All in でしょう.

In which your heroine emerges from beneath the rock for a little schwag whorage.

No secret at all, this blog has been fallow. While I have finally managed to quadruple my paltry bankroll into the low four digits since the All-Star break by playing PLO on the kiddie tables at Full Tilt, the idea of writing about poker has not been high on my mind of late. I've been much more concerned with picking up a new day job. (Short story short: Middle school teaching was a bust, and I'm now a part-time copy editor for Women's Voices for Change. It's an incredibly good site, but damn, I miss being onsite and technical.)

Since moving down to Philadelphia, I've been hanging with my father a lot more, and we've taken some trips down to the Borgata together to play $3-6. However, I have not been able to wheedle my way into his sacred all-male every-other-Friday night quarter game. I'm hoping that a recent email I got from Nevada Jack's might change the odds just a little.

See, even though I may have seemed to forget I have a poker blog, there are still some folks out there who look at this. Mea cupla, and thank you. So in the interest of turning my readers into customers, Jack's is offering me a free 500-piece chip set (this $50 one) for a happy link article. Note that I will not whore out to just anybody--Ultimate Bet went into my personas non grata trash can a long time ago, and there have been plenty of other offers I've turned down.

However, I've played with people who have Jack's chips; they clink nicely, spin well, and otherwise look good tumbling over fingers. I've been on-and-off coveting a set of their Desert Sands chips for a while. Were I a higher-stakes player or a true collector, I'd already have them.

Anyhow, short story short: Nevada Jack's makes nice chips. Me wants.

Expired leftovers

I just received a call from someone at InfoCision, an Ohio polling and marketing company which the caller identified as being identified with the Republican Party.

She called with an urgent alert (which to me implied a fundraising call) from the College Republicans saying that the College Republicans' chapter office at the University of Rhode Island was being shut down and their office "boarded up."

While I kept her on the line for about half an hour, I was constantly using "the google" to pepper her with questions like "I'm not finding any current headlines; when did this happen?"

Then, "Oh, there's this article from April 18--that's practically tax day--about the C.R. offering a $100 scholarship to white heterosexual males. The student senate demanded an apology. Is that it? It doesn't sound very timely."

When she came back from talking to her supervisor, I told her, "I've got a Fox News story saying this was settled April 30 with the student senate ending their decertification threat and backing down from the demand for an apology. Why are you doing an alert now when this was just a flash in the pan?"

Fearmongering with expired news. It's an oldie AND a baddie.

For the record, the FoxNews.com article is on the site of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which represented the R.I. College Republicans in their appeal

There's also a fun article on the New Jersey College Republicans' blog which states

"Saving money in today's environment is important. It is important because the CRNC does not have any money. And the CRNC does not have any money because Infocision - a fundraising firm recommended to them by allies at the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee - pretty much stinks at fundraising. It's true."

Ah, truthiness. Sometimes facts really do have a liberal bias.

Top ten ways to get money out of frozen bankrolls

#s 1 through 10:

More details at Dr. Pauly's.

The gold medal for juxtaposition

goes to Rodrique Ngowi of the Boston Globe, picking up the relay from Michael J. Fox:

"Levodopa is the gold-standard treatment for Parkinson's ... But it's a little frustrating that the best drug we've got is one that's been around for 40 years. 40 years!" Fox said Monday at the BIO International Convention, a four-day event expected to attract more than 20,000 researchers, investors, activists and others.

"But, hey, credit where credit is due -- I couldn't be happier about the recent advances. What comes to mind is antidepressants for dogs, which makes it a little easier for me because my dog is feeling better," said Fox, who either put one hand in his pocket or gripped the podium to control visible symptoms of his disease.

I don't have a daemon, I have Tux!

But in the world of The Golden Compass, it's rather a different story.

Joseph Bruno's priorities

Joseph Bruno yesterday claimed that Governor Spitzer "has his priorities wrong" for introducing a bill supporting gay marriage this week. Instead, Bruno says, Spitzer should be supporting the return of the death penalty in New York to protect police officers, and--as usual--that the governor needs to do more to help people upstate.

Does Bruno still not realize that GENDA and gay marriage will help people upstate? Does he somehow believe that every gay person in New York State lives within a ten-block radius of Chelsea Market? Beyond directly helping the thousands of upstate GLBT New Yorkers, gay marriage in New York will also help the upstate economy by bringing gay honeymooners to Niagara Falls, New York instead of Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Bruno would much rather consider his personal economy than his constituents'. Bruno backs a bill that would raise the pay of state senator, assembly mambers, and judges over a competing Spitzer bill that would raise jurdges' pay only. According to the New York Sun, Bruno wants to vote on his pay raise as early as next week.

As for the death penalty, perhaps Senator Bruno did not notice that the state trooper killed last month was killed by friendly fire? Does he really want to call for the death penalty now, when it could be a state police officer facing the needle?

And while it's appalling that by his tally ten police officers have been killed statewide in the last year and a half, has he ever called the Pride Agenda or any other agency to learn how many GLBT New Yorkers have been killed in the last year and a half?

How many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered New Yorkers have been killed in the last year and a half?

How many murdered? I'll bet more than ten.

How many through medical neglect? More than ten.

How many after starving on the streets? More than ten.

How many does Joseph Bruno care about? I truly wonder.

"Nice tie, Mr. President"

I'm not very familiar with Scripps-Howard columnist Bonnie Erbe. I never watched her PBS series "To The Contrary" because even if all the participants were women it was still a bunch of pundits shouting at one another--call it "The McLaughlin View."

But Google News tipped me today to a great column Erbe wrote about the Bush Administration's recent Justice Department massacre.

What do George W. Bush and Muhammadu Buhari have in common? More and more as time goes on, it seems. Twenty-two years ago Buhari enjoyed brief tenure as Nigeria's dictator by rising to power amidst a failing economy, widespread political corruption, and violent civil unrest, which caused the collapse of that country's so-called Second Republic. Buhari staged a military coup and imposed draconian measures on his nation, punishing those associated with the just-destroyed civilian government, curtailing press freedoms and subordinating the judiciary to the military.

President Bush has not yet subordinated our judiciary to the military, but the more we learn about U.S. attorneys fired for failing to succumb to Justice Department and congressional political pressure, the more the Bush administration looks like the tawdry, third world, small-time dictatorship its opponents accuse it of being.

Try as the administration might to explain away the firing of eight United States attorneys, there is only one explanation for their being dispensed with: they didn't succumb to political pressure to do the king's bidding.

At least Erbe knows which 18th-Century George most resembles: not Washington but William Frederick.

In bed with Al D'Amato

Politically, I'll usually take a northern Republican over a southern Democrat. (John Edwards is a happy exception.) Of the two New York senators, I'd actually rather have Chuck Schumer as President than Hillary. So it seems perfectly appropriate that Schumer's predecessor, brass-balled Alphonse D'Amato, became a lobbyist for the Poker Players' Alliance.

Today's NYT has a good profile of the Senator, noting his hopes of representing something I believe in for the first time since I move to New York (only seven years ago) and the Long Island poker game he plays in regularly with Howard Stern. Expect broad radio coverage.

Poker Player Newspaper columnist Nelson Rose thinks that D'Amato has only a marginally better chance of D'Amato and the PPA prevailing in the near future as I have of turning my last unclaimed 52 cents at Party Poker into a World Series bracelet in triple draw, but here's hoping. Just don't place any money on D'Amato at Betfair (unless you live outside the United Staes and its protectorates).

A day in the life of the Thrill Kill Coult

Ann Coulter is wrong. Just plain wrong. (ok, nothing new about that, but...) She does not have to go into rehab for calling John Edwards a faggot. As a transgendered person herself, she can just get off with an apology. Or whatever she gets off with.

Hat tip to guest blogger Huey P. Freeman

Run, Rudy, Run, 'cause hiding's not an option

I was once impressed by Joel Surnow. As writer and co-exec of the series Nowhere Man back in 1995, Surnow and his colleagues pwnzed me for an hour a week. When 24 came on in 2001, I watched the whole first season despite finding the writing, and especially the characterizations of pretty much anyone but Jack Bauer and Senator Palmer, to be boring. It was dependent on hourly cliffhangers and more violence than necessary. In short, I grokked the premise around 8am, still stuck around to see the whole Day 1 storyline, and then felt no need to lather, rinse, nor repeat.

Well, I'm not going to be invited to the White House, but maybe I'll get some appreciation at West Point. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker last week, West Point instructors have been appalled at the repetitive use of torture techniques which (a) go against the Army field manual and (b) work every time on the show even if they don't in real life. The West Point brass have had their hands full with cadets who love the show and can't understand why they can't turn the whole planet into Abu Gharib.

So, we're caught up with old business, now onto new business.

Surnow, now that he's poisoned the well for many discussions of civil rights, recently decided to become a more old-fashioned Hollywood political player. He's begun donating to Republican political campaigns. Two Republican political campaigns.

In June, he gave $2000 to Rick Santorum's failed re-election bid for the U.S. Senate. I really don't wanna know whether Surnow drank the Santorum-flavored Kool-Aid, but Santorum swallowed Surnow's. His was one of the September votes for the suspension of habeas corpus. (Hm, whole lotta sibilance back there. Is there a parselmouth in the house?)

Then, just before the ball dropped to usher in 2007 on Mayor Bloomberg's watch, he upped the ante by sending $2100 to Rudy Giuliani's presidential exploratory committee, joining foulmouthed NYPD retiree (and big 24 fan) Bo Dietl [vid] and Bush/Microsoft lawyer Ted Olson, whose wife died the day Rudy became world-famous. It was under Rudy's watch that Amadou Diallo was shot and Abner Louima was turned into a plunger-topper, so I'm not sure whether Surnow's donation was for future hopes or past performance. But it ain't for a kinder, gentler anything.