A Republican state legislator from Fairfax County has launched an attack ad on cable TV against his Democratic opponent that features unidentified, unverified quotes from a blog.

Hugo’s ad highlights critical comments about his Democratic opponent, Rex Simmons, that someone with the screen name “Pitin” posted on the Democratic blog Raising Kaine. Tim Craig

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Presence of Malice.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Compared with Gasoline:

Ink Jet ink is $5,200 a gallon.

In the early 1990s, they were on TV all the time, a middle-aged, middle-class American couple named Harry and Louise, sitting around the kitchen table, worrying that Hillary Clinton”s health care plan would get between them and their doctor.

Not Harry. When his company went bankrupt a few years later, he and Louise lost their insurance and couldn”t get new coverage because of Harry”s asthma and coronary history… Robert Stein

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Spiritual Judasim by David Ariel.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav once said that every nation, every religion, has its own niggun (melody) that comes from the one, original niggun of Judaism. If we understand music as a metaphor for culture, we can say that Judaism is both a unique melody and a world music. We have sung our own song and taught this special song to the world. When we entered the Diaspora, we began to learn the songs of other choruses and the music of other orchestras. We learned to play harmony as we added other melodies to our own song line. From the essay: “The Unfinished Symphony,” pp 257-9

To improve my vocabulary (and my reading) I always keep a dictionary close at hand because I aspire to a Shakespearian vocabulary. Inspired by the new PBS Kids show Word Girl, I’ve decided to add My Words as an occasional feature here at Have Coffee Will Write. The word I’ve chosen for today is in medias res.

adverb : Latin, literally, into the midst of things : 1786 : in or into the middle of a narrative or plot.

Amid all the talk about a woman or African-American in the White House, there seems to be a resistance to taking Kucinich seriously because, in some way, he is not stereotypically presidential–too ethnic, too working-class, too head-on in confronting issues without softening the edges. Robert Stein

Run Denis run…

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

1954 An Important Read
0922 Newspapers in 2020: Death of editors?

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Clichs.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

If at first you don’t succeed:

So, I tried retirement and found that I’m perfect for the job.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Spiritual Judasim by David Ariel.

As we moved from one country to the next, we brought our civilization with us. We brought our own spiritual outlook with us and developed a rich Jewish life within our homes, schools and synagogues. We also learned from the environment about the dominant non-Jewish culture and balanced the best of it with the best of ours. Out of this synthesis came new expressions of Jewish culture. As we moved from one culture to another, we brought the cumulative traditions of all the cultures we had absorbed along with us. From the essay: “The Unfinished Symphony,” pp 257-9

Normally this would wait to appear as a From My Chapbook post, but I’m near the end of the Ten Days of Awe and finishing my annual assement and planning exercise, I thought I’d let everyone have a peak at the book that I annually read cover-to-cover: Time Power by Charles R. Hobbs; the best book written on the subject.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is 10 virtually instant ways to improve your life.

We all know facts that aren’t really facts. For years I’ve always thought the 80-20 rule was one of those; an intellectual urban legend. But today I discovered that it actually has a name and a creator: The Pareto Distribution, put forth at the beginning of the last century by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. I feel much better now.

[Update — 1207 — Jill adds details to the story with a link to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.]

Michael Righi went to the edge. And stepped back. I don’t know what happened behind closed doors. I don’t know what his family encouraged him to do or not do. I don’t know the financial realities he faced. There is a great deal of missing information about why Michael Righi’s stand for personal rights has taken the turn it has.

But here is what I do know. Michael Righi decided that the fight wasn’t worth the cost.

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The city prosecutor on Wednesday dropped a misdemeanor charge of obstructing official police business against Circuit City shopper Michael Righi.

And Righi agreed that a police officer did nothing wrong in arresting him after he refused to show his driver’s license outside the store Sept. 1.

Here’s how I see it.

Righi looked at the costs — both personal and financial — and said I can’t pay them.

He agreed to not involve himself and the City of Brooklyn in a protracted civil suit over unlawful arrest and what ever other charges his lawyer might come up with, in exchange for the city agreeing to not involve himself and the City of Brooklyn in a criminal trial to prove his guilt.

This is what Righi said on his blog yesterday:

I have been contacted by a number of people [including myself. JH] who indicated that they are planning on attending my hearing which was originally scheduled for tomorrow, September 20th 2007 in Brooklyn, Ohio Mayors court. [Huh?] I just received confirmation a few minutes ago that there will be no hearing tomorrow. I am very appreciative of the people that wanted to be there, and I”m very sorry for the last minute notice. Please do not show up at the municipal building as I will not be there. I”m sorry to be brief in my posting but I can”t say much more at the moment. I will provide more information at a later time.

And so we wait.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read in the last year or so about police and security guards using Tasers to subdue people. Ones that pop to mind include a student at UCLA and, of course, the student at UF. Both cases are examples of use of excessive force. Then we have this case from the Associated Press:

Sheriff’s officials defended their use of a Taser stun gun to subdue an autistic teenager who left a social services center where he was being treated.

“If that were your son, would you want him Tased or hit by a car?” Amormino asked.

Those are not the only two choices. The deputies could have wrestled Karras to the ground and restrained him. Yes. It would have been more difficult. Yes. It could have been dangerous to the officers and maybe even to the student.

But the Taser makes it too easy to avoid what must be seen as an acceptable level of danger associated with law enforcement.

Put a knife or other weapon in the hand of a violent person and I’ll never argue that police act improperly by using a Taser instead of a gun or attempting to wrestle the knife away.

There is also missing information in the story.

I’d like to know if the Taser used was the type that requires physical contact or the type that fires electrodes from a distance.

If it was the first type then the deputy was close enough to wrestle Karras to the ground. If it was the second type, and the deputy fired because he believed he couldn’t reach Karras in time to prevent him from being struck by a car, then the case takes on a different slant.

Law enforcement is hard. Law enforcement is dangerous. Police officers are not paid anything close to what they ought to be for the work they do. And we do not hire enough police so that we are left with mercenaries private security performing police actions.

Society gets the protection it’s willing to pay for.

Security on the cheap doesn’t make us safer. It just makes us a little wealthy in the short term.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

0646 Diversity among news disseminators, where art thou?
0643 On AG nominee Mukasey being an Orthodox Jew

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Spiritual Judasim by David Ariel.

Despite the religious sense of living in exile, Jews actually developed a deep sense of belonging to those alien places in which they resided. Jews developed a portable civilization that could be taken with them from one place to another as circumstances required. The circumstances of anti-Semitism frequently required Jew”s sudden and rapid departure from lands they had long called home. The Jews were expelled from Rome in 50, England in 1290, France in 1306 and 1394, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497, parts of Germany in 1348, Lithuania in 1495 and Prague in 1744. From the essay: “The Unfinished Symphony,” pp 257-9