6 Thoughts for November 4, 2016

1. Brad Avakian: Some people think that a SoS has no real powers to effect political changes, and thus, choosing to vote for Dennis Richardson is acceptable given Avakian's past troubles. But then, all you need to do is look at Indiana and Republican SoS Connie Lawson. I'm not saying that Richardson is either motivated to, or could, pull off a stunt like this in Oregon, but that politics cause some people to act out in both large and small ways as to deprive a group of people their rights, such as we've seen in North Carolina. Given the very long history of Republicans nationally working to suppress the African-American vote, I put it to you that having a Democratic SoS, in fact, matters a lot. Of course, Oregon being a very-White state, perhaps this issue doesn't matter so much with Oregonians.
2. Assange, the Puppet: My eyes rolled when Julian Assange adamantly said yesterday that the stolen emails involving Democrats did not come from Russia. First, anyone halfway knowledgeable about these things would not presume that Russia would directly hand over these documents to Wikileaks; in fact, most people would assume that Russia would obscure the source of the documents. Secondly, Assange's statement implies that he knows who is doing the hacking, which then places him in more trouble with the US government -- is he dumb or what? Assange is merely a puppet in all this, but his naivete prevents him from realizing the obvious.
3. Tangible Conservative Bias: There is no better gauge of conservative bias than through the case of Scott Greene, the Iowa man who shot and killed two police officers. In an earlier Breitbart story there were over 2000 comments, many of which included attacks on liberals and BLM. Later that same day, Breitbart added another story that was strictly about Greene's racist past -- zero comments. Zero. As in, not a single Breitbart reader could care less that a cop shooter was racist.
4. Can Biscuit Pizza: I feel like I should have thought or known about this a long time ago. Today I had opened up a can of biscuit -- $1.00 store brand -- and had used a couple of pucks to make morning biscuit sandwiches (egg + cheese + bacon). At lunch, I had the epiphany that I could roll the biscuit dough out and turn it into a pizza. It worked a lot better than I had expected. I normally use sourdough bread for this, but had a much better outcome. Mmm.
5. Store Brand Coffee: I stood at the store a few days ago, staring at the various coffee selections. On one side of the aisle the usual 10~12 oz bags and on the other were canned and instant coffee. I bought my standard, Seattle's Best #4 and then turned around and picked up a 1# can of medium-dark roast arabica bean store brand coffee. The store brand tasted like what you'd drink at Denny's, which is to say that it's not bad but it's not good. So I mixed the two, and the flavor is significantly better. Mind you it doesn't have the character of Ethiopian, Kona, Sumatran, Kenyan or anything in-between, but it's far better than the plain store brand or anything that is freeze dried instant, and for the time being it's my go-to daily coffee.
6. October Jobs Report: 161,000 new jobs added. Seems a bit low, but the two previous months' numbers were revised upwards by a total of 44,000. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.9% even as the participation rate decreased slightly, which is sometimes used to criticize the recovery, yet the notorious U-6 number continued to shrink -- in other words, the lower participation rate is likely due to baby boomers choosing to retire.