News from the superficial world of online dating:
It turns out, women really care about men's height. I'm 5'9”, if I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who's 5'10”, right, another inch? I would have to make about $35-40,000 more a year.
This and other, deeper and more interesting, observations about human motivations and the psychological discount rate, in the Big Think Interview With Dan Ariely.
Today's Miami Herald has a report that raises as many questions as it answers about a dirty trick gone bad, originally aimed at Joe Garcia, the likely Democratic candidate for the open House seat in FL-25.
As I haven’t blogged much about this race previously, forgive me for taking longer than usual to set the scene, but I think the background is relevant.
The primaries are not until the end of August, but the smart money is for Garcia, who ran a strong campaign against an incumbent two years ago, to win the Democratic primary and face the likely victor on the Republican side: increasingly beleaguered state Rep. David Rivera. If fundraising numbers are any guide, both candidates should coast to easy wins over their less-well-known and underfunded primary opponents.
That said, Rivera has had a really, really bad month or so. (Bear with me.)
So, to sum up, the Rivera campaign has some reason to be feeling a little worried.
Utterly coincidentally, someone cooked up the idea of sending voters in Collier County a campaign mailer that tries to suggest that because he served in the Obama Energy department – as head of the Office of Minority Economic Impact – Garcia is responsible for the Gulf Oil spill. It also tried to suggest that Garcia, the former director of the Cuban-American National Foundation – is somehow anti-Cuban. Yes, really: see the Miami Herald’s Student's bizarre attack ad targets Democrat Joe Garcia (7/23/10).
The mailer claimed to be paid for by a newly registered independent expenditure group, a so-called 527 organization, called “Progressives for Prosperity.” The head of this group was a 19-year-old college student at FSU named Matthew Slider who claimed to be a Democrat supporting one of Garcia’s primary rivals. You can see a picture of the mailer over at the Reid Report.
That story didn’t last real long. Today’s Miami Herald reveals that in fact the moving force behind “Progressives for Prosperity” is Evan J. Power, a Tallahassee lobbyist and political operative with a history of dirty tricks. And the student whose name is on the registration papers, well, he’s angry and says he was conned (7/28/10):
Slider said he met Power through a friend, fellow FSU student Chris Spencer. Spencer and Power told him they needed a registered Democrat to head the political group and showed him copies of a positive mailer they planned to send out that outlined Meurice's best qualities. That mailer was never sent.
But it gets better. Not only does Matthew Slider now say (under oath!) that Power tricked him, but he claims that there is no way his organization could have paid for the mailers since it only ever had $100 in its bank account. As reported in the Naples Daily News,
“Evan Power told me that despite the difference in their political parties, he was supporting Luis Meurice and cited polls, which I never saw, that supposedly claimed Mr. Meurice would be a strong general election candidate versus David Rivera,'' Slider said in his sworn statement.
Lobbyist Power says someone hijacked the group’s name the very week he was creating it, and the mailers were a complete surprise to him. The lobby group that employed Power seems to have taken a dimmer view of the situation, as it has fired him.
The timing is especially suspicious here. According to the Naples Daily News,
Slider said he was assured that he would get to see and approve any piece of mail sent out by the 527 group and that no mail had yet been distributed.
…
What struck him most about the mailer, he said, was that it was sent from Miami on Saturday July 17, but the group wasn’t formed until Monday.
“It all just clicked,” Slider said. “I realized I had been duped.”
According to the Herald, “Garcia's campaign said it is considering legal action, especially since the bank statement shows money was never withdrawn to fund the mailers.”
Usually campaigns don’t like to get involved in lawsuits since it drains time and money away from the main task of reaching voters. But this is one time where I wonder if the lawsuit might not be worth pursuing. Discovery could be very interesting, as witnesses will have to explain under oath just how independent of Rivera they were, and where the money came from.
(Of course if they deny everything under oath, then it all grinds to a halt unless someone can find the printer.)
Didn't set off a thing.
Previous relevant post: What I Expect to Learn Today
…is whether the metal valve in my aorta sets off airport metal detectors.
Yes, the family is leaving early in the day for a quiet (two teenage boys, cough cough) week's holiday to a house in a location which if not in the absolute middle of nowhere is at least on the edge of it. But only, promises the rental ad, about 30 minutes from somewhere. Even if it is, we later discover, some 75 feet from the road to the house.
To get there from here will involve a short flight as I didn't feel up to the very long drive we might otherwise have taken. Then we will still have a car ride of some length. The house is well suited, allegedly, for lounging about — something I'm getting quite practiced at. There are supposed to be great views. And if I want exercise, well, the house is on a mountain side.
There's supposed to be broadband, so we may be on the information highway even if we're just on the edge of the paved grid. Or there may not be broadband, in which case there will be very little posting for a week, but that doesn't mean I've had a relapse. Or, there may be broadband and I still may not be posting much.
(As regards the metal detectors, I have this card I'm supposed to give anyone who wants to point a magnetic field at me about the metal inside me. It tells them the safety parameters beyond which the fields can hurt me. It looks terribly easy to counterfeit, so I wonder if the TSA will accept it if I do set off the alarms, or if I'm headed for the back room to show them my scars.)
All this is due to the fact that I'm feeling considerably better than I was, say, two months ago. There is no question that I am recovering, slowly but generally surely. That said, I still have some way to go before reaching normal strength and especially stamina. I can do most of what I used to do — but not nearly as much of it in a day. And a cold really really knocks me out. And I'm not up to doing much work yet.
The docs said it would take six to twelve months to feel 100% and it has been about five (or four if you count from my hospital discharge) so far, so I suppose I'm on track. Teaching starts in a few weeks, and I'm confident I'll be ready to handle the one class I'm scheduled for. Whether I'll be up to much of anything else remains to be seen.
The Harvard Crimson (they publish in summer?) has a nice story on Edmond Joseph Gong who flunked out of Harvard Law after his first year — they said he would “never become a lawyer” — but after a stint as a reporter found a second chance in his home town, at the University of Miami School of Law from which he graduated in 1960.
Mr. Gong went on to become an Assistant US Attorney, then got elected to the Florida House, then the Florida Senate in 1966, making him the only nonwhite state Senator at that time.
It seems the letter telling him not to come back to Harvard Law served as a powerful inspiration…
Pay czar chose not to go after $1.6B in bank pay – Yahoo! News
The Obama administration's pay czar said Friday that he did not try to recoup $1.6 billion in lavish compensation to top executives at bailed-out banks because he thought shaming the banks was punishment enough.
Yes, such humiliation. How will they ever be able to look themselves in the mirrors of their Ferraris?
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