Election night draws record viewership

WASHINGTON - Lots of news trickling in about Sarah Palin’s time on the campaign trail?

Like the time John McCain’s top aides Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to brief the fit 44-year-old Alaska governor in her hotel room at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

here’s how newsweek described it: “after a minute, palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. she told them to chat with her laconic soothe, todd. ?i’ll be just a trifling,’ she said.”

There were strains between the McCain and Palin camps on the trail. Now that the election is over, the long knives have come out.

Demiforce

The Los Angeles Times reported that when Palin arrived at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix on Tuesday, she had expected to speak before McCain gave his concession speech, but was told by Schmidt and Salter that it would not be appropriate.

The Alaska governor is keeping her options open about running in 2012, and when she arrived in her hometown of Wasilla on Wednesday night, she was greeted by chants of “2012.”

Related posts: Ohio issue 5 results, Twincities, Santa claus indiana, The break up, Twilight soundtrack songs

Don’t Mess With Mamma

Mark Cuban is a lot of things. He’s a billionaire internet entrepreneur, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, chairman of HDNet, and a Dancing With the Stars loser. And now the Securities and Exchange Commission would like to add one more descriptor for the outspoken investor: insider trader.The S.E.C. charged Cuban with trading shares of Mamma.com, now known as Copernic, based on insider information. Cuban invested in the fledgling internet search engine in early 2004. In June of that year, the S.E.C. alleges, Mamma.com invited Cuban to participate in a stock offering after he agreed to keep the information confidential. He allegedly knew the offering would be at a price lower than the market price and would be dilutive to shareholders.Cuban allegedly instructed his broker to sell his stake just hours after receiving the information. Based on the stock’s decline after the offering was made public, Cuban avoided $750,000 in losses by selling early. Interestingly, Cuban blogged about this trade on Blogmaverick.com.

Shout! factory

“It’s not Google or Yahoo, nor will it be a top 5 search engine anytime soon. But it is a good metasearch tool that I use and have used. Google and Yahoo have become carbon copies of each other, and for me, other than usenet and news searches, it’s too big. I like the way Mamma.com organizes web searches, and I use it for picture searches.”

cuban wrote to it again after he sold the shares, and he referenced the offering at the center of the s.e.c.’s charges. “then the company did a p.i.p.e. financing. i’m not succeeding to consult on the good or bad of p.i.p.e. financing [private investment in a public entity] other than to utter that to me it’s a huge red flag and i don’t want to own wares in companies that put into practice this method of financing. why? because i don’t like the idea of selling in a private organization, stock for less than the market honorarium, and then to make matters worse, pushing the price lower with the issuance of warrants. so i sold the stock…i’m glad i sold my ordinary.”is cuban still glad he sold? so there, there have been no updates on cuban’s blog today, but he’s never been known for his peacefulness. stay tuned.

UPDATE: Mark Cuban responds. “I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”

related linksgoogle extends web search leadchrome: why google fears microsoftgoogle to microsoft: heroic on

Related posts: Watch ufc 91 online, Twilight soundtrack songs, Twincities, Security pacific bank, Knowledgeability

FullTiltPoker.Net Welcomes Randy Couture as a Friend of Full Tilt Poker: “The Natural” Returns to the Ultimate Fighting Championship on November 15th for the UFC 91 Heavyweight Championship Bout

FullTiltPoker.Net welcomes Randy Couture as a Friend of Full Tilt Poker:”The Natural” returns to the Ultimate Fighting Championship on November 15th for the UFC 91 Heavyweight Championship Bout (PRWeb Nov 14, 2008)

Sweet home alabama movie

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/11/prweb1620754.htm

Related posts: The break up, Twilight soundtrack songs, Knowledgeability, Ohio issue 5 results, Security pacific bank

FL Election Integrity Advocate, Candidate For Election Supervisor Arrested at Direction of Election Supervisor, Opponent

Mike ruggles

a candidate for supervisor of elections in broward county, fl was arrested yesterday, following threats and orders from her foe, the current broward soe, dr. brenda snipes. ellen h. brodsky, the county’s first non-myopic candidate for soe, had in days been barred from patent counting and oversight on a number of occasions, at the county’s official canvassing …
Related posts: Security pacific bank, Chris durbin, Ohio issue 5 results, Halloween h20, Twilight soundtrack songs

‘Twilight’ Countdown: Ready for Twi-rock? Meet the Twilight Girls

8 more days…

Plenty of bands and artists count the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” books among sources of inspiration, but there may be only one that can credit “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke for its very existence.

Joe walsh

The Los Angeles-based Twilight Music Girls stress they’re not so much a band as a collective of individual singer-songwriters, but there they are, lining up gigs at the 2009 edition of Twi-Con and performing Sunday (Nov. 16) at Borders in Westwood as part of an afternoon of “Twilight” music and discussion.

Actors Michael Welch and Peter Facinelli are scheduled to be on hand, and four of the five Twilight Music Girls will perform, singing songs of love, desperation and being obsessed with a vampire. Or, as Lyndzie Taylor may sometimes introduce her “Twilight”-inspired tunes to the non-bookstore crowd, “nerdy things.”

But though the women who make up the Twilight Music Girls — all in their early 20s — may sneak in a sly reference or two to Stephenie Meyer’s books, you won’t find specific passages quoted in the lyrics, and f the characters’ names don’t pop up in the acoustic-guitar-and-piano-based songs. Yet there wouldn’t even be a Twilight Music Girls, says Kris Angeles, if Hardwicke hadn’t suggested the idea to them.

Back in the summer, the members of the Twilight Music Girls scored entree into an early, pre-reshoot screening of the film. Invited to give comments to the director — “We’re not supposed to talk about what we saw,” says Taylor — someone mentioned to Hardwicke that some of their songs had been inspired by the books.

“It was back in July that we got to meet with Catherine Hardwicke and talk to her about the movie,” Angelis says. “We were saying that we had been inspired to write songs about ?Twilight,’ and she said, ?You should form a group. That would be so much fun.’ So it was Catherine Hardwicke who put the idea in our head. We formed the MySpace page that night.”

In addition to Taylor and Angelis, the Twilight Music Girls consist of Lauren Harding, Mallory Trunnell and Laura Serafine. They’re all budding singer-songwriters and friends from theater school. They perform regularly at West Hollywood clubs — not as the Twilight Music Girls — and discovered their mutual love of “Twilight” long before seeing the film in July.

But their “Twilight” references are specifically for the in-crowd. Sure, Taylor’s “Breathless” may allude to shifting eye color of the object of her affection (an Edward Cullen trait, but those reading this blog probably already knew that), but her hurried strumming and fraught wailing can live outside of the “Twilight” lexicon.

“The wizard rock thing is really cool, but a band like Harry and the Potters, it’s schtick,” Taylor says. “That’s what they do. They’re really cool, and I do think they’re a lot of fun, but we have more general themes going on.”

Trunnell, who penned the Gothic, piano-based tune “How’s the Weather,” notes it was never the objective to hit the audience over the head with “Twilight” references. “There are other ?Twilight’ bands, but a lot of people love the fact that we don’t talk about the characters specifically,” she says. “If you read ?Twilight,’ you know it’s about ?Twilight,’ but if haven’t, you can still like the songs.”

That being said, the Twilight Music Girls are ready to geek-out over specific chapters. Ask Harding about her graceful ballad “Give It Away,” and she’ll get right to the point, saying the song is inspired by a scene in the series’ third book, “Eclipse.” “It’s about Chapter 20, actually,” she says.

The Twilight Music Girls are selling a 9-track compilation CD via iTunes, having utilized CDBaby to distribute their music to the dig

Related posts: Ohio issue 5 results, Halloween h20, Twincities, Chris durbin, Security pacific bank

SIBOS 2008 - A few million won’t be missed!

This year’s SIBOS event was SWIFT’s largest ever with over 8000 participants from around the world. Traditionally SIBOS is an event where business gets done. Senior bankers and the vendors who service them, spend a week together learning about trends in the industry, cutting deals, and selling product.

As luck would have it this year’s SIBOS coincided with one of the most turbulent weeks in Financial Services history. Bankers read daily headlines like:

Lehman Brother’s with $60B in bad loans says it will file for Chapter 11 after all rescue attempts fail. Bank of America announces it will acquire troubled Merrill Lynch in a $50 billion all-stock transaction U.S. government agrees to provide an $85-billion emergency loan to rescue the huge insurer AIG, taking an almost 80% stake in the company Regulators ban short selling of Financial Services stocks for 10-day in order to slow the market drop. Treasury Secretary announces a plan to relieve banks of their troubled loan portfolios in an attempt to revive the financial markets Many senior executives from the top global firms arrived in Vienna only to immediately catch a plane heading home back to “deal with the issues”.

During the week many journalist seriously debated whether the US financial services industry could survive. Given this environment, I expected banking professionals to be in shock and the level of interest in making deals and building solutions to wane. However, in sharp contrast to the pessimism of the media, in the many conversations I held with senior bankers at SIBOS, they were optimistic or at the very least hopeful.

There seemed to be consensus that while the financial services industry has some very tough times ahead, the banks that survive will have to be stronger, more cost efficient, more customer-oriented, and have an infrastructure better equipped to deal with ever the future brings. Numerous banks were actually looking at this as an opportunity - a time for significant investment. At this point, bankers are still looking at IT to help make them more functionality rich, cost competitive and secure in the future. Whether or not this optimism can endure given the market turbulence of last few weeks, we’ll have to wait and see.

Lisa anne

I actually had a banker say to me with a wink in his eye, “this is a great time to spend, another few million dollars off the bottom line won’t be missed!”.

- John Hunter, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Systems Inc.

Related posts: Twincities, Chris durbin, Ohio issue 5 results, Halloween h20, Knowledgeability

Let the Republican bloodbath begin

Well, Republicans were saying before the election that if Obama/Biden won and McCain/Palin lost, things were going to get ugly:

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin’s critics as “cocktail party conservatives” who “give aid and comfort to the enemy”.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?”

Sure enough:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

Robert Farley has it about right:

I expect that the effort will make Palin more toxic to anyone who’s not in the Republican base, but won’t touch her position within the base. Sarah Palin is too big to fail. Bill Kristol has staked his prestige on Palin’s future, and the simple fact that she thought Africa was a country isn’t going to make he and his back down. He’s too deeply invested in her, and everyone else in the conservative punditariat is too deeply invested in him. If she crashes, everyone goes down. I foresee two possible futures; in one, Kristol starts walking everyone back from the brink in a year or two, and Palin’s future Presidential candidacy goes down the memory tube. In the other, we get Sarah! 2012, and a Goldwater style annihilation next time around. I’m guessing door #2.

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

Related posts: Chris durbin, Knowledgeability, Ohio issue 5 results, Halloween h20

In one 11-state swath, House Republicans are a vanishing breed

Aside from John McCain, another defeated Republican garnered a fair share of attention Tuesday night — Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut (below), who after fending off several spirited challenges in recent elections finally got knocked off.

Since the Democratic surge in the 2006 midterm election, Shays had been the last man standing — the sole Republican House member from any of the six New England states. With his defeat, the tally for the congressional districts in his state plus Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island now stands at Democrats: 22, Republicans: Zip.

That got The Ticket wondering about the breakdown, more broadly, in the northeast (once home to multitudes of so-called Rockefeller Republicans) and parts of the mid-Atlantic region. So we looked at what the new House delegation counts will be in five more states — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.

Assuming that a Democrat retains a slim lead in a close race in Maryland, when Congress reconvenes in January Barack Obama’s party will occupy 74 House seats in this 11-state area extending from the Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Maine. The GOP number: 17.

Put another way, the Democrats will control 81% of the total seats, Republicans 19%.

Along with the wipeout in New England, the shrinkage of GOP House members hailing from New York is especially notable.

After the 2002 midterm, the Empire State’s 29-member delegation consisted of 19 Democrats and 10 Republicans. The GOP number has been steadily reduced in every election since then. After Tuesday night, the figures are Democrats 26, Republicans 3.

Centenarian Obama cited proud of his win

Nationwide, the GOP losses in Senate and House races could have been worse. The party appears to have avoided a Democratic Senate that is filibuster-proof. And the net Republican hit in the House will be in the mid- to low 20s, not as bad as many forecast.

Still, we think the folks producing MSNBC’s “First Read” political briefing nailed it today when they wrote that “the glass isn’t half full for the GOP, it simply has some condensation.”

– Don Frederick

Photo credit: Associated Press

Related posts: Chris durbin, Halloween h20, Ohio issue 5 results

Union Voters Helped Propel Obama, Working Family Candidates to Victory

Ted stevens results

Here’s how union members made the difference in last night’s big win.

* Union voters supported President-elect Barack Obama 67 percent to 30 percent over Sen. John McCain. In the top-tier battleground states the difference was even more stark, with union members going for Obama 69 to 28?a 41-point margin.

* While McCain won among voters ages 65 and up, active and retired union members older than 65 went for Obama by a 46-point margin.

* While McCain won among veterans, union veterans went for Obama by a 25-point margin.

Related posts: Halloween h20, Chris durbin

Who won the presidential debate between Obama and McCain?

nashville, tenn. john mccain dismissively called compare with barack obama “that whole,” obama mocked mccain’s “straight talk express,” and both left the debate division to return to the campaign trail wednesday.

Easy homemade costumes

cnn’s federal poll of debate watchers found that 54 percent said obama did the best bother, compared to 30 percent who said mccain performed better. while 51 percent of those polled said they had a favorable estimate of mccain, unchanged from before the debate started, 64 percent said they had a favorable opinion of obama, up 4 part points from before the debate.

by more than a 2-1 margin, 65 percent to 28 percent, more people said they set obama more likable than mccain during the dispute, according to the cnn/opinion check in corp. scan.
Related posts: Halloween h20