I always get a vicarious kick out of the British election results, which should start trickling in around our supper time. The anticipated result is a "hung Parliament" with no one party winning more than 50 percent of the seats. The UK's two and a half party system has transitioned, with Labour's decline and the Liberal's re-emergence, into a full-fledged three party system. Throw in relatively strong fourth parties, the regional parties in Scotland and Wales, plus the four entire different Northern Ireland parties, and you can see how getting to the magic number (326) is a tough slog.
FiveThirtyEight has all sorts of scenarios, none of which look good for Gordon Brown and Labour.
Some of the rituals: A few districts ("constituencies" which are named not numbered) race to get the first result. Ballots are paper and hand counted, but they're not voting on 30-odd judges and soil commissioners like we do. Candidates go down to the local equivalent of our county auditor (the "returning officer") to hear the results read, in person, and stand there in triumph or (like poor Kevin Phillips Bong above) humiliation. No lame duck period; if David Cameron and the Conservatives win a clear majority the moving van will be backed up to Number 10 Downing Street first thing tomorrow morning.
A surprise shuffle on Capitol Hill as House Appropriations Chair Dave Obey (D-WI) retires after 21 (!) terms spanning six different decades.
The Iowa angle here: Obey is the fellow who crushed Des Moines Congressman Neal Smith's dream of chairing Appropriations (unofficial full name: the Powerful House Appropriations Committee, always with the Powerful modifier).
Chairing Appropriations is a lot like getting Green Bay Packers season tickets: you have to wait 40 years and someone has to die. That happened in 1994 when chair William Natcher of Kentucky (best known for never missing a roll call in 40 years) died. Smith took over for a few interim weeks. But when the House Democratic Caucus voted on a permanent chair, Obey beat Smith and took the gavel.
It's not uncommon for people who lose leadership fights like that to quietly retire, but Smith never got the chance. The House caucus vote was after Iowa's filing deadline, and Smith was a surprise victim of the 1994 GOP landslide as Greg Ganske drove the 1958 Studebaker DeSoto (representing the year Smith was first elected) to victory.
The 1994 wave also meant Obey, too, lost the Appropriations chair. He had to wait 12 years, until the Democrats regained control of the House in 2006, to get it back.
Obey was also, briefly, my congressman back in the grad school days. I remember the buttons said OBEY! in all caps with exclamation, as if commanding you. (It's pronounced O-bee, not o-BAY.) His district is the northwest and central part of the state, and covers my ancestor's homeland on the Lake Superior shoreline. Should be a hot race.
The contested House District 30 primary is heating up as incumbent Dave Jacoby announces an event:
I hope you can join me at a special event we're having next Wednesday, May 12th 5:00 PM-7:00 PM at Gus' Food & Spirits in Coralville. Special guests include Mayor Jim Fausett of Coralville, Mayor Matt Hayek of Iowa City, Mayor Tom Salm of North Liberty, and Mayor Royce Phillips of Tiffin.
That last name is really interesting.
In another hot area primary, the Senate 45 Republican race, Sandy Greiner picks up the Farm Bureau nod.
One year ago today: the sales tax election. The still unanswered question: "Could a campaign where Thornton and Thayer and Cox and Carsner were on the same team, with a cohesive voice, have flipped seven votes?" (the winning Yes margin in Iowa City; Coralville voted No by eight votes) "And how many people voted Yes just to spite `em?"
Speaking of the tea partiers, here's a third party fusion: behold the Green Tea Party!
Numbers, we got numbers, and even though prolific pollster Rasmussen is known for a strong Republican "house effect" at Rasmussen, Steve Singiser at Daily Kos says:
Is it possible that one of the most invulnerable Senators in recent American history is really within striking range. Looking at the Rasmussen poll in Iowa, it appears so.
IA-Sen: Sen. Charles Grassley (R) 53%, Roxanne Conlin (D) 40%
Grassley led Conlin 55-36 in Rasmussen's previous Iowa poll, taken in mid-March. Rasmussen's summary notes that Grassley "now leads Conlin by only five points among women."
Grassley leads Democrat Bob Krause by 57 percent to 31 percent, the same as in Rasmussen's March poll. He leads Tom Fiegen by 57 percent to 30 percent, a slightly smaller margin than his 57-28 lead in March.
...a few stumbles by Grassley could make this race highly competitive in a hurry. At the very least Conlin is going to make it a lot closer than any other Democrat has against Grassley in the last 25 years.
Things aren't looking as good for Gov. Big Lug:
IA-Gov: Terry Branstad (R) 53%, Gov. Chet Culver (D) 38% IA-Gov: Bob Vander Plaats (R) 45%, Gov. Chet Culver (D) 41% IA-Gov: Gov. Chet Culver (D) 43%, Rod Roberts (R) 41%
With numbers like these, will the ultra-right feel comfortable going for the whole loaf with BVP rather than settling for Back To The Future?
As for the Senate race, Tom Fiegen is trying to play the inside baseball "issue" of attacking Conlin for her donors. Unfortunately for him he gets the names wrong. I write more at the Register in Fiegen Complains: Conlin is Able to Raise Money. "Conlin has voluntarily turned down more money, in just those two refunded checks ($1750), than the Fiegen and Krause campaigns combined have in cash on hand."
Ironic after the Big Dorm Overkill Weed Raid, but praise due to two of my local officials, county attorney Janet Lyness and sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek, for steering minor weed smokers to treatment rather than jail. Not quite what I want but still a big improvement:
Lyness' stance appears to deviate from her predecessor J. Patrick White. In response to a 2006 suggestion by Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek to decrease the penalty for small amounts of marijuana to, in effect, a cite-and-release policy, White said reducing marijuana penalties would send the wrong message.
"I think (changing marijuana laws) sends exactly the wrong message. We've spent years telling people not to get into the drug culture," White said at the time.
Finally, DITV must have had a really slow news day because they interviewed me for a story on political blogs. It's about a quarter of the way in (no time stamp or embedding) and I don't sound too goofy. I look kind of goofy, though, as I try to find my way around a Mac.
Team Roxanne is targeting the students before finals:
Roxanne Conlin to meet with students, local activists , and supporters in Iowa City to kick-off satellite voting.
LUCAS-DODGE ROOM of the Iowa Memorial Union (2nd floor), Iowa Memorial Union, 2:30 PM
The satellite voting (petitioned, 2-8 PM) is just down the road at the UI Library; another group petitioned for the IMU which will be Wednesday 10-4. Here's hoping they both do better getting out the vote than Jared Bazzell did last fall for the city election.
Mike Mauro is also touring the state this week with an "Announcement Tour" (sic; the ballots with his name on them are already printed and being voted so it's not exactly a surprise). He's got no primary opposition; three Republicans are fighting for the nomination.
The Lucid Lynx reviews keep coming in. This fanboy is more excited about Ubuntu than about Windows or Macintosh, and this one says "perfect" I wouldn't go THAT far but I'm so far so good. No problems and I've tried a couple of the new features including some social media integration.
But you still may have a few things to do, and I still haven't figured out how to use low-resource desktop Fluxbox in 10.04.
Classic Rock Without The Overplay: In Praise of Dwight Twilley
"Classic rock" is such a narrow definition. Isn't the 1950's generation "classic"? What about pre-White Album Beatles?
And how about the glories of the B and C list bands and the one hit wonders? Nowhere do we hhings like the Nuggets set that came out in the 70s, anthologized garage bands of the 60s, got recompiled in the 80s and became a box set in the 90s.
For some reason, a handful of songs from the spring of 1975 really stick in my brain: "Bad Time" by Grand Funk, "Jackie Blue" by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils (best heard with the "strawberry wine" verse that got trimmed from the 45 edit), "Black Water by the Doobie Brothers with its a capella break (I always picked up on the buried in the mix "I wanna honky tonk, honky tonk, honky tonk (pause) WITH you all night long). And the incredible "Never Been Any Reason" by no hit wonder Head East, a vocal duel that either should have been a male-female duet or else has a serious homoerotic subtext.
But the one that tops my "Gee if my hands would work and I could play guitar I'd definitely have my bamnd cover this" list is a janglepop gem, a latter-day Nugget that I haven't heard on the radio since it was a fluke top 20 hit in 1975: "I'm On Fire" by the Dwight Twilley Band. It stuck in my brain for decades before I finally found it on some obscure budget bin cutout compilation. Eventually I downloaded it in the Napster glory days; I have no idea where one could find a "legitimate" copy. Here's a live take:
They came out of nowhere. Well, out of Tulsa, actually (remember teenyboppers Hanson were from Tulsa, and the actual album was called "Middle of Nowhere".) The lyrics seem like semi-random lines, but that doesn't matter. What the song is really about is the million layers of overdubbed guitar (Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour were basically a two man band). Yet there's no proper solo, unless you count a two second riff when all the other instruments frop out.
There's no proper chorus, either; the title phrase is droppen in midway through, but it's not until the very end of song that Twilley and Seymour frag it out: "Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii'm (jumpo about an octave or so) OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON fiiiiiiiiiiiiii-yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....." repeated a couple times, then joined by the counterpoint of "but you ain't, you ain't, you ain't, got no lover, lover, lover, lover...."
The song got orphaned because Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour got burned by the biz. Just like the song, the marketing was an anachronism: a one-off 45 on a regional label, about ten years after rock started to get globalized and corporatized. Then, just like the fate of so many 50s R & B one-shots, the label went broke. (The same label also stalled Tom Petty's career for a couple years.)
Eventually the duo split. Seymour had another one-shot on his own in `81 with "Precious to Me," which was also a nice litle gem. Twilley had a payday in the 80s with the less-memorable "Girls" and then again in the early 90s when his "Why You Wanna Break My Heart" was remade for the Wayne's World soundtrack. Tia Carrere may have made Mike Myers schwing, but she was a godawful singer. Twilley's version of the song is much better.
