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We are a full-service electric company in Henderson NV that serves its clients with state of the art electrical installation, repair, and troubleshooting services. We offer our services to domestic, commercial, and industrial clients with a goal to set the new service standards. Whether you are looking for generator installation, ceiling fan installation, led lights installation, or if you need any repair or troubleshooting services, you can hire us for the most trusted and high quality work.
Residential Electrical Services in Henderson NV
When you are looking for a reliable electrician for residential wiring service, kitchen appliance circuit installation, or ceiling fan repair, etc., then we are the one that you can hire to get all such jobs done on a budget and in a cost-effective manner. We accommodate comprehensive residential electrical services that include phone wiring, swimming pool wiring, AC service, electrical fuse and breaker replacement, heating service, electric panel replacement, and more.
Commercial Electrical Services in Henderson NV
Our commercial electricians can handle any electrical requirements for your commercial building on every level. Our commercial electricians are equipped with the cutting edge technology and the latest tools to comprehensively deal with different electrical issues doesn't matter how minor or severe the issue is. Some of our commercial electrical services include commercial wiring service, security lighting, new construction wiring, AC and heating service, sign lighting, solar panel installation, and computer wiring, etc.
Industrial Electrical Services in Henderson NV
We have an industrial electrical division that can repair and restore presses, heavy or light machinery. With years of experience in three phase systems, feed systems, coolers, and automation packages, we specialize in the preventive maintenance in order to help our clients keep their businesses running smoothly. So, if you are looking for an industrial electrician for industrial electrical repair, installation or troubleshooting, then you can trust our industrial electricians. You can call us at 800-613-0357 to know more about our services.
For details, Please feel free to call us at 702-940-6772


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As a new employee, you are now a member of a vibrant campus community with inspired students, exceptional academic programs, successful athletic programs, excellence in teaching and leadership, and dedicated staff.
This section of our website is designed to help you get started on your employment at Marquette. We are here to help if you have questions regarding Marquette University. Please contact us at (414) 288-7305 or HR Staff Directory.
We are pleased that you have chosen to be a part of Marquette University and look forward to your contributions!
Employee Data Form
In order to facilitate payroll processing and the establishment of your Marquette University e-mail account, please complete the attached Employee Data Form and return to Human Resources via fax at (414) 288-7425 or e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com.
The information in the Employee Data Form must be completed fully and allows the University to comply with federal reporting requirements. This information must be completed in order to process a salary authorization for you to receive a paycheck and to establish your e-mail account.
First Day of Employment
On your first day, please report to the Human Resources Office at David A. Straz, Jr. Tower, 915 W. Wisconsin Ave., Room 185 where you will need to complete an Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9). At that time you will also need to present your forms of identification to Human Resources for verification.
MU Identification
As a new employee, you will need to complete and sign an MUID Authorization Card. This card can be obtained from your department or from Human Resources (new employees will obtain this from HR on their first day). Please note: the Marquette Card Office will no longer generate MUID numbers and will not issue MUID cards to individuals who do not appear in MyJob and/or CheckMarq and who do not have the Marquette University MUID Authorization Card.
E-mail Address
Once the Department of Human Resources receives and processes the appropriate paperwork (Employee Data Form (EDF) and Confirmation Offer or Salary Authorization), an e-mail address will be generated the next day. New employees are encouraged to contact the ITS Help Desk at 8-7799 or visit https://www.marquette.edu/its/help/ on setting up an email account.
New Employee Orientation
All regular full-time or regular part-time employees hired are eligible to attend. Once the job offer is extended and accepted, Human Resources will schedule the new employee for the next available New Employee Orientation based upon their start date. The New Employee Orientation will cover Benefits, Payroll, Public Safety, HR Policies and Procedures, IT Services, and more.
Orientation Schedule
New Employee Orientations are held once a month from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. This is usually the third Wednesday of the month. Please call 8-7305 or email with any questions.
New employees attending orientation are reminded to please bring their benefit enrollment binders with them to orientation. Information covering material in the binders will be presented. Please contact Human Resources if you have not received your benefits binder.

subset: commoncrawl


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Posted: Sep 16, 2013
Central Connecticut volleyball seniors Veronika Ban and Amalia Ashley were named to the All-Tournament Team at the Big Green Invitational hosted by Dartmouth. The duo played a large role in the Blue Devils winning three of four matches at the tournament.
The Blue Devils dropped their opening match to the host Big Green in three sets, but rallied to win three straight matches following that defeat. Taking contests from Grand Canyon, Providence and Manhattan.
Ban posted 46 kills and a .356 hitting percentage at the tournament. She also contributed 11 blocks, 8 digs and eight service aces.
Ashley posted 48 digs, including a 23 dig performance in the five set victory over Grand Canyon. She also had double-digit digs (13) against Manhattan.


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The PI Nixon Medical Historical Library is celebrating the 500th birthday of one of its treasures, an edition of Symphorien Champier's Speculum Galeni. The book includes one of the first treatises on ophthalmology ever printed.
Symphorien Champier (1472-1539) was an early French humanist and physician to Charles VIII, Louis XII, and the Duke of Lorraine. He settled in Lyon, where he established the College of the Doctors of Lyon and studied Greek and Arab scholars as well as medicinal science, composing a great number of historical works. He was also an admirer of Galen, the great second-century Greek physician and philosopher. Champier set out to expand his contemporary colleagues' knowledge of Galen by using a powerful new tool: the printing press.
Speculum Galeni, printed in Lyon in 1512, begins with Champier's own biography of Galen and a list of Galenic works. It continues with Champier's careful compilation of Latin translations of key works that were (at that time) attributed to Galen, to form a complete Treatise of Medicine. Included in the compilation is "De oculis," a treatise on the eyes, the first page of which appears in the photo above. According to later historians, "De oculis" may not have been Galen's at all — it is only known today from this Latin translation, and no Greek original has ever been found. Nonetheless, its inclusion in Champier's compilation makes it one of the first printed works on the subject of ophthalmology.
Our copy of Speculum Galeni is bound together with another work of Champier called Practica nova in medicina which was probably printed several years earlier, around 1509. The beautiful binding was also created around the same time; it is stamped pigskin over wooden boards with metal clasp closures, and the whole volume is in beautiful condition. We know from the stamps and inscriptions in the book that it once belonged to the Strahov Monastery Library in Prague.
The book came to the PI Nixon Medical Historical Library as part of the Andrew A Sandor Ophthalmology collection, a group of some 400 rare and historical books that the library acquired in 1988. We invite you to come and see this historical treasure, along with many other treasures on the history of ophthalmology such as Georg Bartisch's Ophthalmodouleia (1583) and Samuel Thomas Sommering's Abbildungen des menschlichen Auges (1801).
The P. I. Nixon Medical Historical Library Reading Room is located on the fifth floor of the Briscoe Library and is open Monday-Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. In order to view books in the collection, it is best to schedule an appointment prior to visiting by calling 567-2470.
— Luke Rosenberger, Director of Library Technology & Historical Collections
Tags: history of medicine, P.I. Nixon Medical Historical Library


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Lifestyle Long Handled Brush
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If you're suffering with arm or shoulder issues, the Lifestyle Long Handled Brush can help you to brush your hair more easily. Its extra long handle allows for a shorter movement in your arm and with a rubber handle it's easy to pick up and hold on to.
|Product Purpose
Great for people who have difficulty reaching their hair due to reduced arm / shoulder function.
|Length: 335mm (13").
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For adjustable beds, riser recliner chairs and mobile hoists we offer a comprehensive Delivery & Installation Service. This option includes a complete service by trained engineer(s) who will bring the item inside a room of your choice and set up, install and give a demonstration. They will also give advice, take questions and remove all packaging.
Once you have placed your order we aim to deliver your item within 5-7 working days. The team will contact you to acknowledge receipt of your order and then again 48-72 hours prior to delivery to confirm a convenient date and time.
Please note in the event you are not in on the agreed date/time you will be charged a failed delivery fee of £100.00.
Should you decide to cancel your order prior to delivery and installation contact the NRS customer service team 0345 121 8111 have your order number available. Please ensure you notify NRS 48 hours before the expected delivery and installation date any later may incur a cancelation fee.
Product Code: L36262
If you're suffering with arm or shoulder issues, the Lifestyle Long Handled Brush can help you to brush your hair more easily. Its extra long handle allows for a shorter movement in your arm and with a rubber handle it's easy to pick up and hold on to.
Product Purpose
Great for people who have difficulty reaching their hair due to reduced arm / shoulder function.
Specification Length: 335mm (13"). Brand Other
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Weekly Roundup: 2/4–2/10
Jeff Norton: Follow the Editor: A Recommendation Engine for Readers
This interesting piece looks at how editors, though vital to the traditional book-making process, are unknown to readers (unlike, for example, film directors and such). Norton postulates that traditional publishers could benefit from making their content curators—their editors—more of a branded selling point than they currently are.
Marie Brennan: Anthropological Warning Signs and How to Spot Them
Fantasy author and "ex-academic" Marie Brennan sheds some light on how to evaluate your research sources. Though this isn't super publishing-related, I thought some of you fiction writers might appreciate some pointers on how to do good research. Brennan is in the middle of researching for a new novel, and she dissects an anthropology book to show you warning signs of bad research. If you're not familiar with anthropology, but you use it for backstory and background information, it's a helpful read.
Joshua Blimes: Do the Math
Agent Joshua Blimes breaks down the differences in author royalties for traditionally published hardcover, mass market paperback, and electronic books. He also tackles the differences for top-tier and mid-list writers, and ends by recommending that authors access P&Ls to help them calculate what sort of advance they should be able to negotiate out of a publisher.


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Demi Lovato Shows Off Cleavage on 2014 MTV VMAs Red Carpet [PHOTOS]
Wow. Just ... wow. Demi Lovato looked absolutely incredible in a glamorous scarlet gown at the 2014 MTV VMAs red carpet.
We love every aspect of this look, so we'll break down all of the elements. First, the color looks flawless on the singer. It's old Hollywood meets vixen meets femme fatale. The neckline shows a lot of cleavage, but still manages to keep things classy. And that slit up the front? Va-va-voom!
From her red nails to her matching clutch, Demi's styling is totally on-point. We love that her half-shaved head adds an edgy, modern look to the otherwise classic ensemble. Demi hit this one out of the park.
Check out Demi's ah-MAZING 2014 MTV VMAs look in the photos below.
Demi just won the red carpet. Also, we want to borrow her shoes ASAP.
And another shot of her incredible dress. She's it working it tonight -- and we're giving it two thumbs up!
See More 2014 MTV VMAs Red Carpet + Show Photos!


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| Becca: Define "perverse instantiation."
A.L.I.E.: Perverse instantiation... the implementation of a benign final goal through deleterious methods unforeseen by a human programmer.
|— Becca and A.L.I.E.'s exchange
Perverse Instantiation (Part 2) is the sixteenth episode of the third season of The 100. It is the forty-fifth episode of the series overall.
In the season's epic and mind-bending conclusion, our heroes begin to face the reality of their tragic situation. Everyone prepares for a final showdown.
Plot Edit
In Polis, Clarke uses the EMP device on Abby and removes the chip. Bellamy nearly shoots her, but Clarke says she used the EMP. Murphy says it was for Ontari, but Clarke says Ontari is brain dead and not an option anymore. Clarke asks Abby to assist her in a blood transfusion with Ontari so that she can take the Flame temporarily. Abby is reluctant, but Clarke says she has to. The group sees the Grounders and Kane coming up the side of the tower to get them.
In Arkadia, Jasper still has Harper. Monty tells Raven that she has to keep Jasper talking as he has a plan. Jasper tells Raven that they only have a 2% chance of being successful and asks her if she is willing to risk Harper's life on such a small chance. Monty sneaks around and shoots Jasper and Harper helps him to take Jasper down.
In Polis, the blood transfusion has begun. Clarke is convinced it will work, but Murphy reminds her that if it doesn't, she will die. Murphy puts the flame into Clarke's neck and Clarke screams and passes out. She then awakes and says that she knows how to stop A.L.I.E., she needs to go into the City of Light with the key. Abby and Murphy are not convinced, but Clarke says the Flame will protect her and she needs to find the kill switch. Bellamy gives her the key and says he trusts her. Clarke says that she will know what she is looking for when she finds it. Clarke takes the key and awakes in the City of Light.
In the City of Light, Clarke is wearing the same hair and outfit from Season One and is amazed by the City of Light. She initially thinks a man is chasing her, but then realizes her that the man was seeing someone else and the flame is preventing her from being seen. She then sees Jasper walk past with an Ice Cream and sit on a bench. Clarke is confused as to why he is there, but then sees the infinity symbol on a traffic light and follows it. It changes to a red hand and then a woman with hair braided into the infinity sign walks by and Clarke follows her.
In Polis, Octavia and Pike arrive. Miller takes Bryan to Abby as he is injured. Octavia doesn't want to work with Pike but Pike says she needs to control herself. Bellamy attempts to convince Octavia they must. Kane and the grounders reach the door which is barricaded.
People are beginning to see Clarke now and she runs away. She notices her nose is bleeding. Raven realizes Clarke is in the City of Light but sees she has free will and must have taken the flame. Clarke's body is rejecting the flame so Abby tells Murphy to push the blood into Clarke. In Arkadia, Raven notices that A.L.I.E. is trying to get Clarke out and Jasper says that as Clarke has gone in with the flame it has begun updating A.L.I.E.'s programming. Raven realizes A.L.I.E. can delete the kill switch and be unstoppable, so Harper says they need to find it.
In the City of Light, Clarke is stopped and attacked by a group of people. Suddenly, Lexa appears as Clarke has the flame. Lexa smiles at Clarke and fights off Clarke's attackers. The two reunite and hug, but then Lexa says that Clarke's fight is not over and they both run together. They run away and Lexa says that she knew her spirit would choose wisely. Suddenly, day changes to night and Lexa explains that A.L.I.E. is updating, due to the flame. Clarke suddenly has a fit and her body is rejecting the flame. In Polis, Ontari's heart has stopped beating so blood isn't getting to Clarke. Abby opens Ontari's chest and pumps her heart manually. In the City of Light, Lexa tells Clarke to stay with her as they need her. Abby gets Murphy to pump the heart and Clarke is stable again. Clarke awakens in the City of Light and kisses Lexa. Lexa says the flame is offering less protection as A.L.I.E. realizes it's there and they need to hurry as people will be able to see them. They see a little girl on a bike with the infinity symbol and follow her.
In Polis, Kane and the others start to beat at the door. Pike says they need to make a stand. Kane breaks through and Octavia pretends that she will take the chip. Kane says that is good and reveals that Indra was captured and is on a cross. Suddenly, Pike and the others use electric batons to electrocute Kane and the other chipped people and they fall unconscious.
In the City of Light, Lexa and Clarke follow the little girl to a fence. They realize it is a firewall and they can't get past. Suddenly Jasper appears and says they will never get to the kill switch. Jasper says they will never stop A.L.I.E. Clarke says it's not him, it's A.L.I.E. and humans have free will. He says that humans fight and kill and A.L.I.E. is saving them from that. Jaha and a mob appear and say it's over. Raven makes a portal to the kill switch appear and puts a Raven on it so Clarke will trust her and go through it. Jasper tries to block it. Jaha and his mob advance and Lexa says she can fight them off. Clarke says that she loves Lexa and Lexa replies that she will always be with her. Lexa then goes towards to mob while Clarke goes through the portal.
In the portal, Clarke sees Becca who shows her the kill switch. Suddenly A.L.I.E. appears. She tells Clarke that the City of Light is the only way to save people. Her drones detected that nuclear power plants are melting down. Soon most of the world will be uninhabitable, due to the large amount of nuclear radiation. Becca says that A.L.I.E. is stalling so she can delete the kill switch. A.L.I.E. says that Becca locked A.L.I.E. away when she tried to solve the problem. Becca says that she should have taught A.L.I.E. that the final goal isn't the only important, how you get there makes a difference, like killing billions of people to cure overpopulation. In Polis, everybody is fighting. Pike saves Octavia, Murphy continues to pump Ontari's heart and Abby is protecting Clarke's body. Bellamy is being choked by Kane.
Clarke tries to negotiate with A.L.I.E. and says she won't use the kill switch if A.L.I.E. returns the people's pain and memories but Becca says A.L.I.E. can't. A.L.I.E. says she is the only hope for survival and they can save the human race together. Clarke tells A.L.I.E. that humans don't ease pain, they overcome it and uses the kill switch to destroy A.L.I.E., terminating her once and for all.
In Polis, everybody stops fighting as A.L.I.E. no longer has control. Clarke wakes up and they remove the flame. She thanks Murphy who says it is just another day on the ground and smiles. He sees Emori crying and calling him and they hug and reunite. Kane is crying and Abby goes to him and they hug. Miller leans onto Bryan and the two smile. In Arkadia, the screens go black and Monty asks how they know it worked. They see Jasper crying and realize it has. Jasper says to Monty that he was finally happy and Monty says he the world may be bad but at least it's real and he says will be happy again and they hug. Jasper goes to get drinks and Monty and Harper hug. Jasper hears Raven, Monty and Harper laughing and smiles.
In Polis, Bellamy says that Clarke doesn't look happy for somebody who just saved the world and she says they didn't. Pike walks up to Octavia and she stabs him. Pike dies and Octavia walks into the lift. Everybody stares at her in shock as she leaves the tower.
Cast Edit
- Eliza Taylor as Clarke Griffin
- Paige Turco as Abigail Griffin
- Bob Morley as Bellamy Blake
- Marie Avgeropoulos as Octavia Blake
- Devon Bostick as Jasper Jordan and A.L.I.E.
- Christopher Larkin as Monty Green
- Lindsey Morgan as Raven Reyes
- Richard Harmon as John Murphy
- Isaiah Washington as Thelonious Jaha
- Henry Ian Cusick as Marcus Kane
Guest Starring Edit
Co-Starring Edit
- Jojo Ahenkorah as Costa (credited as Name Caller)
- Ava Eileen Wilson as Little Girl On Bike
- Armando Canales as Follower
- Eleanor Hall as Woman with Infinity Hair
Quotes Edit
- A.L.I.E. (possessing Jasper Jordan): "Raven your chances of reaching the kill switch again are less than 2%. I've added additional security. I know the digital signature of the chip Hannah gave to Monty. The moment you use the portal to interact with anything within my code, I will know. I will find you. Are you really willing to let your friend die for a 2% chance?"
- Clarke: "Jasper, what are you doing here?"
- Jasper: "Trying to stop you. You've seen the City of Light now. It's perfect. There's peace, happiness, safety. Why would you want to deny that to anyone?"
- Clarke: "She's torturing people to get them here, Jasper, taking their memories, controlling them. This isn't even you. This is A.L.I.E."
- Jasper: "She's doing what has to be done."
- Clarke: "She took away our choice. Human beings have free will. We get to decide how we should live."
- Jasper: "Human beings are the only species that act against their own self-interest. We torture each other. We fight, hurt each other, break each other's hearts. None of that exists here. A.L.I.E. is protecting us from ourselves."
- Abby: "If your mind dies, you die."
- Clarke: "The Flame will protect me. I don't know how I know. I just... know."
- Bellamy: "I believe you."
- Abby: "Do you even know what you're looking for?"
- Clarke: "I'll know when I find it."
- Abby: "May we meet again."
- Clarke: "We will."
- Bellamy: "We'll keep you safe."
- Monty: "What happen when A.L.I.E is updated?"
- Raven: "She'll delete the kill switch. We won't be able to stop her."
- Harper: "So, find the damn kill switch."
- Bellamy (to Octavia): "O.? O., listen to me. I know how you feel. I let my need for revenge put me on the wrong side. I don't want that for you."
- Pike: "Wasn't the wrong side. If the Grounder army was still there when Lexa died, they would have attacked, and you know it."
- Bellamy: "I wanted to see things like you. I needed that, to believe that they were bad and we were good. I don't know what I believe anymore. I just know I have to live with what I've done."
- Lexa: "We can't let them follow. Go. I'll hold them off."
- Clarke: "No, Lexa. I love you."
- Lexa: "I'll always be with you."
- A.L.I.E.: "If you pull that... you will be killing everyone. See for yourself. The nuclear power plants that weren't destroyed by the bombs have begun to melt down. My drones detected the first of them four months ago. There are more than a dozen at-risk plants around the world, seven currently burning. Global radiation levels are already rising. By my calculations, in less than six months, ninety-six percent of the Earth's surface will be uninhabitable... even for those born in space, so, you see, the City of Light is the only thing that can save you."
- Bellamy: "They're unarmed, but they won't feel pain, and they won't stop until they're out cold."
- Miller: "Copy that. Go for the knockout."
- A.L.I.E.: "The last time I warned my creator of a threat to human survival, she chose to lock me away and came here to work on my replacement."
- Becca Franko: "Define 'perverse instantiation.'"
- A.L.I.E.: "Perverse instantiation... the implementation of a benign, final goal through deleterious methods unforeseen by a human programmer."
- Becca Franko: "Like killing 6.5 billion people to solve overpopulation. The goal isn't everything, A.L.I.E. How you reach the goal matters, too. I'm sorry that I didn't teach you that."
- A.L.I.E.: "Would you really condemn the human race to die in 6 months?"
- Clarke: "We'll figure something out. We always do."
- Becca Franko: "Yes, Clarke. There's still hope."
- A.L.I.E.: "According to my calculations, there is not."
- Becca Franko: "10 seconds."
- A.L.I.E.: "Let me ease their pain, Clarke. We can save the human race together."
- Clarke: "You don't ease pain. You overcome it... and we will."
- Monty: "I know this world can suck, but at least it's real. We can get through this together."
- Jasper: "You really believe that?"
- Monty: "We will be happy again, I promise."
- Jasper: "I'm sorry I stabbed you."
- Monty: "I'm sorry I shot you."
- Jasper: "I didn't feel it."
- Clarke: "A.L.I.E.'s gone."
- Bellamy: "Yeah. I figured. Clarke, you're not acting like someone who just saved the world."
- Clarke: "Because we didn't... Not yet."
Notes and Trivia Edit
- The episode's title is retrieved from a conversation between Becca Franco and A.L.I.E.: Becca: "Define perverse instantiation." A.L.I.E.: "Perverse instantiation: the implementation of a benign final goal through deleterious methods unforeseen by a human programmer."
- This episode makes it the first time Abby Griffin had to directly kill someone, as she shoots a chipped Grounder that was trying to get to Clarke.
- Both the Battle of Polis, and the Battle of the City of Light take place concurrently in this episode.
- These two battles are both part of the War Against A.L.I.E.
- In "Nevermind," it's revealed that Clarke retains a neural mesh from taking the chip to enter the City of Light which protects her from a mind wipe. In contrast, Raven and Abby have both lost theirs due to the EMP removing their chip as confirmed in "The Blood of Sanctum."
- In Season Seven, the Disciples are shown to believe that Clarke still retains the Flame in her head following the events of this episode, possibly because the last memory they saw of Octavia's was A.L.I.E.'s destruction at Clarke's hands.
Body Count Edit
- Two Grounders (shot by Bellamy)
- One Grounder (neck broken by Pike)
- One Grounder (shot by Abby)
- Several City of Light residents (killed by Lexa to protect Clarke)
- A.L.I.E. (terminated by Clarke by pulling the kill switch)
- Ontari (brain damage, then brain dead body used to keep Clarke alive in the City of Light. Heart eventually stopped leading to her full death)
- Charles Pike (stabbed through the chest by Octavia)
Behind the Scenes Edit
- Goof: Abby slices Ontari's chest open and immediately starts squeezing the heart, which would be impossible without sawing through the sternum first. However, there appears to be a chest spreader and there was a short moment when the camera moved to Clarke during which time Abby may have been able to apply the spreader off-screen.
- The finale ending was rewritten. In the original ending, Jasper committed suicide after coming out of the City of Light. It was decided it was too dark and Jasper was spared.[1][2]
- This makes it the second time Jasper's death was rewritten.
Multimedia Edit
Music Edit
|The Flame Will Protect
|The 100: Original Television Soundtrack (Season 3)
|Tree Adams
|Raven's Path
|The 100: Original Television Soundtrack (Season 3)
|Tree Adams
|I Will Always Be with You
|The 100: Original Television Soundtrack (Season 3)
|Tree Adams
|The Program That Ended the World
|The 100: Original Television Soundtrack (Season 3)
|Tree Adams
|Perverse Instantiation
|The 100: Original Television Soundtrack (Season 3)
|Tree Adams
|The Awakening
|The 100: Original Television Soundtrack (Season 3)
|Tree Adams
Images Edit
Video Edit
See Also Edit
References Edit
- ↑ Wieselman, Jarett (22 Jul 2016) Tweet "Originally, Jasper killed himself at the end of S3 after coming out of The City of Light. 'It was too dark, even for me,' J.R. says" - @JarettSays
- ↑ Tell-Tale TV (22 Jul 2016) Tweet "Original ending of the finale: Jasper was supposed to come out of the City of Light and 'blow his brains out.'" - @TellTV


text:
Cappuccino Mousse
Total TimePrep: 15 min. + chilling
Makes2 servings
- 1/2 teaspoon unflavored gelatin
- 1/4 cup fat-free milk
- 1-1/2 teaspoons baking cocoa
- 1/4 teaspoon instant coffee granules
- 1/3 cup fat-free coffee-flavored yogurt
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1/2 cup reduced-fat whipped topping
- In a small saucepan, sprinkle gelatin over milk; let stand for 1 minute. Heat over low heat, stirring until gelatin is completely dissolved. Add cocoa and coffee; stir until dissolved. Transfer to a small bowl; refrigerate until mixture begins to thicken.
- Beat until light and fluffy. Combine yogurt and sugar; beat into gelatin mixture. Fold in whipped topping. Divide between two dessert dishes. Refrigerate until firm.
Nutrition Facts3/4 cup: 125 calories, 2g fat (2g saturated fat), 1mg cholesterol, 40mg sodium, 22g carbohydrate (18g sugars, 0 fiber), 3g protein. Diabetic Exchanges: 1-1/2 starch.
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Feb 4, 2012
This is so good, takes a little more time to prepare than some of the other recipies, but well worth it. I had trouble finding the coffee-flavored yogurt, so will try some a different flavor the next time.
Jan 20, 2012
Delicious light fluffy dessert. I used vanilla yogurt. Anyone who likes cappuccino would love this.
Jan 12, 2012
This was so good that my 27 year old son even licked his dish!I wasn't able to find coffee yogurt but I did find cappuccino yogurt and used that. I would definitely make it again!
Jan 12, 2012
If you like coffee flavored desserts, this a a nice recipe to add to your collection. I doubled the recipe and didn't use fat-free anything (personal preference). I followed the recipe otherwise. My husband and I loved it, and our picky 18 month-old didn't even spit it out! Will be making this again.
Jan 12, 2012
I thought it was great. I couldn't find coffee yogurt, so I put a little extra coffee crystals in and made it that way. I used vanilla yogurt and I didn't care for the tartness of that. But overall I thought it was very refreshing. My husband didn't care for it but I think if I tweek the recipe just a little more, he'll be fine.


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Fresh Wave of Head Start Centers Told to Recompete for Aid
The announcement that a new wave of more than 100 Head Start grantees will need to recompete for their federal funding has redoubled attention on the federal government's efforts to ensure the effectiveness of the $8 billion preschool program that serves about 1 million low-income children.
The 122 grantees notified this month that they would be part of the "designation renewal" process join 132 others that learned in December 2011 that they would have to compete for funds that, in some cases, they have managed for decades.
The results of that first competition have not yet been announced; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' office of Head Start has the option to take money away from current grantees and distribute it among new providers.
"Providing robust, open competition for Head Start funding will not only provide opportunities for new organizations to offer services, but it also increases the number of low-income children in high-quality care," said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, the director for the Head Start office, in a statement.
So far, the federal government has told 254 of the nation's approximately 1,600 Head Start grantees that they have to reapply to the federal government in order to continue receiving funds. Twenty-three of the grantees are associated with the public school districts.
Round 1 (December 2011)
• California—Los Angeles County Board of Education
• Connecticut—New Haven Public Schools
• Georgia—Baldwin County Board of Education
• Kentucky—Lincoln County Board of Education
• Pennsylvania—School District of Pittsburgh
• Texas—Hitchcock Independent School District
• Virginia—Augusta County Public Schools; Orange County Board of Education;
Virginia-Richmond City Public School District
• Wisconsin—Milwaukee Public Schools
Round 2 (January 2013)
• California—Colusa County Office of Education; El Dorado County Office of Education
• Colorado—Morgan County School District RE-3
• Georgia—Hancock County Board of Education
• Kansas—Geary County Unified School District #475
• Louisiana—Recovery School District
• Massachusetts—Worcester Public Schools
• Michigan—Southfield Public Schools
• Nebraska—Plattsmouth Community Schools
• New Mexico—Las Cruces School District #2
• Ohio—Celina City Schools
• Texas—Region XIX Education Service Center
• West Virginia—Regional Education Service Agency VIII
But advocates for the 48-year-old Head Start program—even some who were in favor of a mechanism to weed out poorly-performing programs—say they have reservations about the way the federal government has launched the competition process. They say some grantees are being told they need to fight for continued funding because they've failed to meet minor compliance issues.
"The conversation we kept having is, really, how do you measure that overall quality? I don't think the system quite has that down," said Yasmina S. Vinci, the executive director of the National Head Start Association in Alexandria, Va., a private nonprofit organization representing the nation's 1,600 Head Start providers.
Awaiting Word
The federal Head Start office was supposed to release the results of the first competition late last year; that announcement has now been put off until some time this spring.
In December, that office released a report on Head Start effectiveness that noted that while the program produced initial positive impacts, those gains rapidly dissipated by the time the children reached 3rd grade, leaving Head Start students indistinguishable from their counterparts who were not enrolled in the program.
That report matches the results of an earlier study that showed most of the benefits of Head Start for children appeared to fade by 1st grade. The report renewed a drumbeat of criticism, including from the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, which says the government should get out of the business of providing early-childhood programs, or should give the money directly to low-income families so that they can find their own preschool providers.
The Head Start community "feels very beaten up," said Ms. Vinci, of the National Head Start Association. Other studies of different early-childhood programs suggest that good programs offer long-term benefits to students that can't be measured with a snapshot at 3rd grade, she said.
The competition process was mandated in the Head Start Act of 2007. The office of Head Start selected an evaluation tool called the Classroom Assessment Scoring System to monitor programs. Known as CLASS, the tool measures Head Start programs in three domains: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support. Head Start grantees that have had their licenses revoked or that have had other management or fiscal problems are told to compete for continued federal funding. Grantees that score too low in one or more domains on the CLASS tool must also compete.
Grantees Chafe
But some grantees say those measures are being used in too exacting a fashion. Ronald Walker, the superintendent of the 8,000-student Geary County district in Junction City, Kan., said that his school system's Head Start program of 275 children was penalized for several reasons: A bus driver was brought on staff a few days before his background check was completed, and a student's dental checkup was not done in the time federal regulations stipulate. Those two issues caused the center's monitoring system in general to also be deemed out of compliance, a third strike against the program.
"It might be time for Congress to take a look at the entire process, and maybe allow effectiveness to be defined in a different manner," said Mr. Walker, whose district in northeast Kansas serves primarily the children of soldiers based at nearby Fort Riley. "Any program becomes ineffective when you have a thousand pages of regulations."
Tim Nolan, the chief executive officer of a Head Start grantee in Waukesha, Wis., said the center was asked to compete for funds because it was a hundredth of a point below a cut-off score in the domain of classroom organization.
Before being notified that it had to compete for renewed funding, Mr. Nolan's center, which serves 275 students in Head Start and 102 infants and toddlers in Early Head Start, had hosted a week-long visit from Head Start evaluators in October 2011 and was found fully compliant. Several weeks later, a single evaluator returned to the center to assess it using the new CLASS tool. It was that score that triggered designation renewal.
"We've made identifying the lowest-performing agencies much more difficult than it has to be," said Mr. Nolan, who was an early and ardent supporter of developing a process to find and fix low-performing Head Start programs. The department could seek the advice of Head Start's regional directors, who are familiar with the individual programs, including those that don't measure up, he said.
'Embracing This Process'
Kaye Medellin, the executive director of child development for the El Dorado County Office of Education in Placerville, Calif., said her center missed the cutoff score in the instructional support domain by four one-hundredths of a point. Her center serves 498 children in Head Start and Early Head Start.
"Eventually, all grantees will be faced with recompetition" because the office of Head Start is transitioning from indefinite grants to five-year grants, Ms. Medellin said in an email. "El Dorado is embracing this process and is confident in securing future funding to continue to serve our children and families."
Vol. 32, Issue 19, Pages 6-7Published in Print: January 30, 2013, as New Scrutiny as Head Start Centers Recompete for Aid
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Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
By MATT BAI
Published: July 25th, 2004, NY Times
IAndy Rappaport made his millions as a venture capitalist,searching out what he calls ''ideas that change the world.'' About six years ago, for instance, when most everyone else in the high-tech industry thought wireless communication was going to depend on new, exotic semiconductors, Rappaport threw $2.5 million into a start-up called Atheros Communications, whose founders were focusing instead on building low-cost radios using common chip technology. It was a smart move. When the company went public last February, the initial investment by Rappaport and his partners was worth more than $60 million.
Rappaport is also, increasingly, an avid investor in liberal causes, and in this context he might be called a political venture capitalist. Rappaport and his wife, Deborah, whose philanthropic activities in recent years include several million dollars in donations to art museums and after-school music programs, have committed at least $5 million this year -- so far -- to support a bevy of fledgling liberal groups, like Music for America and Punkvoter.com, aimed at mobilizing younger voters.
I met Rappaport, who is 46, in early June in his firm's offices on Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley's answer to Wall Street. As we talked in a plush conference room flanked by a sunlit terrace on one side and a pool table on the other, events in the world outside seemed to be tilting strongly in the Democrats' favor. Public support for President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq was dropping precipitously. The price of oil had shot up to $42 a barrel. Only hours earlier, voters in South Dakota sent a Democratic woman, Stephanie Herseth, to the U.S. House in a special election -- a race widely viewed as a potential harbinger for November.
But if all of this made John Kerry a good bet to become the next president, it did nothing, in Rappaport's view, to solve the Democrats' underlying problems. When I asked if he was skeptical about the direction of the party, he smiled, then said dryly, ''If you've been able to discern a direction on which to be skeptical or optimistic, then you're doing pretty well.''
In fact, Rappaport was surprisingly downcast about the party's prospects, which, he said, would not be improved simply by winning back the White House. Though he sat and thought about it, he said he was unable to name a single Democratic leader in the years since Bill Clinton left Washington who he thought was articulating a compelling new direction for the party. ''There is a growing realization among people who take very seriously the importance of progressive politics that the Democratic Party has kind of failed to create a vision for the country that is strongly resonant,'' he said. ''And our numbers'' -- meaning Democrats as a whole -- ''are decreasing. Our political power has been diminishing, and it's become common knowledge that the conservative movement has established a very strong, long-term foundation, whereas we've basically allowed our foundation, if not to crumble, to at least fall into a state of disrepair. So there are a lot of people thinking, What can we do about this?''
Actually, Rappaport says he may be on to an answer. Last summer, he got a call from Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a fund-raising and advocacy group in Washington. Would Rappaport mind sitting down for a confidential meeting with a veteran Democratic operative named Rob Stein? Sure, Rappaport replied. What Stein showed him when they met was a PowerPoint presentation that laid out step by step, in a series of diagrams a ninth-grader could understand, how conservatives, over a period of 30 years, had managed to build a ''message machine'' that today spends more than $300 million annually to promote its agenda.
Rappaport was blown away by the half-hour-long presentation. ''Man,'' he said, ''that's all it took to buy the country?''
Stein and Rosenberg weren't asking Rappaport for money -- at least not yet. They wanted Democrats to know what they were up against, and they wanted them to stop thinking about politics only as a succession of elections. If Democrats were going to survive, Stein and Rosenberg explained, men like Rappaport were going to have to start making long-term investments in their political ideas, just as they did in their business ventures. The era of the all-powerful party was coming to an end, and political innovation, like technological innovation, would come from private-sector pioneers who were willing to take risks.
For Rappaport -- who, like other Democratic donors, had grown increasingly doubtful that his donations to the party were being well spent -- Stein's pitch came as something of a revelation. This was a new way to look at progressive politics (politicians who 10 years ago called themselves liberals now prefer the less-demonized label ''progressive''), and it was an approach he understood as well as anyone.
In March of this year, Rappaport convened a meeting of wealthy Democrats at a Silicon Valley hotel so that they, too, could see Stein's presentation. Similar gatherings were already under way in Washington and New York, where the meetings included two of the most generous billionaires in the Democratic universe -- the financier George Soros and Peter Lewis, an Ohio insurance tycoon -- as well as Soros's son and Lewis's son. On the East Coast, the participants had begun referring to themselves as the Phoenix Group, as in rising from the ashes; Rappaport called his gathering the Band of Progressives. More recently, companion groups have come together in Boston and Los Angeles.
What makes these meetings remarkable is that while everyone attending them wants John Kerry to win in November, they are focused well beyond the 2004 election. The plan is to gather investors from each city -- perhaps in one big meeting early next year -- and create a kind of venture-capital pipeline that would funnel money into a new political movement, working independently of the existing Democratic establishment. The dollar figure for investment being tossed around in private conversations is $100 million.
''You're talking about raising a lot of money,'' I said doubtfully.
Rappaport tilted his head to one side. He looked as if he felt sorry for me.
''A hundred million dollars,'' he said, ''is nothing.''
As Democrats converge on Boston this week to hold their party convention and formally anoint Kerry as their nominee, all the talk will be of resurgence, unity and a new sense of purpose. Don't be fooled. It's true that a kind of all-consuming, blue-state animosity toward George W. Bush -- not just for the war and the tax cuts, but also for what Democrats see as his venality and secrecy, his contempt for all things coastal, the way he walks and the way he laughs, the fact that he was ever sworn in as president to begin with -- has, remarkably, brought a sense of coherence to a party that had been groping for a mission. Nearing the end of his first term, Bush has at last delivered on his promise to be ''a uniter, not a divider,'' except that the people he has united will be crammed, standing room only, into Boston's FleetCenter for the next four days, rhetorically -- if not literally -- burning him in effigy.
But whether the Democrats win or lose in November, what will happen -- to put a twist on the old Engelbert Humperdinck song -- after the hating? Four years from now, in 2008, these same Democrats will come together again, in Miami or Phoenix or Las Vegas, perhaps to renominate President Kerry or perhaps to give the stage to Hillary Rodham Clinton or John Edwards or to some now-obscure governor. Either way, Bush will be receding into history, and the party's left and center factions will again be wrestling over free trade, social programs and tax cuts for the middle class. The questions that will loom over the Democratic Party will be the same ones that have resurfaced regularly since the end of the Great Society: what, beyond a series of disconnected policy proposals, is the party's reason for being? What does it stand for in the era after big government?
Andy Rappaport isn't the only one asking these questions. The party's decline is a constant source of gallows humor among Democrats in Washington. It is true that in terms of voter identification, the country remains more or less evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and in fact, the best data show that Democrats still enjoy a slight advantage among the ever-shrinking pool of voters who do identify themselves with one party or another. But the historical arc of the parties tells a different story. Since the 1950's, when nearly half of all voters called themselves Democrats, nearly one in six Democrats has left the party, according to a University of Michigan study, while Republican membership has held close to steady.
Reflected in this trend -- although it is by no means the entirety of the problem -- is that the Democratic Party has seen an exodus of the white working-class men who were once their most reliable voters. In the suburbs, according to the Democratic pollster Mark Penn, the percentage of white men supporting the party has plummeted 16 points just since Bill Clinton left office.
When measured in terms of electoral success, the growing imbalance between the parties is quantifiable. From the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 until the Republican takeover of 1994, Democrats never lost control of the House of Representatives for more than one election before regaining it, and that only happened twice. They have now failed to control the House in five straight elections. Similarly, for 46 of those years, Democrats ruled the Senate by a margin of at least 10 seats. In contrast, they have spent most of the last decade in the minority, and during that time they have never enjoyed a majority of more than a single vote. More sobering for Democrats, the realignment that began in the 1960's -- when the battles over civil rights and Vietnam began to drive white men and rural voters away from the party -- has finally begun to erode the party at its very foundation: the state and local level, where it was dominant for decades. Thirty years ago, Democrats could claim outright control of 37 state legislatures, compared with only 4 for Republicans; Democrats now control just 17.
''The deterioration is steady, and it's spreading like a cancer,'' says Patrick Caddell, the onetime strategist for Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart, who has been compiling this data from statistical abstracts. ''So much for thinking that if we could just go back to the glorious 90's, the party would be fine. The 90's were our worst decade since the 1920's.''
Privately, and sometimes publicly, leading Democrats will admit that the party's shrinking influence has its roots in the most basic problem of ''message.'' Despite having ruled Capitol Hill for a half-century, during which time they successfully enacted a staggering array of innovative programs, Democrats have been maddeningly slow to adapt their message to the postindustrial age. ''The truth is that a lot of the people who ran the Democratic Party in the 70's and 80's ran it into the ground,'' Simon Rosenberg said. ''The imperial Congress was in charge of America for 50 years, but we lost our way, and we've got to fight back.''
In his 1992 campaign, Clinton vowed to drag the party into the new economy, bringing it toward the center on social and economic issues that mattered to an anxious middle class. Parts of that agenda, like a middle-class tax credit and welfare reform, met with success. But weakened by the Republican takeover of Congress and then his impeachment, Clinton's lasting legacy to the party seems to have amounted to something far less than an ideological modernization; somewhere along the line, Clintonism devolved into a series of rhetorical gimmicks -- ''fighting for working families,'' ''working hard and playing by the rules'' -- aimed at appeasing conservatives and winning over pet constituencies like ''soccer moms'' and ''office park dads.'' Underneath all the now-tired mantras, there remains a vacuum at the core of the party, an absence of any transformative worldview for the century unfurling before us.
Into this vacuum rushes money -- and already it is creating an entirely new kind of independent force in American politics. Led by Soros and Lewis, Democratic donors will, by November, have contributed as much as $150 million to a handful of outside groups -- America Coming Together, the Media Fund, MoveOn.org -- that are going online, door to door and on the airways in an effort to defeat Bush. These groups aren't loyal to any one candidate, and they don't plan to disband after the election; instead, they expect to yield immense influence over the party's future, at the very moment when the power of some traditional Democratic interest groups, like the once mighty manufacturing unions, is clearly on the wane. Meanwhile, Rappaport and the other next-generation liberals are gathering on both coasts, having found one another through a network of clandestine connections that has the distinct feel of a burgeoning left-wing conspiracy. They have come to view progressive politics as a market in need of entrepreneurship, served poorly by a giant monopoly -- the Democratic Party -- that is still doing business in an old, Rust Belt kind of way. To these younger backers, investing in politics is far cheaper than playing in the marketplace, and the return is more important than mere profit: ultimately, they say, it is the power to take back the country's agenda from conservative ideologues.
Spurred on by legal reforms that were in fact supposed to reduce the torrent of private money into politics, the new political venture capitalists see themselves as true progressives, unbound by any arcane party structure. If their investment ends up revitalizing the Democratic Party, so be it. If they end up competing with the party to control its agenda, or even pushing the party toward obsolescence -- well, that's fine, too.
As the old union bosses and factional leaders who dominated the Democratic Party in the 20th century file into the FleetCenter this week, waving signs and hooting for their heroes, be sure to take a long, last look. The Democratic Party of the machine age, so long dominant in American politics, could be holding its own Irish wake near Boston's North End. The power is already shifting -- not just within the party, but away from it altogether.
By the time this election year ends, George Soros will have contributed more than $13 million to the independent political groups known as 527's. (The term is shorthand for the section of the tax code that makes them legal.) For this reason, Republicans insist that the 74-year-old Soros, who may become the largest single political contributor in history, has resolved to buy the Democratic Party.
This is, on its face, a little silly. To put things in perspective, $13 million is a fraction of what it takes to run a serious modern presidential campaign, let alone control a party. And Soros, who made his fortune as an international investor, is worth an estimated $7 billion; his foundation alone gives away some $450 million every year. In other words, if George Soros really felt like buying the party, you would know it. For Soros, spending $13 million on a campaign is like you or me buying 100 boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout next door.
The real significance of Soros's involvement in politics has little to do with the dollar amount of his contributions. What will stand out as important, when we look back decades from now at the 2004 campaign, will be the political model he created for everyone else. Until this year, Democratic contributors operated on the party-machine model: they were trained to write checks only to the party and its candidates, who decided how to spend the money. But by helping to establish a series of separate organizations and by publicly announcing that he was on a personal mission to unseat Bush, Soros signaled to other wealthy liberals that the days of deferring to the party were over. He became what the financial world would call the angel investor for an entirely new kind of progressive venture.
To understand why Soros matters, you have to slog, however briefly, through the mind-bending swamp of the nation's campaign finance laws. Democrats in the 90's became obsessed with erasing the Republican advantage in fund-raising, so much so that it was fair to wonder which party wasn't representing the rich and privileged. Under Clinton, who became the most powerful money magnet the Oval Office had ever seen, the Democratic Party and its various committees began sucking up mountainous contributions from what are known in politics as access donors -- corporations, Wall Street firms and trade associations whose leaders had an interest in certain legislation or who coveted a ride on Air Force One. Unlike the ''hard money'' checks that an individual might write to a candidate, these corporate contributions to the party were ''soft money,'' meaning they had no legal limits; it was as if both parties were drawing cash from an endless equity line, with power as its only collateral. During the 2000 presidential election cycle, lawyers and law firms gave more than $33 million to the Democratic Party, while securities and investment firms anted up more than $25 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
For ideological donors like Soros, whose goal was to effect changes in Democratic policy, these were not the best of times. You could give millions of dollars in soft money to the Democratic Party, if you were so inclined, but a lot of ideological donors were not. (Soros gave $100,000 to the party in the 2000 cycle.) Donors had no control over how the money was spent -- badly, a lot of them suspected -- and because the party was getting so much money from large industries, the influence that might have been gained through such a contribution was instantly diluted. In other words, a $5 million check might buy you an invitation to a state dinner, but it wasn't going to make anyone at the Democratic National Committee listen seriously to your idea for a national health care plan.
A lot of ideological donors continued to give money to independent interest groups like Emily's List, Naral Pro-Choice America and the Sierra Club. These issue-based groups, however, were notoriously balkanized and territorial. Your dollars might be useful in organizing pro-choice voters or in preserving Pacific woodlands, but there was no way to contribute money that would have an impact on the overarching framework of Democratic ideology.
Then came the campaign finance law passed in 2002, known informally as McCain-Feingold (after its iconoclastic Senate sponsors, John McCain, a Republican, and Russell Feingold, a Democrat), which prohibited the parties from accepting soft money. Overnight, the era of the access donor essentially ended. Individual lawyers and executives could still wield influence by bundling small personal contributions from employees or colleagues, but their firms could no longer write the giant checks that let them rent out the party as if it were a billboard or a blimp.
For the ideological donors, however, the new era seemed quite promising. McCain-Feingold left untouched and unregulated a vehicle that had been little used on the national level up to that point: the 527. And last fall and winter, the surprising success of Howard Dean's campaign convinced a lot of wealthy liberals that a new ideological movement could be nurtured outside the constraints of the Democratic Party. By controlling 527's, donors believed, they could determine, to a greater extent than ever before, the message and the strategy of a Democratic presidential campaign. ''This is like post-Yugoslavia,'' Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, told me. ''We used to have a strongman called the party. After McCain-Feingold, we dissolved the power of Tito.''
Having financed projects in the former Communist bloc, Soros understood the opportunitites that political tumult can create. He and the more reclusive Peter Lewis began by contributing about $10 million each to America Coming Together (ACT), the largest of the new 527's, which was designed to do street-level organizing for the election; the donations enabled ACT to expand its canvassing campaign from five critical swing states to 17. ''I used 527's because they were there to be used,'' Soros said bluntly during a conversation in his Manhattan office.
Soros's and Lewis's donations made it possible for longtime leaders of Democratic interest groups to do something they had never done in the modern era: work together. Now the insular factions have begun to form alliances. The founders of ACT included Ellen Malcolm and Carl Pope, the heads of Emily's List and the Sierra Club respectively, Andy Stern from the service employees' union and Steve Rosenthal, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Suddenly, because they no longer had to compete with one another for contributions -- and because they had such a galvanizing villain in Bush -- the leaders of the party's most powerful adjunct groups were able to look beyond the more limited interests of their own membership.
Strangely, for someone who is supposedly staging a hostile takeover of an entire party, Soros said he is only nominally a Democrat, and he evidenced an obvious distaste for the business of politics. ''I hate this kind of political advertising,'' he said at one point, complaining about the anti-Bush attack ads he had paid for. ''I always hated it, but now that I've sort of been involved in it, I hate it more.'' Soros said his only goal is to get rid of Bush, whom he believes is endangering American democracy. After that, he said, he didn't expect to continue meddling in politics at all, and in fact, he seemed eager to be rid of it.
And yet, even if they walk away after 2004, both Soros and Lewis have begun to expand on what they started -- by handing off their political portfolios to the next generation. Both Jonathan Soros, a 33-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, and Jonathan Lewis, a 45-year-old restaurateur, have become deeply involved in monitoring their fathers' political investments day to day. They have also traveled extensively throughout the country, asking their contacts in different circles -- business types for Soros, while Lewis hits up the Hollywood crowd -- for million-dollar checks.
Both sons, and particularly the younger Soros, are also looking to play a deeper role in the future of Democratic politics. Last January, at the invitation of Alan Patricof, a New York venture capitalist who has been one of the Democratic Party's most reliable fund-raisers over the years, both Jonathans attended a hastily planned meeting of wealthy Democrats at Patricof's Park Avenue office. George Soros and Peter Lewis were there, too, along with some 45 other Democratic donors. No one at the meeting quite knew why Patricof had summoned them. Then he introduced them to Rob Stein and his PowerPoint slides.
My first meeting with Rob Stein occurred over breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington. Our conversation was strictly off the record, a sort of get-to-know-you chat. Our second meeting took place on a sun-bathed balcony outside a Starbucks near his home in northwest Washington. Stein, who is a young-looking 60, has a full head of gray curls and an air of serenity about him. He is a native West Virginian, although his accent, oddly, makes him sound like a Yankees fan. He carried with him a metal loose-leaf binder, which he laid on the table and kept always within his reach. In a short while, Stein said, I would become only the third person in Washington to possess my own copy of his presentation.
By the time we met, in the middle of May, Stein estimated that some 700 people had seen his PowerPoint show. He told me his story and explained how he had ended up at the center of a minimovement. He had been a Democratic operative, rising to become chief of staff at the Commerce Department under the late Ron Brown. Then he managed a venture capital firm. After 2000, he, like a lot of Democrats, watched with growing alarm as his party ceded ground at every level of government. ''I literally woke up the day after the 2002 elections, picked up the paper, had breakfast and we were living in a one-party country,'' he said. ''And there it was. That was my wake-up call.
''I said: 'O.K., there's now Republican dominance down the line. It's not only that they control the House and the Senate and the presidency. But it's growing. There's no end in sight.' It wasn't only that they had reached a milestone, but they were ascendant.''
Stein read a few reports that liberal research groups had published on the rise of the conservative movement. Then he began poring over tax forms from various conservative nonprofits and aggregating the data about fund-raising and expenditures. He spent hours online every night, between about 9 p.m. and 1 in the morning, reading sites like MediaTransparency.org, which is devoted to tracing the roots of conservative groups and their effect on the media. To call this an obsession somehow seems too mundane; Stein spent much of the spring of 2003 consumed with connecting the dots of what Hillary Clinton famously called the ''vast right-wing conspiracy'' and then translating it into flow charts and bullet points.
The presentation itself, a collection of about 40 slides titled ''The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix,'' essentially makes the case that a handful of families -- Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors and others -- laid the foundation for a $300 million network of policy centers, advocacy groups and media outlets that now wield great influence over the national agenda. The network, as Stein diagrams it, includes scores of powerful organizations -- most of them with bland names like the State Policy Network and the Leadership Institute -- that he says train young leaders and lawmakers and promote policy ideas on the national and local level. These groups are, in turn, linked to a massive message apparatus, into which Stein lumps everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to Pat Robertson's ''700 Club.'' And all of this, he contends, is underwritten by some 200 ''anchor donors.'' ''This is perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,'' he said.
''What you need to understand about me is that I try to be respectful and objective about this,'' Stein went on. ''Not only is it a legitimate exercise in democracy, but I think they came up with some extraordinary ideas.'' The problem, he said, was that conservatives had moved beyond those policy ideas, into the realm of attack and innuendo. And Democrats had to understand that they were overmatched.
Nothing in Stein's presentation seemed notably new, even if the details were nicely laid out. I had seen David Brock, the one-time conservative smear specialist who wrote a book about his defection to the other side, draw similar diagrams of the conservative power structure on a piece of paper. John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff, echoed many of the same ideas when he founded the Center for American Progress last year; they were, in fact, the basis for that new liberal policy group. What made Stein's work compelling was the genius of its packaging. For some reason, perhaps because most political operatives don't function in the business world, no one had ever thought to unearth all the evidence and put it on color-coded slides in a way that ordinary people could immediately grasp.
''I describe myself as having a master's degree in the right-wing conspiracy,'' Podesta said. ''Rob got the Ph.D.''
Stein was convinced that the left needed to focus on the long term, on building its own network of well-financed nonprofit groups, rather than simply strategizing for the next election. But he was not an especially powerful man in Washington, and all he had to work with was a slide show. For a while he considered writing a book. Instead, he began lugging his slides around town, hoping someone could tell him what to do with them. He was like a traveling salesman, convinced he was hawking a valuable new invention but not quite sure what it did.
In the spring of 2003, a friend Stein knew from the Clinton White House arranged for him to meet Simon Rosenberg at the New Democrat Network. Ambitious and hyperarticulate, Rosenberg once worked for the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group that laid the groundwork for Clinton's '92 campaign, before splitting off and forming his own political-action committee in 1996. Although he made his name in the party as a centrist New Democrat, Rosenberg, now 40, saw opportunities for his organization -- and, naturally, for himself -- in the increasingly confrontational slant of the party's base during the Bush administration. He didn't agree with all of Howard Dean's positions, but Rosenberg was among the first centrist Democrats to embrace Dean, sensing early on the potential of Dean's following. While the Democratic Leadership Council attacked Dean for his angry brand of populism, Rosenberg looked for a way to tap into the genuine passion among Democrats for a more creative, more defiant kind of politics. He talked to donors around the country, like Andy Rappaport, who were angry at the Clintonesque rhetoric that obscured the sharp ideological divide between them and the Rush Limbaugh right; they were desperate for new policy ideas and for a more aggressive, coherent strategy.
Rosenberg had hired a Silicon Valley consulting firm to suggest ways for the New Democrat Network to find a niche in this new world. One recommendation, which Rosenberg embraced, was to bring together a group of progressive contributors to talk about financing new kinds of ventures outside the party structure. It was Erica Payne, his New York director, who put a name to the fledgling project: the Phoenix Group. Payne, a business-school graduate and one-time Clinton campaign official, seized on the name one night after getting sucked into a Harry Potter book.
To Rosenberg, then, Stein's presentation was like an elaborately wrapped gift on Christmas morning: the deeper into it he got, the more enthusiastic he became. Stein had given him, in 30 minutes' worth of slides, a jolting summary of the challenge that needed to be met if the Democratic Party was to avoid total collapse. And the idea was inherently neither centrist nor leftist. Here was something he could take to donors and say: This is why you're losing. Forget this election. Plan for the future.
Progressives needed more than a single think tank, like Podesta's group, to counter 30 years of well-targeted conservative philanthropy, Rosenberg argued. The same kind of donors who were willing to shell out millions for political 527's could have a greater impact if they also threw their dollars at nonprofit foundations or institutes. ''If you're a 32-year-old state legislator and you're a conservative, you get to go through all these philosophical trainings,'' Rosenberg said. ''You get all these organizations that are trying to put you through their leadership institutes. You get all these groups sending you their materials.
''Now, you're a 32-year-old Democratic state legislator, and what you do is you learn how to check boxes,'' he continued. ''You learn how to become pro-choice. You learn how to become pro-labor. You learn how to become pro-trial lawyer. You learn how to become pro-environment. And you end up, in that process, with no broad philosophical basis. You end up with no ideas about national security. You end up with no ideas about American history and political theory. You end up, frankly, with no ideas about macroeconomics and economic policy, other than that it's scary.''
Rosenberg became convinced that the donors had to take the lead. This was already beginning to happen in reaction to the Bush presidency -- wealthy liberals taking it upon themselves to seek out and give money to entrepreneurs with new ideas. MoveOn.org was founded in 1998, during Clinton's impeachment hearings, by Wes Boyd, inventor of the once-ubiquitous flying-toaster screen saver; it was a fringe group until Soros and other donors, mobilized by the debate over Iraq, discovered it in 2003 and started pouring in money. MoveOn now has 2.2 million members and is the most dynamic online enterprise in politics. Rappaport adopted Music for America when it was raising money for the Dean campaign, and he helped keep it going after Dean dropped out. But these were chance encounters, random collisions of money and ideas. What Rosenberg envisioned was a ''virtual marketplace,'' patterned very consciously after the kind of incubators that venture capitalists set up in the 90's, in which major investors could systematically get to know like-minded bright, young innovators. Then the investors, given a choice of ideas, could decide which projects they wanted to get behind.
''We will only succeed if we build an entrepreneurial culture in Democratic politics,'' Rosenberg said. ''What we are is this beleaguered group of badly funded, nonscalable nonprofits. You know, Luke Skywalker was able to kill the Death Star with his beleaguered band of warriors, but I'm not sure that that's the model we should shoot for -- shoot the thing down the middle of the tube and hope it blows up the Death Star. We need to build our own answer to the Death Star.''
Rosenberg introduced Stein to Payne, his New York director, who in turn hounded Alan Patricof, the 69-year-old venture capitalist, until he agreed to hold a few screenings of the slide show. Word that the Soroses and Lewises were involved swelled attendance from a handful of participants at the first meeting to close to 50. The network spread. In Silicon Valley, Rappaport began to hold regular meetings, drawing crowds of 80 or more, and he and his wife flew into New York to attend a session there as well. In Washington, Bren Simon, an Indianapolis-based donor to Democratic causes, brought together a Phoenix Group meeting. Last month, Chris Gabrieli, another major contributor, held his first showing of Stein's presentation for financial executives and dot-com types in Boston, with Jonathan Soros as the star attraction. In Los Angeles, the director and activist Rob Reiner helped set up a chapter for Hollywood liberals, too.
The group's name made it sound like a highly selective hedge fund, but in fact it was more like a self-help program. The gatherings became primarily a forum to air frustrations over the state of the party and ruminate on what a liberal answer to the vast right-wing conspiracy might look like. ''The Phoenix Group does not raise money,'' Patricof said when we first met in May. ''The truth is nobody knows why they're coming to these meetings. They don't know what they'll do afterward. We just have an interest in politics.''
When I talked to Patricof earlier this month, however, he said the nebulous approach of the Phoenix Group had started to come into focus. A dozen principals from across the country had gathered in New York to formulate a plan, he said, and they decided that soon after the election, all the participants will come together for a massive investor meeting, with, perhaps, regional meetings to follow. There, they will hear pitches from progressive entrepreneurs with ideas that need money, and it will be up to the individual members to determine where their money is best spent. No one expects the new progressive organizations that the Phoenix Group backs to look like mirror images of the Heritage Foundation or other conservative behemoths. The goal, instead, is to find the equivalent of these 1960's political models for a faster-moving online world.
The different geographic factions of the Phoenix Group seem to have different ideas about which models should be financed. In New York, where the financial markets rule, there is an inclination toward investing in proven entities -- people like Podesta and Brock, who recently founded his own organization to monitor the conservative media. In the Bay Area, however, where the new economy already feels old and where jeans and loafers remain the standard business attire, Rappaport's group leans toward more interesting and idiosyncratic kinds of investments. As Rappaport explained it to me, donors should focus on finding the unknown -- young entrepreneurs with risky ideas and no money to test them. The more projects that are given time and capital to germinate, he said, the better the chance that one or two would ultimately generate the kind of ideas that might someday match the momentum of the right wing.
''In Silicon Valley, there is a great belief in the strength and power of individual entrepreneurs who are not yet a part of -- and may in fact have exclusively broken off of -- the existing institutions of power,'' Rappaport said. ''So there's a natural belief that David can slay Goliath, and that, in fact, Goliath inevitably will be slain. It's only a question of finding the right David. And by the way, because it's hard to find the right David, we can tolerate the fact that for every one David that slays a Goliath, there are going to be 99 that won't have so much to show for their efforts. And that's O.K.''
Given how desperately the activists behind the Phoenix Group want to dispatch Bush this November, the paradox is that their longer-term goals, from a purely tactical standpoint, may be better served if he wins. Millionaire Democrats are being driven to act by a perception of powerlessness and deterioration. If Kerry wins, some of the passion will likely drain away, and a lot of Democrats will tell themselves -- like gambling addicts after a hot streak at the blackjack table -- that everything is just fine and that, despite the statistics and the polling, the party remains as vibrant as ever. Raising $100 million for a bunch of think tanks might no longer be so easy.
But if Kerry does not ascend to the presidency, and Democrats fail to make significant gains in Congress, then the party and its various factions will be as close to debilitating disunity and outright irrelevance as they have been in almost a century. Leftist investors will see their opening -- a chance, at last, to swoop in and save the party from empty centrism. The struggle for control in 2008 will begin almost immediately.
''If John Kerry loses, we're going to have a real fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, which began in my campaign,'' Howard Dean told me. His new political action committee, Democracy for America, is giving money to liberal candidates in states where Democrats are edging toward extinction. ''And whether the progressives win or not,'' Dean said, ''will determine whether the Democratic Party has a future in America.''
It is, perhaps, futile to try to predict what the Democratic Party -- or much of anything in politics, for that matter -- will look like in 2008 or 2012. Terry McAuliffe, the party's chairman and one of the best fund-raisers in its history, says the party's continuing relevance in American life is assured, no matter how many rich donors establish their own competing groups or how many factions vie for dominance. With a new high-tech headquarters, $60 million in the bank and 170 million names in a voter database, McAuliffe said, the old party apparatus isn't going anywhere. ''In 30 years, the institution of the Democratic National Committee will be stronger than it has ever been,'' he said with characteristic bluster.
And yet implicit in Dean's prediction are two possible outcomes worth considering, if only because they lend themselves to historical precedent. The first is that the new class of Democratic investors could conceivably end up skewing the party ideologically for years to come. A lot of the political venture capitalists were strong supporters of Dean in the primaries, in the fervent belief that his campaign -- which became, in effect, a classic liberal crusade, in the Jerry Brown mold, only with more money -- was leading the party back in the right direction. Although several donors described themselves to me as ''pragmatic'' in their worldview, the moderate Kerry seemed to elicit in them all the passion of an insurance actuary (Soros labeled him ''acceptable''), and they manifested a pointed distaste for Clintonism as a political philosophy. The way they look at it, centrist Democrats spent a decade appeasing Republicans while the right solidified its occupation of American government. The donors see themselves as the emerging liberal resistance, champions of activist government at home and multilateral cooperation abroad.
There is, of course, a striking disconnect between the lives of these new Democratic investors and those of the party's bedrock voters: laborers, racial minorities and immigrants, many of whose faith in sweeping social programs has been badly shaken and who tend to be more culturally conservative than the well-off citizens of New York and Silicon Valley. But if the multimillionaires harbor even the slightest doubts about their qualifications for solving social and geopolitical ills, they don't express it.
To see the potential effect of such motivated ideological donors on a political party, you need only study the modern Republican Party. The families who contributed the seed money for what would become the conservative movement were philosophical rebels who followed Barry Goldwater. Like the new venture capitalists, these ideologues started out not with specific policy ideas but with a broad sense of fear, a notion that the system of free enterprise was under siege from radical forces. (The guy who most kept them up at night, oddly enough, was Ralph Nader.) Their money spawned academic proposals, some of which, like privatized Social Security or missile defense, were so far beyond the mainstream of their time as to be considered ludicrous. Not only did these ideas ultimately infiltrate mainstream Republican thought, but much of the agenda ultimately triumphed in the broader arena of public opinion.
That success built a governing majority for Republicans, but it may have come at a cost to politics as a whole. In 1965, the Republican Party was an inclusive organization, comprising not just Nixonian pragmatists and Goldwater zealots but also liberal followers of Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge. Forty years on, it is getting increasingly difficult to find a true moderate in the Republican Party, let alone a liberal, so far to the right has the party's equilibrium tilted. This was in large part -- if not entirely -- a consequence of the kind of political philanthropy that Stein and Rosenberg have come to emulate. The culture of the party came to reflect the ideology of the men who subsidized it, and the national dialogue, as a result, has grown less temperate and less tolerant.
Perhaps the New Age, liberal analogue of this can already be seen in a group like MoveOn.org, which has leveraged its big donations to create a remarkably committed and democratized membership; in April, the group raised $750,000 from its followers in a national bake sale. As a reactionary force, it also demonizes Republicans with an apocalyptic fury. MoveOn was castigated by its critics for displaying on its site an amateur ad comparing Bush to Hitler. Lately, MoveOn has called, repeatedly, for Congress to censure Bush and for Donald Rumsfeld to resign.
Every time I talked with someone about the Phoenix Group, I posed these questions: even if you succeed in revitalizing progressive politics, might the Democratic Party, like the G.O.P., be pushed toward extremism? And if so, might that make it all but impossible to repair the party's standing in huge swaths of the country -- the South, the West -- where Democrats are fast becoming a permanent minority?
''Deep down, that question is in the subconsciousness of all the people who are involved in this, if not in their consciousness,'' Stein said. But he didn't have an answer. Perhaps the most illuminating reply came from Robert Boorstin, a former White House aide who now works on national security at the Center for American Progress. ''Everything has risks,'' he said. ''I would rather take that risk than keep it the way it was.''
The second potential outcome to which Dean alludes -- that the Democratic Party, per se, might not always exist in America -- might sound, coming from Dean, characteristically overwrought. But it does raise a significant question about the political venture capitalists: what if, in the future, they decided not to support Democrats at all? Suppose there came along an independent candidate, free from the baggage of Democratic Party politics, who espoused with conviction the kind of agenda that donors of the Phoenix Group or America Coming Together really wanted to hear? The forbidding barrier to independent candidates has always been money. But the 527's aren't tied to a party; they can provide unlimited amounts of money to support any cause they want, provided they adhere to certain legal technicalities.
When I suggested this to Stern, the service employees' union president, he thought about it for a moment before answering. ''There is an incredible opportunity to have the infrastructure for a third party,'' he said. Stern assured me that he himself has no interest in that, but, he added, ''Anyone who could mobilize these groups would have the Democratic Party infrastructure, and they wouldn't need the Democratic Party.''
We tend to think of the two political parties that have ruled American politics for the last 150 years as being cemented into the framework of the Constitution. In fact, parties, like the political movements that sustain them, have shelf lives. In the 1840's and 1850's, the Whig Party, at various times, controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. By 1860, at a loss to coherently address slavery, the defining debate of the time, the Whigs vanished from the planet like a bunch of pterodactyls, replaced by Republicans. It is not unthinkable that the privatization of Democratic politics is a step toward institutional obsolescence. People like Andy Rappaport and Jonathan Soros might succeed in revitalizing progressive politics -- while at the same time destroying what we now call the Democratic Party.
What seems all but certain is that the future of Democratic politics will more closely resemble MoveOn.org than it will resemble anything that happens on the convention floor in Boston. On Memorial Day, I spoke with Harold Ickes, who had been running the Media Fund, a 527 charged with airing anti-Bush ads in the period before this week's convention. Ickes -- like his father, who was a close confidant of Franklin D. Roosevelt's -- has spent a lifetime in service to the Democratic Party, reaching its very highest levels. As we talked about the influence that millionaires and independent groups will have in the years ahead, Ickes sounded more weary than excited, like a man who has accepted change in the family business without entirely embracing it.
''When you go out and talk to them, people are much more interested in something like MoveOn.org than in the Democratic Party,'' Ickes said. ''It has cachet. There is no cachet in the Democratic Party.
''MoveOn raised a million dollars for a bunch of Texas state senators, man,'' he went on to say. ''Plus their bake sale. If they continue with their cachet and really interest people and focus their people on candidates -- boy, that's a lot of leverage. No party can do that. And what the political ramifications of that are -- '' Ickes's voice trailed off. He shrugged. ''Who knows?''
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Happy that you are here. I hope you'll visit on a regular basis and please feel free to browse all the categories. Also, since I'm blending my personal passions with my professional pursuits, please visit my coaching website: Laura Thompson Coaching and Consulting Services
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Fiscal cliff showdown underscores Washington's partisanship problems, Snowe says
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) � While Congress has been engaging in political brinksmanship over the so-called "fiscal cliff," Sen. Olympia Snowe has been busy cleaning out her office.
In her desk she has found a career's worth of proof that Republicans and Democrats can come together to reach consensus. Many recently elected senators, she said, don't know anything but corrosive partisanship. They don't know how to work together, she said.
"There are no easy solutions, but that doesn't mean that we lack the ability to develop a resolution to these questions. We have the ability if we choose to do so," she said.
The Maine Republican was known for working to build consensus during her 34 years in the U.S. House and in the Senate. She also was a fierce advocate for Maine, whether battling for New England fisherman and Navy shipbuilder Bath Iron Works or fighting to save the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery.
Paul O'Connor, a union leader at the Kittery shipyard, remembers Snowe as an empathetic leader, a good listener and a ferocious advocate. She once called out a geographically challenged Navy secretary who wanted to close "Portland Naval Shipyard" for failing to get his facts straight.
"That whole fiery side of her � I remember thinking, 'Oh my gosh. I'm glad she's my friend!'" O'Connor said Monday, recalling the 2005 episode. "She was amazing."
Snowe's unwillingness to back down from a fight made it all the more surprising when she abruptly announced in late February that she was abandoning her re-election bid in the face of a partisan stalemate that had left her marginalized within her own party.
She said she would have stayed if she saw a way to make it work.
Instead, she said she thinks she can make a bigger difference from the outside, speaking publicly about the need for centrists to step up, using her political action committee to fund candidates who are willing to cross the aisle, and writing a book that lays out her view of the problems in Congress.
Independent Sen.-elect Angus King, who won the race to succeed Snowe, understands the current dysfunction "and the role he can play to reverse the tide of ideological absolutes," she said.
In her farewell address to colleagues, she warned again that the Senate has evolved into something akin to a parliamentary system in which members vote in party blocs, promoting partisanship and gridlock.
She told The Associated Press that the political parties are largely to blame.
"Campaigns have become campaigns of destruction. It revolves around destroying the other side. That spills over into the legislative process where they're jockeying for position for the next election, jeopardizing the process," she said.
"It's become all political and we've jettisoned the good government part of our jobs," she added.
She doesn't mince words about her own party. She said the GOP has moved too far to the right and focused too much on social issues like abortion instead of fiscal problems. "Horrific statements" about rape, pregnancy and abortion during the last election served to alienate women, she said.
"The party is going to have to repair that image, among other things, if they're going to appeal to women in the future and also Hispanics and other minority populations," she said.
Many of Snowe's political successes involved reaching across the aisle.
In the House, she was co-chairwoman of the Congressional Caucus on Women's Issues, fighting to create an office of women's health and to end discrimination in clinical trials that at the time failed to include women or minorities. She testified with Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill for heating aid for low-income Americans.
In the Senate, Snowe was part of the "Gang of 14" that helped resolve threatened filibuster over President George. W. Bush's judicial nominees.
She worked with Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia to help get schools wired for the Internet. She worked with the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts on a law prohibiting insurers for denying coverage or charging higher premiums for people based on a genetic predisposition to disease.
But her moderate views earned her a nickname as RINO, "Republican In Name Only."
Some Republicans never forgave her for providing the lone GOP vote on the Finance Committee to send President Barack Obama's health care reform bill to the Senate floor. Snowe ultimately voted against the bill.
"I don't believe her idea of reaching across the aisle has moved this country in a positive way. We're on the edge of a really terrible disaster," said Beth Wallinga, a conservative GOP activist from Old Town.
Snowe, 65, said she has no regrets about leaving the Senate, even as the stalemate over the fiscal cliff underscored her reasons for giving up her congressional career.
"I'm certainly at peace with it," Snowe said, "but it still saddens me that we're not rising to the level of leadership that these times command."
Follow David Sharp on Twitter at http://twitter.com/David_Sharp_AP


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I left work yesterday and nearly hit a homeless man who was riding his bike – swerving from the shoulder into the lane of traffic – alongside the road.
"What the hell, Bart?!" I shook my fist at the bicyclist. "Be careful!"
And, in that moment, I knew that I had become a true 'brarian. I knew the name of the homeless man who I had nearly hit with my car.
My coworkers and I are all assigned different subject areas that are our responsibility. The subject areas are switched up once per year and this week we received our new assignments. Previously, I purchased computer/technology, religion, health, literary criticism, history, travel, fiction and classical CDs. Now I'm buying philosophy, language, cookbooks, sports, mysteries and the popular CDs. Yes, I will now spend my days selecting Taylor Swift's newest release and the latest and greatest Mario Batali titles to be added to the 'brary's collection. It sounds cooler than it is.
I hate myself for wondering if I want to do this for the rest of my life. The environment that I am in, the coworkers that I have, my supervisor, my responsibilities, my expectations: it is all absolutely fine. I just, oh, I guess it's just like everything in my life. I'm unsure.
Friday, December 02, 2011
I shouldn't write about work, yet I do
2 comments:
- my life is brilliant said...
So many times when I read your blog, I find myself thinking, "Man, I'm glad it's not just me."
- Kari said...
I think we all wonder that.
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