Almanacs “November 2010 election could include vote on state constitutional ... - The Almanac Online” plus 4 more

November 2010 election could include vote on state constitutional ... - The Almanac Online
The almanac - United Press International
On Native Ground - American Reporter
Music, reading highlight event - Daily Item
From the Editor : - Cricket365.com

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November 2010 election could include vote on state constitutional ... - The Almanac Online

Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:06 PM PDT

By Bay City News Service

A group advocating an overhaul of the state constitution submitted ballot language in Sacramento Wednesday (Oct. 28) that would allow Californians to vote on a constitutional convention next year.

The group, known as Repair California, must secure 1.2 million signatures of registered voters by April to ensure the measures' place on the November 2010 ballot.

One measure would authorize voters to request a convention, and a second would actually call for the event. Under existing state law, the only means to a convention is a two-thirds vote of the state Legislature.

Repair California spokesman John Grubb said a large legal team, including former California Supreme Court justices, drafted the language.

"There are lots of legal challenges we could potentially face and we'll probably face them all," he said.

The legal team predicts a 90 percent chance of success, according to Grubb.

The ballot language calls for a convention to take place in 2011. Any proposals coming out of the gathering would be voted on by 2012. Delegates would include local government appointees, representatives from federally recognized Native American tribes, and three representatives from each Assembly district.

A constitutional convention would address topics such as the state budget process, elections and ballot initiatives, and the balance of authority between state and local entities, Grubb said. As written, the ballot measure prohibits addressing topics such as taxes or social issues like same-sex marriage or the death penalty.

The organization has done polling that suggests 70 percent of Californians would vote for a convention.

Repair California is an offshoot of the Bay Area Council, a coalition of local business and civic groups.

Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of both organizations, said in a statement, "California has become the laughing stock of the country, but the damage our state government is causing to our education system, prisons, water, budgeting, local government and economy isn't funny, it's tragic."

Discussion of a constitutional convention is often connected to the state's requirement that budgets be approved by two-thirds of the Legislature. However, Grubb said issues such term limit reform and the balance of state and local power come up more in voter polls.

"There's lots of ways to get there without getting at the two-thirds requirement," he said.

According to Repair California, the state constitution contains 75,000 words, compared with only 4,500 in the U.S. Constitution.

California possesses the third-longest governing document in the world, after India and Alabama, Grubb said.

"We live in one of the most diverse states in the union, culturally, ideologically and geographically," he said. "It makes little sense to run so much from a top-down approach."

The almanac - United Press International

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 12:25 AM PDT

Today is Thursday, Oct. 29, the 302nd day of 2009 with 63 to follow.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Scorpio. They include Scottish biographer James Boswell in 1740; singer/composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, who wrote the words and music for "Dixie," in 1815; comedian/singer Fanny Brice in 1891; Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels in 1897; political cartoonist Bill Mauldin in 1921; singer Melba Moore in 1945 (age 64); actor Richard Dreyfuss in 1947 (age 62); and actresses Kate Jackson in 1948 (age 61), Finola Hughes in 1960 (age 49), Joely Fisher in 1967 (age 42) and Winona Ryder in 1971 (age 38).

On this date in history:

In 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded in London. He had been charged with plotting against King James I.

In 1901, Leon Czolgosz was electrocuted for the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley.

In 1923, the musical "Runnin' Wild," which introduced the Charleston, opened on Broadway.

In 1929, the sale of 16 million shares marked the collapse of the stock market, setting the stage for the Great Depression.

In 1969, the first connection on what would become the Internet was made when bits of data flowed between computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. This was the beginning of ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet developed by the Department of Defense.

In 1991, in a first meeting between Soviet and Israeli heads of state, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Shamir conferred at the Soviet Embassy.

In 1992, Alger Hiss said Russia had cleared him of the charge of being a Communist spy that sent him to prison for four years and helped propel Richard Nixon's political career.

In 1994, a Colorado man was arrested after he sprayed the White House with bullets from an assault rifle. U.S. President Bill Clinton was inside at the time but no one was injured.

In 1998, Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, who in 1962 became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth, returned to space aboard the shuttle Discovery. At 77, he was the oldest person to travel in space.

In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush, elected in a chaotic tableau of ballot mishaps and court challenges, signed legislation said to help reduce ballot-counting errors and ensure greater citizen participation in the election process.

In 2003, digging through more than 164 feet of rock, rescuers liberated 11 of 13 Russian miners trapped underground for six days after a methane gas explosion.

Also in 2003, the third-largest recorded solar blast slammed into the Earth causing a severe but short-lived geomagnetic storm.

In 2004, Osama bin Laden, in a videotape to the American people, admitted publicly that he ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Also in 2004, EU leaders signed the European Union's first constitution.

In 2005, three explosions in New Delhi hit a bus and markets crowded with holiday shoppers, killing at least 65 people.

Also in 2005, a reported 102 people died in a train wreck in southern India, where heavy rains caused major flooding.

In 2006, a Boeing 737 crashed near Nigeria's Abuja airport killing 96 of the 104 people aboard. Officials said the pilot took off after disobeying an air traffic controller and crashed moments later.

Also in 2006, 17 instructors and two translators were gunned down at a British-run police academy at Basra, Iraq.

In 2007, a suicide bomber attacked a police brigade in Iraq, killing 29 people, including 26 police officers.

In 2008, U.S. forces are struggling to deal with an intensified Taliban insurgency and need about 20,000 additional troops in Afghanistan to counter it, officials say. U.S. troop casualties at their highest levels since the conflict began.

Also in 2008, the death toll from a 6.5-magnitude earthquake in Pakistan topped 200, officials said, as hundreds of people were hurt and more than 20,000 were left homeless.

And, as nations around the world worked on ways to avoid severe economic woes, the International Monetary Fund announced it would allocate $100 billion to countries with basically healthy economies but short-term problems.

A thought for the day: Scottish biographer James Boswell wrote, "I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed and that a good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation."

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On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:06 PM PDT

On Native Ground
MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

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Printable version of this story

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.

News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out.

Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s.

Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business.

The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac.

They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials.

In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone.

Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek."

There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink.

That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce.

One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades.

Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle.

The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead.

The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments.

Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job.

Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute.

And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies.

Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business.

The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive.

Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation.

I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed.

What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age?

My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

Music, reading highlight event - Daily Item

Posted: 28 Oct 2009 10:38 PM PDT

Published October 29, 2009 01:41 am - Priestley Chapel Associates presents an informal program of words and music from 9:30 to 10 a.m. on Sunday at Joseph Priestley Memorial Chapel, 380 Front St., Northumberland. The music portion of the program includes Charles Phelps playing piano and the historic John Wind organ.

Music, reading highlight event

NORTHUMBERLAND — Priestley Chapel Associates presents an informal program of words and music from 9:30 to 10 a.m. on Sunday at Joseph Priestley Memorial Chapel, 380 Front St., Northumberland. The music portion of the program includes Charles Phelps playing piano and the historic John Wind organ.

This Sunday continues a year-long reading of "A Sand County Almanac" by naturalist Aldo Leopold with a reading of "November" by Ben Olena. He and others will then read several of Olena's own poems. Olena is a retired industrial arts teacher and now lives in Sullivan County near Forksville. Priestley Chapel Associates is a secular, non-profit 501 3 corporation established in 1977 to care for and manage the Joseph Priestley Memorial Chapel, the beautiful memorial garden and the historic 1811 John Wind organ located in the chapel. This country chapel was built in 1834 by descendants of Joseph Priestley and members of the Unitarian congregation in Northumberland. Currently, the chapel is open to the public the first Sunday of each month for a program of words and music. For more information, visit www.priestleychapelassociates.org.

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From the Editor : - Cricket365.com

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 12:39 AM PDT

From the Editor :

We've barely had a chance to breathe out after the Champions League and we're already in the middle of a couple of one-day series. For heaven's sake, we haven't even had time to talk about our Team of the Tournament. We'd like your opinions on the players who made the list and the general views of the competition.

Okay, now we are ready to move on to the spicy India against Australia one-day series. Perhaps the build-up hasn't been the most controversial, but if the first match is anything to go by then it will be an exciting affair. The second game takes place on Wednesday, but the Aussies are in a spot of bother as their players - especially bowlers - are dropping like flies. Sorry to say it, but Peter Siddle, Doug Bollinger and Ben Hilfenhaus just won't frighten the Indian batsmen. Hope they prove us wrong.

Back in Blighty, a couple of players have thrown their hats into the ring for the England captaincy for next year's trip to Bangladesh. With Andrew Strauss set to be rested, Alastair Cook (!) and James Anderson (!!!) say they are willing to step in. Cook has barely set the world alight in the England team and he wants to be skipper. He is the obvious choice, but you can't make someone who doesn't deserves a place in the starting XI skipper. Anderson is a certainty in the England team, but he hardly comes across as someone with captaincy material. Who are we to judge though?

From captaincy discussions to coaching decisions. The Kiwis will tackle Pakistan in Abu Dhabi without a coach. Super Dan Vettori will not only skipper the side, but he will be doing some coaching - something which he has apparently been doing for quite some time now. Is this a recipe for disaster? Not only is he filling the captaincy-coaching role, but he is also a selector, his team's premier bowler and most of the times their best batsman.

Finally, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are going head to head in a five-match ODI series. The Zimbos impressed during the recent series against Kenya, but the Tigers are a different kettle of fish. Can they win this one?

That'll do us for now, so it's over to you. Get bantering and we will stick your posts up as soon as possible.

Cheers,

The C365 Team

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Almanacs

Thursday, October 29, 2009