Half Past Noon

Vindicated by the King of Rock:

Absolute FOOM, my friends.

1. It had long been my dream that one day a brave Freshman at NSA would throw Tolkien and Monty Python to the wind and do Thriller (or at the very least Beat It) for the much-loved annual Latin Projects. Though Latin projects themselves seem to have been murdered and buried (only to be resurrected as brain-eating zombies in the occasional YouTube offering), I can die happy knowing this exists instead.

2. This song was a painful reminder to me of how utterly peerless Michael Jackson is when it comes to vocal performance. The fact that the guy can croon while moonwalking in goat-pants and white socks pretty much ensures that he will forever stand shoulder to shoulder with the gods of Rock History. Though the fellow singing does a good job (and gets better as the performance continues), he barely holds a flint and steel to MJ’s flaming gas giant of awesomeness.

Ronald Davis was a paid consultant for Obama, who called him the “guru of petitions.” Davis’s job on January 2, 1996 was to look at each of the nearly 1,600 signatures that stat senator Alice Palmer’s campaign had collected in order [to] place her on the ballot for re-election. Davis was supposed to find a way to challenge and disqualify as many signatures as possible. The goal was to throw her off the ballot.

Palmer, the long-time South Side activist and state senator since 1991, had gathered 1,580 signatures, more than twice the 757 required to get on the ballot. But Davis and his team, over a few days, disqualified hundreds of them, one at a time. Obama says he was uneasy with this hardball tactic. In the end, however, he would say of the five-year incumbent Palmer: “If you couldn’t run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be.”

With that justification, he approved the project, and he checked up on its progress nightly. One by one, Obama’s “petitions guru” disqualified Palmer’s signatures for one reason or another. According to one local newspaper at the time: “Some of the problems include printing registered voters name [sic] instead of writing, a female voter got married after she registered to vote and signed her maiden name, registered voters signed the petitions but don’t live in the 13th district.”

Soon enough, Davis and his crew had brought Palmer below 757 valid signatures.

They had thrown an incumbent state senator off the ballot.

– David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama, pp. 2-3.

Citizens of the Republic of Austinnica: It is with unconcealed pride that I declare to you today the selection of the official bird of our fair land, long may it prosper. A quorum of our parliamentarians labored long into the afternoon over the selection, and in a fit of fevered genius reinvented the sandwich midway through. I am utterly convinced of the excellence of their selection. » Read the rest of this entry «