A SUPREME CORNUCOPIA OF MUSINGS...

I enjoyed the Daily Howler's take on the Supreme Court story...When I first looked the stories last night, I thought the same thing that he elaborated on today...He says the press is already spinning Roberts' story, trying to turn him into an option that Republicans can argue no reasonable person can refuse, even though he apparently was instrumental in the Florida recount of the 2000 election...Political payback sure is sweet.

I noticed that Alterman used some of the same logic regarding this nomination as the man he vilified during the election of 2004--Ralph Nader.















Alterman takes a more or less blase attitude toward the nomination, pointing out that maybe the people who voted for Bush should get a taste of the horror they voted for, hoping that in a decade or two they'll wise up and get rid of the Bush types. Nader has been using that exact argument for a while now...I first heard him mention it in the 2000 election.

Raimondo at antiwar.com has an excellent piece on the Rove distraction. He points out how the whole investigation is not even really about Rove or Novak or Cooper or whatever, it's about finding out how we were lied into war. But Rove did in fact leak Plame's identity to Cooper and probably others.

Finding vs. Getting A Job

And then I was checking my Hotmail account and ran across this quiz. I realize they're just trying to be helpful by posting this tripe, but reading through it just made me tired and depressed and I'm not even looking for a job. But hell, if this war keeps going and this deficit keeps growing, we may all be looking for jobs soon.

It's a pretty standard "self-marketing" questionnaire--multiple choice answers to what are supposedly standard interview questions. What I don't understand is why any employers are asking such questions since there are so many resources like this quiz that tell a jobseeker what to say. And I'm sure there are some newly minted popular interview questions that aren't covered in the questionnaire. What is the hapless jobseeker supposed to do then?

I was entertained by the way the quiz's author kept saying that you should answer the questions honestly then proceeded to tell people how to bullshit effectively when questions about why you left your last job come up. The most useful thing that this article could have told a potential jobseeker is that universal, immutable truth of job-hunting: You have to know somebody on the inside to get hired.

But my point is that most people are lucky to even get an interview. There was a period in my life a few years ago where I put on the coat and tie and handed in applications for somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 jobs and got maybe five interviews. And from what recent jobseeking friends have told me, their experience has not been much different.

It's like I've always said, there's a giant chasm between "finding" a job and "getting" a job even though most people use the terms interchangeably. Anyone can "find" a job, but "getting" a job is a bitch...