Cuccinelli said he could not say how much of his staff's time has been devoted to writing Virginia's next filing in the suit--due June 7 but estimated it likely reached "scores of hours, for sure."

This is an important point because Cuccinelli has so far said the suit has cost the state only $350, the court filing fee, and declined to break down how much the state is paying to staff working the issue.

But I guess it's all right to spend the money as long as you're trying to establish that you don't have to spend any money on health care

Denise Graveline takes us from the football field to the guitar studio and provides some valuable insight.

"You can't stop when you make a mistake," he said.  "You're pausing to think what you did wrong and how to fix it. But you've got to keep going. The pros make mistakes all the time, but they keep going."

...

Take the stopping.  I know full well that "ums" trip lots of speakers up. The speaker's got a heightened awareness of any mistakes she makes, especially if she's nervous or not as practiced at it.  And ums serve as a verbal pause while you're trying to remember what it was you wanted to say.  They're also a normally occurring part of everyone's speech.  Nonetheless, if an um throws you off and you stop, you'll find your momentum and focus tough to recover.

When we're trying to learn or perfect a new skill, we often forget our other experience or accomplishments and what we've already learned. Here's a reminder of how valuable it can be to apply all our experience. Click through to read Denise's whole post, then let us know how you've learned to be a better speaker from another of your skills.

Scalia, in a 1995 decision on the separation of powers, made the same mistake as Palin. Two readers, on other hand, disagree with the standard interpretation of the poem. One writes:

In my opinion, Frost doesn't actually choose a side between his two characters.

It is true that the narrator feels "something there is that doesn't love a wall," and tries to convince his neighbor that they are not necessary. But the narrator is not Frost himself. He appears to be a whimsical man, who likes to tease that his apple trees will not eat the neighbor's pine cones, and wants to enter into jokes about elves. The neighbor is plainspoken and stolid, and only responds, "good fences make good neighbors." But his obstinacy could easily be due to finding the narrator irritating. Frost is talking about boundaries and how different people have different tolerances for them. I'm not out to set up Palin as a literary expert, but she is adopting a perfectly valid side of the argument.

The other writes:

You and Palin both have Frost wrong. It is the act of repairing the wall that forces the neighbors to work together each year.  It is this communal act of repairing the barrier that seperates them, that forces the human interaction, thus making them better neighbors.  Frost doesn't like walls, but jointly maintaining the wall is its own benefit.  Thus, "Good fences" (those that are kept in good order) make good neighbors" (neighbors who communicate, work together, etc. on a regular basis).

If the Palins and their new neighbors worked together to build a privacy fence, the communal act of building would make them better neighbors, according to Frost.  And it would also give the reporter a perfect opportunity to make small talk ("So, tell me about your kids ... ")

I think I'll forget Palin and focus on Frost. Thanks to @PoetryFound (and Andrew Sullivan) for bringing a good poem back into focus for me.

But beyond tooting my own horn, it occurred to me, while watching the other speakers, that a Toastmasters Speech has its own unique style. It is part performance art, part motivational appeal and part moralistic sermon. There’s no rule saying it has to be that way, but winning speeches generally contain a moral lesson or message of some sort and tend to be physically demonstrative and emotional in tone.

Some new Toastmasters I have met, mostly those coming in to learn business or sales presentation, question the value of learning such a style. It’s not directly applicable to what they need to do in business, they say.

I always counter that by pointing out that there are no tires on an American football field. Yet football players often train by running through rows of tires. It would seem a pointless exercise, training for something that will never happen in a game situation, but of course, that’s not why they do it.

They run through the tires because it trains them to stay balanced, to place their feet precisely and to lift their feet when they run. It trains them in the type of skills that ARE directly applicable to successfully running through the jumble of flying limbs and falling bodies that litter the field during the average play.

That’s what Toastmasters does too. It trains speakers to speak with power, flexibility and precision. It trains them to use their faces and bodies to reinforce their spoken message. It trains them to control or eliminate nervous mannerisms that undercut their authority. It trains them to think about what, specifically, they are trying to communicate and how they can most clearly and effectively structure the words and ideas. It trains them to be disciplined, to stay on message and not go on pointless, unproductive tangents. It trains them to stand in front of a crowd, of any size, with composure and confidence.

It trains them in precisely the skills that are directly applicable to delivering a disciplined response to a media inquiry, to presenting a scripted sales demonstration with an air of spontaneity, to explaining a complex technical problem to the suits in management or to rallying the troops in times of uncertainty.

Those are the skills that will make you stand out from the pack and put you on the fast track to the top.

This from the blog of R. L. Howser, who competed in the Toastmasters All-Japan Speech Contest championship and will be traveling to California for this year's finals. I confess to the same doubts about contest speeches, but I really appreciate what Howser says about the value of Toastmaster training and I know it has worked for me in many ways and on many levels, most recently as a lab in which I redeveloped the ability to speak after a stroke. What about you? Do you still see the importance of running through the tires?

via @OliviaMitchell

We’re in the aftermath of a financial crisis — and there’s overwhelming evidence (pdf) that recovery from financial crises is almost always protracted and difficult. There’s no way one should have expected everything to be fine until the Lehman failure lies years in the past. In fact, the return of job growth we’ve already seen is ahead of schedule compared with the historical average.

And one thing is clear: the financial crisis occurred on Bush’s watch. To demand that everyone let Bush off the hook for where we are now because 16 months have passed under his successor is to defy the overwhelming evidence of history.

I wish we saw more like this. I'm usually amazed and angered when I hear the (predictable) Republican jabs at the Obama administration. Seems to me the Republicans took eight years to run the economy into the ground. The new administration is expected to turn it around on a dime?