History Made As Congress’ First Alaskan Native Wins Partial House Term

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Yes. It has allowed my brother to vote first for his first choice candidate and second, while holding his nose, for the Democrat. He used to waste (IMHO) his vote on Green Party candidates and such (he’s a fan of Lisa Savage, for instance, though he’s parted ways with her on Ukraine), partly out of delusions of purity but mainly because he felt he was registering his actual beliefs. Registering with whom, I always wondered. Nobody noticed, and Maine would end up with the likes of LePage. With ranked choice voting, he really does get to register his beliefs, since in close races Dems will have to attend at least a little to people like him.

Writing this I suddenly realized that ranked choice voting provides analysts with hugely useful data sets at least as useful to party hacks as polls, and requires of them a whole new set of analytic tools and skills.

You might be interested. I became friends with Lisa Savage on her insider FB page. I asked to be her FB friend (curious because my brother spoke so highly of her and some of her reported peace activities were appealing) and, I guess because of the connection with my brother, she friended me. I appreciated her posts about renaming Skowhegan’s team and other Native American issues. I just read whatever of her posts FB fed me. Then came Russia’s more recent invasion of Ukraine (the first being Crimea), and I started following her closely on that insider page. Not only were her positions (and most of her commenters’) outrageous Putin drivel; the sources she (and they( linked to were pure junk. I commented objections and offered counter arguments, to which she never replied (though I’d get a number of “likes”). Instead, she’d PM me to the effect, “Why are you attacking me?” (I never attacked her; I challenged her arguments and her sources and offered other perspectives.) One of her followers PM’ed me, in friendly tones, to provide some context: Maine’s peaceniks (at least those in Lisa’s orbit) were deeply – “acrimoniously” was the word he used – divided over Ukraine. Anyway, long story finally short, Lisa unfriended me from her insiders’ page. Just as well. I’d become too absorbed in following her Ukraine BS.

What struck me most in following her posts at her FB pages: what she did not ever talk about. Trump, for instance, or Jan. 6, or the real fascist threats in this country. Lisa is no fascist, but she is so invested in critiques of the liberal order that she cannot talk about anything else, even when real fascists are at the door. She would throw in posts about Dobbs, for instance, apparently clueless that, if you wanted to assure abortion rights, you’d better vote for a Democrat, not Jill Stein.

Well, at least ranked choice voting gives Lisa and her followers a chance to vote for both, in their due order, and enhancing the Dem’s chances.

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Rec’d for the reference to Mr. PC of Giant Steps. I can’t play anything worth a damn but I can recognize brilliance. The sparse interplay between him and Bill Evans in the first few bars of So What and then him playing the main theme are basically burnt into my brain. Kind of Blue was one of two albums I listened to repeatedly throughout college.

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He died at 33 but Jesus what a legacy he left. He was part of the greatest rhythm section in the history of jazz.

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YAHOO!!! Thank you Alaska!!!

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One of the main reasons the Nazis were able to sneak in was because Germany’s center, left and far left refused to cooperate to prevent it, over hair-splitting issues of ideological purity. People like this are fucking dangerous, and in the end I firmly believe that ego, not a desire to make the world better, is what drives them.

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First place I heard that tune, curiously enough (before RTF or whoever else), was on this odd-but-cool double LP put out by Guitar Player magazine. Larry Coryell double-tracking himself:

“THIS! Is a LATE… Palin!” (actually, I’m tempting to delete this, given the virtuosity of @rickjones, just down thread)

Sheer happenstance: I was onstage with the James Montgomery Band at Jack’s when Jaco came in and…uh…took over. It’s a very sad story, actually, and I wish the poor man had been able to retain the medical assistance he needed. Very sad.

For me, it’s Chambers, Mingus, and Haden. Lots of other brilliant players, of course (I’d put in a plug for the remarkable Ron Carter / Jim Hall live duets, for example:

but Chambers, Charles, and Charlie were the ones for me.

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:rofl::rofl::rofl:

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Miles buried most of the the played with, at least till he got into Fusion.

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@tena

@chelsea530

@lastroth

@katscherger

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If you’re referring to the two+ weeks elapsed since the election, that is due to the necessary time window to permit ballots mailed on election day to be delivered. Nothing wrong with that. Alaska is a huge state with few roads and some mail has to travel by boat.

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Peltola is a common Finnish surname. Finnish puts the accent on the first syllable, so PEL-to-la. Any thoughts?

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I think Miles’s great genius, more than bravura technique or compositional output, was his capacity to perceive / predict what previously-unexplored players could discover when he put them together. He was a great bandleader, which–in American music–is its own kind of virtuosity. See Muddy, Bill Monroe, Mingus, Zappa, Carla Bley, Wolf, James Brown, Prince, Ellington, Jelly Roll, and on and on. A kind of situational virtuosity–knowing better than anyone else what could come next.

I wrote my first published scholarly article, and first published poem, about Miles. I owe him a lot.

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I have a good friend who’s a drummer and he went to a club in the area decades ago to hear this jazz band Return to Forever. He thought they were another straightahead-type jazz band and he told me he was struck when he saw the roadies taping down the cymbal stands. This may not be your typical jazz band, he thought. That proved to be true. :smile:

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If her clothes weren’t the same overtight crap she had 10 years ago, it wouldn’t be so hard to pull everything back down where it belongs.

And, btw, that’s 1/2 term governor.

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Lenny had played with Miles too :grinning:

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No, I was lamenting the time it took for a native Alaskan to breakthrough to national office. To this point, I’ve never been particularly bothered by the length of time state election officials need to account for all their ballots.

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Random Miles Davis story: I used to gig at a dive bar in Santa Clara called the Quarter Note and they had Bitches Brew in the jukebox alongside your standard rock stuff. I loved playing tracks from that both to get the best minutes to quarters ratio as well as to irritate the regulars.

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You’re going to be disappointed in me, but I see Jaco’s direct descendants in Cliff Burton and Robert Trujillo.

Anyway:

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I presume there are tire tread marks on Kemp after that.

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