”
Demolition porn
The demolition of the old Stapleton Airport parking lot continues apace. Kind of cool.
Wider view below.
In the great green room…
Due to my Twitter hiatus, I can’t retweet this tweet by @pourmecoffee — so I’ll blog it and blockquote it instead:
Goodnight moon. Goodnight Boehner, goodnight Reid. Goodnight Bachmann, goodnight Trump’s hair, goodnight morons everywhere.
LOL!!!
By the way, you can consider this an open thread on the impending government shutdown if you want. I don’t really have anything much to say about it, other than ugh, and — in the immortal words of, well, 19-year-old Brendan Loy, yelling out from the Daily Trojan balcony to the USC campus at large after Bush was (prematurely, it turned out) declared the winner on Election Night 2000 — “EVERYONE SUCKS!!!”
The VCU “riot”
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Brilliant video of the VCU “riot” after the Butler loss. (Warning: profanity!)
Doesn’t look like much of a riot, really — more like idiotic, and somewhat dangerous, but mostly non-destructive, drunken revelry — but maybe that’s the soundtrack talking. Anyway, great video, courtesy of Mondial Creative Labs on Vimeo.
OMG FRAUD IN WISCONSIN!!!!! (not)
King County, Washington, meet Waukesha County, Wisconsin:
In one explosive stroke Thursday, the clerk in a Republican stronghold tilted the tight Supreme Court race in favor of Justice David Prosser by recovering thousands of untallied votes for the incumbent.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday that she failed to save on her computer and then report 14,315 votes in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial total she released after Tuesday’s election. With other smaller errors in Waukesha County, Prosser gained 7,582 votes over his challenger, JoAnne Kloppenburg, leaving the sitting justice significantly ahead for now amid ongoing official counting.
“I’m thankful that this error was caught early in the process. This is not a case of extra ballots being found. This is human error which I apologize for,” Nickolaus said, her voice wavering as she spoke to reporters.
The figures are still far from final in a race that had previously seemed almost certain to see a statewide recount. Around the state, elections officials Thursday were tweaking unofficial results from the day before that had put Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general, ahead of Prosser by a razor-thin 204 votes.
But nothing compared to Brookfield, where the new totals give 10,859 more votes to Prosser and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg.
You can just imagine the howls of protest and outrage from the Right if something like this had happened to favor a Democrat. An awful lot of conservatives these days assume a priori that any late changes in a vote count that go against them are, by definition, examples of systemic, conspiratorial Democratic vote fraud. I suspect, though, that they’re okay with this change! Meanwhile, although I haven’t been reading liberal blogs or Twitter feeds this evening, I presume that certain corners of the Left are howling about this. It’s a conspiracy!! They’re stealing the election!! Scott Walker = Hitler!! For my part, I will assume — as I always do, regardless of which party is ahead and which is behind — that this is simple, legitimate, honest human error, unless I see actual evidence to the contrary. Just like the errors and irregularities in Florida, and King County, and Minnesota, and Bridgeport, and on and on. Election officials are human; this kind of thing happens. Join me, won’t you, conservatives and liberals, in making this assumption? In all future elections, regardless of who benefits from this sort of error? Don’t cry “fraud” unless there’s actual evidence of fraud?
I want iTunes for live sports radio
Why isn’t there an iTunes-like service where I can go online with my iPhone, find the local radio broadcast for basically any sporting event, and pay $0.99 per game to listen to it? Maybe not for sports like Major League Baseball that already have fairly advanced systems for listening/watching online, but for other sports? Like college basketball and football, say? This should exist!
As things stand now, I can use an app like TuneIn Radio (either through its “RadioTime Sports” feature, or its “Browse Local Radio” feature) to find a handful of games, sometimes. But it’s a total crapshoot, and often the local station that broadcasts the game I want to hear doesn’t stream its game broadcast at all, presumably because of licensing agreements or whatever. That’s stupid! Instead of locking me out, make me pay! Create a centralized system for this sort of thing, make it intuitive and simple, and people will use it. If the price were an iTunes-like $0.99 or $1.29, or hell, probably even $1.99, I — and a lot of other sports fans — would drop that kind of money repeatedly, without really thinking about it. I demand that someone fill this market niche!
LRT loses 150 pixels of ugly fat
With basketball over, football far away, and Becky heading into her third trimester, I’ve decided to take a break from Twitter. This eliminates, at least for the moment, the need for an extra or double-wide blog sidebar showing my latest tweets. So we’re back to the old 835-pixel-wide layout. Low-res and mobile users, rejoice! (Apropos of which, if this page looks screwy on your browser, reload it. If it still looks screwy, load the stylesheet, hit reload on it, then come back to this page and click reload again.)
Meanwhile, for posterity’s sake, after the jump is the entire “March Madness Live” live-tweet window that’s been in my sidebar for the last month.
Pat McGriff wins LRT Men’s Pool; Lindberg 4th
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Pat McGriff of Boone, Iowa, a secretary at Iowa State University who has been entering my free NCAA Pools since she found them over the Internet in 2009, won the 16th annual Living Room Times men’s pool, riding her unlikely pick of a UConn national title to an surprising pool victory. She rallied from 123rd place at the end of the first round; 85th after the opening weekend; 43rd heading into the Elite Eight; 17th heading into the Final Four; and 5th before tonight. She finishes with 272 out of a possible 477 points.
UConn junior Dan Dinunzio and Mike Long, both of whom also picked the Huskies, finish second and third with 266 and 264 points, respectively. Dane Lindberg, who picked Butler to win the championship and would have won the pool if the Bulldogs had done so (or if Kentucky had beaten UConn in the Final Four), instead finishes fourth with 263 points. Robert Carlos rounds out the Top 5 with 262 points.
Butler-UConn liveblog
In addition to the general March Madness live-tweet window in the right sidebar, all of my tweets tonight — and all tweets by anyone on the TMM Folks list, the #TMMhoosiers list, and various hand-selected individuals, plus all tweets tagged #midswin or #AOUEOU — will appear below. (Note: CoverItLive’s tweet import is wonky. Most tweets will appear almost instantaneously, but a few may be substantially delayed, or not appear at all.)
To join the conversation, you can either tweet at me (there’s a window at right for that) or use the “Send questions or comments” box below. However, any comments submitted there must be approved by me, unless & until I auto-approve you for future comments.
GO BUTLER!!!!! (Sorry, fellow Nutmeggers. My heart is with the mid-majors now.)