This post is in honor of “Buck Smith” (aka U.S. Senator John Cornyn staffer David Beckwith), who has recently been outed using a pseudonym to post on Democratic (and possibly other) sites.

In one post (referring to the “Big John” video), he commented:

“I personally believe Beckwith deserves a raise and/or a promotion for whatever role he had in that video . . .”

I want to see if recommending yourself for a raise on a blog works. So here goes:

Hey, TFN, I think I deserve a raise. How ’bout it?

Joe, same for you.

Pate got to get paid, son.

Boy, I hope it pans out well — or at least that I’m not forced to resign my positions in a few weeks when the media/blog heat has subsided.

(If this doesn’t work, I’ll try posting the request on a conservative Web site under a nom de plume.)

I’m a little busy making dinner for Misty — she gets back from her business trip to Kansas City tonight — but I just read something McBlogger wrote that I think deserves emphasizing:

. . . I never would have guessed that someone would have problems surviving on a wage that, hourly, barely pays for a gallon of unleaded. [Emphasis Mine]

Think about it. Gas, on average, is $4.06 per gallon. The minimum wage is $5.85 per hour. It’s possible, especially for some commuters, to be spending more on gas to get to work than they’re making at work.

But the more important point is: Can you believe we pay people to work for a wage that’s only a bit more than a dollar above what we pay for a gallon of gas? It takes us as long to fill up our gas tank (spending $40-plus) as it takes for a service-industry worker to earn a fraction of the cost of our first gallon.

That’s ridiculous.

Okay, so we only made it through three e-mails last time. I have 61 in my inbox. Fortunately, I don’t have to do all of them — just the oldest and worth saving.

Next up:

An item entitled “Watch ‘Charlie Rose - An hour with General David Petraeus’” I sent myself through Google Reader on 10 SEP 2007 at 8:18 AM. I think the title is self-explanatory. The reason I want to watch it — and still save it? Because I love me some Petraeus. Link still works. Delete.

Next is a really old e-mail (17 OCT 2007 at 3:25 PM) with a link to The Blakes’ (a band) Myspace page. I’m deleting without looking further. Can’t remember why I saved it. If anyone knows if they’re any good, let me know and I’ll look into ‘em this time around.

22 OCT 2007 at 11:12 AM: Another Google Reader e-mail with a link to the Mother Jones’ issue focusing on leaving Iraq. The e-mail itself contains an interview with T.X. Hammes that was posted on the Kings of War blog, written by various faculty and research students of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. The link still works.

Okay, I’m going to stop here again for a while. Maybe I’ll aim for getting rid of three old e-mails per post.

Does anyone else find random stuff on the Web, e-mail it to themselves and then let it sit there lingering forever?

I’ve been saving a bunch of stuff in my Gmail because I’m think I’ll want it later or I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

Notwithstanding, I try to keep my mailbox to lower than 50 pieces of mail — the number that can appear on one Gmail page — every day.

So, instead of them making it difficult to achieve and maintain that goal each day, I’ve decided to post them here. When I want to use them — ift I remember that I moved/hid them here — I can come back here and find them (or not).

I’ll post when I e-mailed them to myself to show just how long it’s been since I’ve visited some of these sites.

From 12 APR 2007 at 10:47 AM, I have an e-mail titled “abu bakr,” which includes only a link to what I think was the writings of Abu Bakr (that seems logical) on the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s Web site. The link is now dead. Boo. Delete.

25 JUN 2007 at 3:44 PM: Saved e-mail from Joaquin to me that included a link sending one to a weird soundboard. Also a dead link. Delete.

4 SEP 2007 at 3:07 PM: An e-mail from me to a translator who was in the process of translating and posting on the Web his translation of Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished The Good Soldier Svejk and his reply. He says that my timing was providential as he had just the night before finished books three and four of the novel and published them as an e-book. The Good Soldier is sort of the Catch-22 of the First World War whose protagonist is a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. It’s a great book that I look forward to rereading. Link works! Yay! Delete.

More to come.

I’ve realized it’s not a good idea to promise myself (and definitely not any readers my delusional mind thinks are out there) that I will post once a day. It just ain’t gonna happen. I’ll keep that defaulted promise in the back of my mind — so maybe it will urge me to write more often — but I’m not going to guarantee anything.

I keep telling myself I need to blog more — stretch my legs (or fingers) again after such a long hiatus from truly active blogging (a few times a week or month not counting). If we remember, I started blogging back in 1998 or earlier (this is before the term “blogging” was in use). But what’s the use in reminiscing? There’s too much to do now.

I need to start blogging again because I need to soon start blogging daily on the TFN blog (which is not open to the public yet).

Anyway, I’m doing my best, I guess. Just not forcing myself to pour out nonsense here every day of the week.

——-

So, as I was writing the last four paragraphs, the people I wanted to talk about first left Dolce Vita. They’d been sitting just next my friend Claire and me. They were discussing how Whole Foods gobbles up Mom ‘n Pop groceries (earlier they’d been talking about how we live under a fascist system and something about grammar). While I’m no great fan of Whole Paycheck, this seems to me to be a late-in-the-game argument: Mom and Pop were in serious trouble — if not already driven out of business — by larger grocery conglomerates far before Whole Foods became any sort of player. You’re about ten years too late, hippies. (Also, how can hippies afford to live in Hyde Park?)

—–

By the way, I’m apparently getting married.

—–

I’ve only been engaged since Saturday and I already hate wedding planning.

—–

Is it normal for one who becomes familiar with the intricacies of Texas politics to start voting against people just because they don’t like who works for them?

—–

Joaquin is eight to ten days away from graduating from Basic Combat Training for the Army. Then he heads to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for AIT for his MOS (88M, Motor Transport Operator).

—–

I suppose that is all for now. It’s starting to rain a little here at Dolce.

Misty and I got up early today and headed to the bank and then the Texas Democratic Convention.

Joe lied to me. He said parking would be a breeze on Saturday. Fortunately, there was a breeze as we walked from 7th Street to the Convention Center on 2nd.

We couldn’t get into the main exhibition hall because we didn’t have credentials (oh-so-Democratic!), so we headed over to another hall to scour all the booths and peer into the delegate registration areas looking for extra convention bags. I “stole” five or six delegate convention bags — the bags given to delegates commemorating the Convention and filled with schwag — at the Convention in 2004. This time, we either got there too late and they’d been hauled away the extras or they learned from last year not to leave them out. Either way, we couldn’t find any with which to, as Misty said on Twitter, abscond.

After failing to sticky-finger any bags, we wandered among the rows of Democratic organization tables, where they hawked T-shirts, buttons and god-knows-what-else. We didn’t see Joe, who was supposed to be manning the HDCC table, but we did see the abandoned TFN table — they took down their table prematurely not knowing that today would be packed.

We headed to the main exhibit hall entrance to try to see what was going on. A guy offered us Guest Passes, so we walked a quarter-mile through the Convention Center to get to the guest entrance only to find that it was a big-screen feed from the main hall. Motherfucker.

They started the ceremonies and then broke in with Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (finally!), but the feed kept dying, Hillary kept freezing on the screen and the audio went dead repeatedly. We finally headed home.

Now we’re drinking at Dolce Vita and considering heading to the Helio Sequence show at Mohawk.

From four until . . . when did we get home?

My brain feels dehydrated.

In the news.

Austin is rife with Democrats today — as if it isn’t always, but even more so today, tomorrow and Saturday — here for the Texas Democratic Convention.

There’s been a lot of, frankly, ridiculous prophesying that Obama or Clinton will show up, but that has finally been put to rest by Obama tapping Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (he with the eyebrow) to attend on his behalf and Clinton’s all-but-certain withdrawal from the race on Saturday. Still, some people just never give up hope (it took him until the Clinton campaign announced its ending to get the picture).

Along with the convention there always comes a host of parties thrown by legislators, lobbyists, supporters of presidential candidates and, well, bloggers. While the Texas “‘netroots” (or “Texroots”) may not be the powerful political force they believe themselves to be, I’m certain they’re fun to get drunk with. Personally, I want to see Vince Leibowitz table-dance.

While I’d like to say that I will attend the Blogger’s Caucus or one of the many other parties, I can’t guarantee anything. See, after I have my double whiskey and three beers at Dolce Vita on the way home from work (usually between four and six) each day, I rarely want to venture out once I get home.

Not that it matters if I show up. I’m no big Texas political personality. In fact, I’ve only ever broken one story (this, obviously, doesn’t count because it was IRL rather than online), and most of the blogosphere probably still resents me for running Ray McMurrey’s unsuccessful campaign against Rick Noriega (our campaign still being the best thing to ever happen to Rick).

So, maybe I’ll make it to a party — especially the Blogger’s Caucus — and maybe I won’t. No biggie. I’ll get drunk either way and no one will miss me.

UPDATE: Yes, that is a picture of me on the cover of this magazine.

The Austin Chronicle is reporting that:

Saturday night, Tim Mahoney and [Speaker of the House Tom Craddick crony] Harrison Keller qualified for a runoff election in the race for Austin Community College Board of Trustees, with the former getting 48.5% of the vote and the latter taking 33%. Today, Keller decided to withdraw . . .

His explanation?

I have learned that the cost of the upcoming runoff for Place 1 on the Austin Community College Board of Trustees could cost the college up to $400,000. Given that I joined this race to expand educational opportunities for our community and to make sure that taxpayers’ money is spent as efficiently and effectively as possible, I think this money would be better spent on ACC’s educational programs.

And:

. . . I have decided to withdraw from the runoff election and to donate the balance of my campaign funds to the Austin Community College Foundation.

For a Republican crony who stands by the side of wannabe-emperor Tom Craddick, that’s a pretty upstanding thing to do — acting on your principles. If only we could convince Hillary to do the same. [Chronic]

Really.

Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat from an old issue of the New York Press.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit.

And this:

On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

Also by Taibbi: “Jesus Made Me Puke,” Rolling Stone, May 1, 2008.