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Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Did DeLay’s Staffers Walk Out On Sekula-Gibbs?
The front page of today’s Washington Post has a glowing-if-quirky profile of the unusual swearing-in of Rep. Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, R-Houston, who will fill Tom DeLay’s shoes for seven weeks before member-elect Democrat Nick Lampson takes over for the 110th session of Congress.
Inside, the Post notes that a “few DeLay holdovers” would help her through the temp job.
Mmmmm, not so much.
In a story first reported by Roll Call, a congressional newspaper, all of the remaining DeLay-loyal staffers walked out and resigned in unison on Sekula-Gibbs on Tuesday, the day after she was sworn in to office. According to Roll Call reporter Mary Ann Akers, tensions simmered between Sekula-Gibbs and the DeLay crew.
Not that Sekula-Gibbs minds. She’ll be running the office for the next seven weeks with her own people, said Lisa Dimond, who ran Sekula-Gibbs campaign and is now serving as her chief of staff.
There will be four Sekula-Gibbs staffers in Washington and three in the district.
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The Following May Be True …
And then again, it may pure fiction. You probably won’t know.
But with so much false information finding its way onto the World Wide Web, the federal government has decided to pay Cornell University $680 trillion to find ways of detecting online fibbery.
Under a National Sciences Foundation grant titled, “The Dynamics of Digital Deception in Computer Mediated Environments,” three Cornell researchers will combine computer science and linguistics to study the problem.
The idea is that it may be possible to write a computer program that will recognize patterns of deception and flag messages that contain them.
For example, the grant is really for $680,000. Could a computer tell?
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Carville Says Dems Should Dump Dean over “Rumsfeldian” Incompetence
Democratic strategist James Carville says his party should dump Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic Party because of incompetence.
Carville, during coffee and rolls with political reporters today, said Democrats could have picked up as many as 50 House seats, instead of the nearly 30 they have so far.
The reason they didn’t, he said, is the Democratic National Committee did not spend some $6 million it could have put into so-called “third tier” House races against vulnerable Republicans.
Carville said the other Democratic campaign committees had borrowed to the hilt.
He said he tried to meet with Dean to argue for additional spending for Democrats in the final days of the campaign, but Dean declined and gave no reason why.
Asked by a reporter whether Dean should be dumped, Carville replied, “In a word, do I think? Yes.”
He added, “I think he should be held accountable.” He added, “I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its competence.”
Carville likened the Democratic takeover of Congress to the civil war battle at Gettysburg, which the Union army won but failed to pursue the Confederate army when it retreated.
“We should have chased them down,” Carville said. There was no immediate response from Dean or the DNC.
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Como Se Dice, ‘Sorry I’m Late, Judge’?
A total of 117 languages required interpretation in U.S. federal court proceedings during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
Federal law requires use of interpreters when persons appearing in court proceedings have communication disabilities. Courts use staff interpreters for Spanish and Navajo and contractors for other languages.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that 95 percent of the 205,000 interpreting events last year were in Spanish.
Other frequently used languages were Mandarin (1,480 events) Vietnamese (988), Arabic (908), Korean (871), Cantonese (868), Russian (610), Portuguese (492), Haitian Creole (447), and Punjabi (375).
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For those who stink at Fantasy Baseball…
…and those interested in just who’s going to wield power in the new Congress, there’s another option: Fantasy Congress. Draft a team at www.fantasycongress.org, recruit your members and watch as their legislative triumphs become your big wins.
Sure, the site isn’t without its flaws: It allows you to draft, for example, former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who stepped down shortly before Election Day. And it’s not really clear how much fun the game is going to be for the next few months, what with Congress adjouring shortly for the year. And what to do about that pesky lame-duck session? Is it better to recruit R’s or D’s?
But come next January, there’ll be a whole new league of rookies to recruit.
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