The Crackpot Times

Iraq: The Neverending Story 2

2007-09-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, but I've just been so rivited by the Petraeus/Crocker testimony. Or as the LA Times referred to it the "Iraq is too important to lose, so we've got to keep on trying, no matter the cost, and though it's not clear when we will succeed" testimony. It seems like it can't get worse and then it does. And today is a horrible example. Maybe some of you have heard about the really stunning op-ed by seven US soldiers in Iraq published in the NY Times a few weeks ago. Here's a copy of it, and while you should really read the whole thing, here's a very short excerpt:

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal.
...
In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, "We need security, not free food."

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Really, really, please read the whole thing. If you do, not only will you read one of the best, clear thinking yet emotional analysis of the current situation, you'll find out one of the seven authors of the piece, "The War As We Saw It" was shot in the head during its writing. He is expected to live, but the past tense of the piece's title has proven all to presenent today:

The Op-Ed by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq questioning the war drew international attention just three weeks ago. Now two of the seven are dead.

Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray died Monday in a vehicle accident in western Baghdad, two of seven U.S. troops killed in the incident which was reported just as Gen. David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress in the "surge." The names have just been released.
....
Mora, 28, hailed from Texas City, Texas, and was a native of Ecuador, who had just become a U.S. citizen. He was due to leave Iraq in November and leaves behind a wife and daughter. Gray, 26, had lived in Ismay, Montana, and is also survived by a wife and infant daughter.

Bush will give a speech tomorrow and by all signs we will STILL be in Iraq with over 130,000 troops this time next year. Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Victoria Clarke, Richard Perle, Michael Gerson, David Frum, Dick Armitage, Douglas Feith, John Yoo, Richard Myers, Tommy Franks, Karen Hughes, Harriet Miers, Tony Snow, Alberto Gonzales, and Karl Rove will all probably still be alive, making millions in the private sector, and appearing on television everywhere praising the end of the Bush era and questioning the patriotism of others who argue. And Sgts. Mora and Gray will still be dead, and their children like all the children of all the dead Iraqis and other US troops and contractors will still miss them. And General Petraeus will probably continue not to want to guess if any of this makes us safer.

It's feels pointless, but I'm going to call my elected representatives today. I hope you do too.

The wonderful future of our country

2007-07-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

It sad, funny, and ultimately kind of scary, but you have to see this Max Blumenthal video of him visiting a recent College Republican conference. Watch how Tom Delay explains how we wouldn't need illegal immigration if it wasn't for all the aborted fetuses! Hear liberals compared to Iraqi insurgents! Learn why we have to fight them over there so we don't fight them here!

Actually, you don't learn why, you just hear them say it again and again. Plus, I guess they are fighting them over here, they just are dressed up like progressives. Still, learn bitches!

Even the Wind God will bow down before the Beijing Olympics

2007-07-18T00:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not saying anything....except to point out the People's Republic is literally claiming to have the power to control the weather.

I heard their next plan is to set the world to Beijing standard time next year: no tape delay!!!

You know who hates losers? Winners!

2007-07-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

All you need to know about the DC area free-alt weekly's article about Late Night Shots, an invite-only DC social networking site, are the comments are awesome!

# Comment: By: possumfest Jul. 12, 2007, at 7:33 pm
The reality of your hipster lifestyle is that most of you will live poor lives in cramped basements, have unattractive wives/husbands/partners, bitch about Republicans while benefiting from the tax burden we shoulder, and in general, not be able to experience much at all because you are very unsuccessful professionally and personally. We are better athletes, smarter in business, more attractive, tougher, and, in general, winners of the genetic lottery. Angela Valdez was treated well by almost everyone she encountered until she wrote this hyper-sexualized caricature of the 20-something Georgetown set. She is a known embellisher and clearly a loser in her personal life. Everyone who supports her on this thread is intellectually dishonest and probably a loser as well. Have fun being poor and insignificant, hipsters.

Wonkette has a collection of LNS stuff if you are interested including this hilarious, possibly made up tale tale involving a broken condom, online confrontation, and offline avoidance. Be careful though, next thing you know you'll be reading this post on LNS with its nod to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Zizek, nationalism, and the Other and hours of your life will be gone with only this in exchange:

Postmodernism is often invoked as the age of fragmentation and unlimited inflation or plurality of subject positions. In this respect, postmodernism follows the logic of rampant capitalism, according to which the more production grows, the greater becomes the need to produce, without ever achieving satisfaction. Similarly, in Freudian terms, the greater the repentance stimulated by the transgression of the Law, the greater the guilt. Opposite to the logic of capitalism of superfluous overproduction and of the postmodern dispersion of subject positions, nationalism assumes excessive identification with one particular ethnic position, at the expense of all other possible subject positions. Zizek emphasizes that, "the more the logic of Capital becomes universal, the more its opposite will assume features of 'irrational fundamentalism'" (220).

In their discussion of the manifestation of national identity, both Zizek and Salecl bring up the issue of a postmodern type of racism, which Etienne Balibar has called "meta-racism." If the old type of racism was based on the idea that racial differences were biologically determined, "meta-racism," even though no longer supporting an argument based on biology, makes these differences culturally and historically contingent. In the latter case "culture itself functions as a 'natural' determinative force: it locks individuals and groups a priori into their cultural genealogy. "Meta-racism" [explains Salecl] perceives cultures as fixed entities and tries desperately to maintain 'cultural distances'" (Spoils of Freedom 12). 'Meta-racism' is identified as even more dangerous than racism, because it employs racist measures while pretending to oppose racism, thus falsely posing as its opposite.

Wait, does reading stuff about Zizek make you a "hipster loser"? I don't think so, but then again I think Ivy-league schools are in the Ivy League, not lame Coach K forever fan clubs...and I'm unattractive, so what do I know!

Moore vs. CNN

2007-07-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, maybe everyone has seen this already, but here's the Moore on CNN clip reacting to be kept honest by the fact check squad!

Moore's site does a great job debunking the debunking of the piece. The best part is CNN's claim Sicko doesn't mention that Cuba is ranked lower than the US in quality of health care when in reality it is ON THE SCREEN WHEN THE US RANK IS GIVEN. In fact, it would have been on CNN too, but their scrolling text blocked it out. Wow.

Although the whole piece is supposed to be about Sicko, its really interesting how it all goes back to the war (aka that stupid, pointless, endless war). The war on the other...um, terror is everything, it is the beginning and the end. It is not only costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, it is posioning our political discourse, warping the minds of a generation of the US army, and closing down the foreign and domestic possiblities for our nation. Don't worry though, the guy in charge is sleeping easy. A lot easier than [asshole citizens] would assume!

Is it lucky to be born Mormon?

2007-07-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Funny...

This time, for realz

2007-07-08T22:19:00.000-07:00

Looking at this story in the New York Times this morning I had to check the date to make sure I hadn't fallen into a wormhole or accidentaly traveled around the sun, a la Star Trek 4: The Journey Home.

White House Debate Rises on Iraq Pullback

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

This story reminded me of something....oh yeah, the same garbage they have been "said" to be debating for months now. This is so well trodden ground that even this crappy blog wrote about a similar story in the Times in May! Even though it is to another post on this blog, please check out the link and be freaked out about how little has changed these last few months despite all the rhetoric that things have/must change.
This is the best part of the article:

Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a “post-surge redeployment.”

Forget the (mom and dad aren't fighting, we're having a) running argument part for a second. What you have to do is run and mark you calendars with the first reference to a meaningless phrase that will come to dominate our political discourse for months to come: "post-surge redeployment". Welcome militaristic euphamisms! Take your rightful place next to "stay the course", "cut and run", "fight them there so we don't fight them here", and, of course, "surge".

Considering this story and the fact nearly 150 people died this weekend in one truck bombing in Iraq, I was pretty feeling pretty hopeless of anything positive being done in the near future. But then I read that Colin Powell tried to talk Bush out of the war for 2 1/2 hours!!! Wow, who says there aren't heroes anymore?

Happy belated July 4th!

2007-07-06T22:37:00.000-07:00

Celebrate with a great post by Rick Perlstein from Common Sense about a very interesting sounding book by Daniel Brooks called The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. Should by highly relevant to many of you......LIKE FN!!!!!!!!!!!!

Probably the only Cato link ever on this blog

2007-07-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

But when you're right, you're right.
Commute these sentences, Mr. President

The Los Angeles Times had this great graph below along side a story about the Libby "jail time for perjury is excessive" thing.

He's commuted 4 sentences in SIX years??? Jerk.

Be your own historian!

2007-06-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

An artist is going around the Silver Lake and marking gentrified bars with monuments memorializing their past lives as Latino gay bars. The link is to a story by Adolfo Guzman-Lopez (the man with the best name in public radio).

You don't need to accept governmental sanctioned landmark plaques, just like you don't need to swallow the AFI's ridiculously lillified top 100 film list as Ken Burns Hates Mexican reminds us.

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past" (dude)

Scientific proof cats can barley stand you

2007-06-28T23:43:00.000-07:00

"Study Traces Cat's Ancestry to Middle East"

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, which could account for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.

All that draft stuff

2007-06-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

means we are destined for more KG trade stories...
...plus Jordan is CRAZY!

Summertime and the living is easy

2007-06-27T03:24:00.000-07:00

Project for Excellence in Journalism news coverage index June 17-22:

At the same time, the Iraq policy debate—the Washington-based battle over war strategy—generated only 1% of last week’s coverage and failed to make the top-10 story list. Those findings are indicative of a trend in recent weeks in which coverage of the political debate over the war has diminished substantially.

For the first three months of this year, PEJ found that the policy debate was the leading news subject by a large margin, accounting for 12% of all the coverage. (The next biggest story was the 2008 campaign at 7%.) But on May 24, after a lengthy political showdown, Congress approved war funding without including troop withdrawal timetables. Since then—in the period from May 27-June 22—the policy debate has been the sixth-biggest story attracting 3% of the coverage. This suggests that the May 24 vote was viewed as a major victory for President Bush over the Democratic-led Congress that, temporarily, brought some kind of resolution to the policy fight.

It's a good thing the Dems folded and agreed September, SEPTEMBER, SEPTEMBER would be when they'll do something about that endless, pointless war. Apparently it's not like anyone cares. You know, except all those dead people. And the people those dead people knew. No one except them!

Is Bill supposed to be AJ

2007-06-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

You've probably already seen this by now, but what is the deal with this???

The obvious implication to me seems to be Hillary is Tony, is that what her campaign is going for? Also, I don't want Hillary "watching out" for me by ordering carrots instead of onion rings when I met her at a diner, I want her to do it by not invading and occupying other nations and actually reading intelligence reports! It is good to see Johnny Sac is doing slightly better.

Meanwhile Bill O'Reilly says reporting on the death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan is pointless while telling his viewers about the things that "really affect their lives", like bears and Playboy spreads. Seriously.

Is it irony or hypocrisy?

2007-06-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

On Friday I met LW at the Formosa at happy hour for a drink. A guy there waiting for his cab asked us (but mainly me) where we're "from", and not from but FROM. After that he told us he was in town to premiere his film at a Tom Tancredo fundraiser at the Nixon library, he had smoked weed in SFO during the 60s, one day we'll think we had fallen asleep and will wake up old, and that he's good friends with the owner of Geno's Chessesteaks in Philadelphia. Maybe you know about Tancredo and his run for the GOP nomination solely on the issue of the horrors of illegal immigration (if you think I'm overstating this, check out his website), but don't know anything about Geno's in Philadelphia. They made some headlines last year when they started an "English-only when ordering" policy. Headlines on Fox News at least.

I was really bothered about this guy a bit later: I should have told him off. I don't know what I should have said, but it bugged me that someone would ask someone like me, out of the blue, where I'm from, and then go on brag about knowing nativist politicians and ignorant restaurant owners. I just doesn't make sense, what do you expect to hear? "Yeah, I can't stand all these illegal too, let's go harass the busy boy here and then call INS on the cab driver taking your drunk at 5pm ass home!"

I felt bad until I read about this article in a post on the Carpetbagger:

The California Republican Party has decided no American is qualified to take one of its most crucial positions -- state deputy political director -- and has hired a Canadian for the job through a coveted H-1B visa, a program favored by Silicon Valley tech firms that is under fire for displacing skilled American workers.

That's right, apparently in the entire state of California there is no one qualified to hold the position of state deputy political director in the state's Republican Party offices. They can hire whoever they want, but its a bit confusing considering their party's position on immigration as a whole. What about all the homegrown political hacks? Maybe the wages are too low so no self-respecting American would work in that job?

I was going to make a larger joke about there being something about Canadians being not as scary and bloodthirsty as the Aztec nation to the south, but I think this about sums it up. Yeah, its not very funny.

Ang Lee: Colossal Tease

2007-06-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks to FN for this, which actually reminds me of a friend, especially towards the end...

David Chase doesn't have time for your theories

2007-06-14T12:20:00.001-07:00

He's nice about it than that, but that's pretty much the nut of it.

By the way: he picked that Journey song, and convinced everyone it was sick. And for the record, it is sick!

UPDATE: Chase might not have time, but here's an interesting one I'm sure you have time for. Close shot analysis in the house!

Two strangely hypnotic videos

2007-06-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

Am I the last person here to have seen this video of Edwards combing his hair?

The music is funny. As a political object its kind of unfair, but it does literalize the GOP's major argument against Edwards: he's gay.

AT sent this from the Made blog (home to dorks making weird shit worldwide). Its pretty amazing how long it is even with time-elapse photography. Still, the music here is LAME!

DC: Delusional funhouse or Delusional crackhouse?

2007-06-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Here's Bush on the failed immigration billed (which one commentator referred to as "the death of his domestic presidency"), Peter Pace's aborted renomination, and the impending no-confidence vote on his boy Alberto:

“It’s an interesting comment about Congress, isn’t it, that, on the one hand, they say that a good general shouldn’t be reconfirmed, and on the other hand, they say that my Attorney General shouldn’t stay,” he said today. “And I find it interesting. I guess it reflects the political atmosphere of Washington.”

1. Congress didn't say the general shouldn't be reconfirmed, you didn't want to deal with uncomfortable questions like: WHEN THE HELL IS THIS F-IN WAR GOING TO END?!
2. They are saying your AG (who you don't refer as "good") shouldn't stay because he probably broke the law and doesn't seem to remember places, events, times, policy decisions, personal, law, etc.
3. How often is this guy going to hide behind the world "politics" as if its a horrible thing that immeditately indicates the opposition is evil. Dude, you're a politician! And how do you think that immigration bill is going to pass? With the brilliant strategic thinking you showed with working Putin? Um...homeboy worked YOU! Actually that's grammatically incorrect: homeboy had, has been, and will continue to work you!

Anyway, maybe he's right about the atmosphere in DC being fucked up. Here's Glenn Greenwald ripping into Joe Klein for saying (seriously) Paris Hilton going to jail is for the good of the nation, but Lewis Libby serving time for "obstruction of justice" makes baby Jesus cry. No, seriously.

Why does LeBron get more pressing questions about passing the ball or scoring in the last seconds than our political class about the logic behind its decisions?

Don't Stop Believing!

2007-06-11T01:37:00.000-07:00

We're still here, with Putin's life lessons and the most important news to come out of the Stanley Cup: Al-Jazeera Banned!

And Wii-less, I just got around to watching Children of Men, I'd say I'm still a few months from see The Lives of Others. Also, you know what's a great double feature, Children of Men followed by Knocked Up. It will BLOW YOUR MIND DUDE!

Been telling you LeBron is the Global Icon!

2007-06-04T00:29:00.000-07:00

Just like I've been telling you Fahrenheit 451 was about television!

The ascension of King James (in your face haters!) into the LAST NBA playoff series means one major thing: no more television till September. No basketball, soon no Sopranos, another confounding Lost finale, and the President saying don't worry about Iraq till the fall? While that last one is a joke, what the hell am I supposed to do? Watch movies? As one student seem to be arguing this quarter: movies are only about sex and violence and they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Plus, Transformers isn't coming out for another month.

I guess I could get religion, or more precisely a radical humanist, neo-Marxist, anti-fascist form of Hinduism as expressed through blog posts.

Or maybe watch You Tube clips, like this Huell Howser puppet tour of the LA River:

Or this trailer for Godfather IV (which has been kind of beaten to the ground, but still funny?):

Religion or the Internet or television. That's it, no other choices!

Maybe during the offseason LeBron can get that Darfur info

2007-05-26T23:32:00.000-07:00

It might seem like I'm just piling on LeBron sometimes, especially in his self-stated quest to become a "global icon". But just so you know: I'm not the only one.

Athletic. Amazing. Powerful. Phenomenal.

America's airwaves are jammed with superlatives to describe basketball star LeBron James, who began his first semifinal playoff series this week. No matter how Mr. James's Cleveland Cavaliers fare in their matchup against the Detroit Pistons, however, I've got my own description for his off-court decisions.

Cowardly.

The piece makes some good points, check it out.

Cat Power video!

2007-05-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

Not actually "Cat Power" as "Cat Power". AT has way too much time on her hands...

Isn't 50% of 146,000 troops 73,000 troops?

2007-05-26T01:04:00.001-07:00

Military accounting might be a specialized subset of advance number theory these days, but this key graf from the top NYTimes story today titled "White House Said to Debate '08 Cut in Iraq Troops by 50%" is very confusing:

The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.

It is hard to think what is most annoying about this story. It's so hard let's make a quick list!

1. It contains NO on-the-record Washington sources. Not a single fucking one. In fact, the only named quotes are from a Sec. Gates press conference and a US general in Iraq who disagrees with the feasiblity of the entire supposed/possible/made up plan!

2. The entire story sounds like a planted leak from inside the White House to make it seem like the administration gets it has to plan to draw down troops even though just one day before the President was openly hostile to the SAME idea.

3. The article itself acknowledges this!

Still, there is no indication that Mr. Bush is preparing to call an early end to the current troop increase, and one reason officials are talking about their long-range strategy may be to blunt pressure from members of Congress, including some Republicans, who are pushing for a more rapid troop reduction.

4. Given all of the above (and pretty much the last six years), this story is still the paper's top story.

5. Oh yeah, that whole wrong math thing.

As we go into this holiday weekend meant to reflect on the ultimate sacrifices of the dead in the name of the nation, we should ask ourselves why our leaders, all of them, political, military, civilian, are unable to face the cultural equivalant of a paper cut to stop this mindless, horrible war.

Keeping with that, and this blog's long record of stealing from Crooks and Liars and questionable sports/politics connections, watch this video.

We play to win the game = we vote to stop this war

UPDATE: Greenwald says pretty much the same thing about the Times article that I do here, but with, you know, facts and shit.

So lazy

2007-05-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

Pitch a show for Cuban and HDNet (like an apprentice knock-off!)

LeBron seeks more information on Darfur

Why WAS I Not Informed About Bruce Lee?

Russert is kind of weird about horn honking:

I have not honked my car horn since September 11 as a gesture of respect to all of them. 9/11 also gave me a whole new insight into my Dad and why he left school in the 10th grade to enlist after Pearl Harbor.

What is this love of white players in the NBA? (P.S. Slate sucks!)

A heartwarming story of racism and xenophobia out weighing Bush loyalty

Jerry Falwell, beat again by Larry Flynt

2007-05-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

Don't like to speak ill of people who have literally just died, but luckily the great, don't-give-a-fuck Rude Pundit has no problem with it.

Lost better be good tonight!

2007-05-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

Given what happened on The Sopranos Sunday night and the attention its been given, it's even odder not much was made of the end of last week's Lost with its ending involving one the main characters shot in the gut, bleeding to death, on top of a pile of roting corpses. Obviously, the show has "lost" lots of its audience for lots of reasons. The main one though seems to be the sinking feeling the writers have no idea where they are going. Sure, its cool to check out the Lostpedia, get links to sites trying to figure out why Richard doesn't seem to age, and read in detail about the weird black light writing on the hatch blast door that is cutting of Locke's leg, but if it doesn't really MEAN anything, what's the point? I have felt for most of this season, especially with the lame Juliet (come on, she's so lame!) and all the Others hand wringing (maybe they aren't so bad???), the only reason I've still been watching is simply the amount of time I have ALREADY watched. All the while, the feeling paying this close attention actually adds value to individual episodes or the larger, overarching themes and concerns, like in film (gasp!) and on shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and BSG, has been slowly dripping away.

I mean, thinking of Season One and Two, Locke wants to get in that mysterious hatch, he is willing to sacrifice the lives of the other survivors to get in the hatch, the hatch is the answer. What's in the hatch then? Okay, not an answer, but this machine that is supposedly saving the world one B.F. Skinner experiment at a time. And then so on: one mystery after another "solved"....with another mystery!
That all being said, the last few episodes have been great, and I'm totally sucked back in. We here at The Crackpot Times have been saying if this season continues on the lame Juliet-lined path it has been on for the last few months, that's it. (come on, fertility issues on the Island??? Why would you want to have a baby on that crazy Island? Maybe this can be the first issue for the Grey's Anatomy spinoff.) Especially with the last episode, it seems the Others won't be redeemed by the shows creators (with something along the lines "oh, your murderous, violent behavior was cause you really loved us!"). And, for me, the callous, horrific elimination of the Dharma Initiative and its hopeful anti-VC-like campaign returns the show to what has always been its central focus: mass catastrophe, dystopia, and the group/individual responses to shared trauma.

So these next three episodes are kind of important. Frankly, I'm more about less creepy Jacob stuff and more answers. And not "answers" like interviews without transcripts or oaths, but ANSWERS like live televised sworn testimony. Cause if we can't get it from scripted television, there's always the sports and government corruption that weirdly mimics The Godfather.

By the way, this is funny and related (for grad students...):

It's hard out there for a television tech

2007-05-14T00:08:00.000-07:00

So the Utah/GS series is going back to totally racially sensitive Salt Lake City with the Jazz up 3-1. Much to say about that, but I just wanted to do some reporting! Actually, more like "reporting". After the game they started showing the highlights, and they were for Game 2 where Fisher came back in Utah! Barkley was the first to catch it, while Kenny Smith and Ernie said he was crazy and then realized he REALLY was paying attention. Barkley really has been on top of his game, realizing this obvious mistake AND having an interview in the New Republic about his political views. Seriously!

It is hard though to do live television stuff. There was this (great) recent mistake on the BBC that was up for a few minutes:

And Gordon Brown is dreamy

2007-05-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm really moved (i guess):

“Just as my first act as Chancellor of the Exchequer was to give away power to the Bank of England to restore trust in economic policy, so one of my first acts as Prime Minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy. Government must be more open and more accountable to Parliament — for example, in decisions about peace and war.”

Powerful stuff, Government must be open to Parliament, which runs Government. I'm waiting for his controversial stand on how voters should vote for candidates for Parliament, and that they in turn be open to choosing their respective party leader as Prime Minister.

And what is up with this photo along side the NY Times article? Is their campaign running with Guy Ritchies's support on the Lock Stock ticket?

Maxine Waters doesn't have time for this shit

2007-05-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Gonzales apparently thinks everything is going to be okay. Essentially, he's done such a great job of lying/forgetting about just WHO fired those US Attorneys. Sure he looks like incompetent and has lost all the credibility and respect needed for the job of Attorney General, but when you see everything in service to your Liege, what do you care? It's sort of like Odom being asked last year if he's ready to win a championship and he answered "You know, I'm really happy about playing in the league". Totally different expectations.

That all being said, Gonzales is an even BIGGER moron if he really thinks this is over, before he even started his House testimony this morning. This is a great clip, and all Gonzales has to defend himself is a stupid, "your big questions mean nothing to mean" smirk. Wonder where he learned that from?

About that fire

2007-05-10T01:59:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I tried (again) to get my car radio finally fixed and ended up (again) just having lunch with AT. Driving back down Los Feliz Blvd I saw cops diverting traffic from Griffith Park. I even saw some hipster Observatory bus driver outside his bus in a left turn lane with his hands up in the air asking what to do. Then I went home to grade midterms as nearly a fifth of Griffith Park burned. I knew it was bad, but I didn't really notice till I went to the Ralph's on the corner and could see the HILL ON FIRE much like in this photo (from the LA Times link above):

There were tons of helicopters, fire trucks, and news vans. There were evacuations, not our neighborhood, not right next door, but close.

We went out on the roof to take a peak at it only to find 5 people quietly already up there (one filming it on his camera). There was a kind of apocalyptic feel to the evening, and some worrying about not having a kitty evacuation plan, but everything was okay. At least it felt that way; like all fires, it was hypnotic.

The Queen in the house

2007-05-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

Now that she (or is it She) has gone back to her massive crib, here are my two fav photos of her visit:

Can you call this anything but a look of disgust? Its very similar to the one she gave Bush when he "accidentally" joked she visited the US in 1776 and the WINKED AT HER. It's one thing not to be serious about the soldiers you are sending off to die in Iraq, but to diss the Queen?!

Apparently kissing the Queen's hand is a faux-paux, but he doesn't care. He's MICKEY ROONEY, the biggest box office draw from 1939-1940, spanning two decades. I know CG loves this photo...

How do you start a film festival?

2007-05-09T02:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool video interview with the director of IFFLA from the Passion for Cinema folks, if you were curious. You'll like it, seriously. You might see me scurrying in the back.

Sorry, this has nothing to do with horses. I just think Muybridge is neat.

"I felt good about myself"

2007-05-07T02:39:00.000-07:00

The five people who read this blog seem pretty smart, so maybe you all can explain this Washington Post op-ed from Sally Quinn about Obama. Quinn is a kind of queen of mainstream, inside-the-beltway political journalism, and statements like this represents that worldview in all its smallness and obliviousness:

I was reminded of [the time I went to Brazil 30 years ago and talked to someone who may or may not have been black] the other day watching Barack Obama. I realized that when I look at him, I don't see a person of color. I see a really smart, appealing, thoughtful person. There is something about his manner that seems to demand that he be seen for who he is and not for what color he is.

Apparently this is why Obama is doing so well, when the arbiters of political culture see him, they don't see a man of color, they see someone smart (and clean!). This resulting feeling by (white) establishment of noticing themselves noticing themselves not noticing his race makes them feel all warm inside. "Look at me not noticing this black man running for President isn't black". No, seriously, it goes on like that:

In every country, when people learned I was American, the questions were the same: Could a black man possibly be elected president of the United States? More important, would Americans actually elect someone like him to represent their country? In almost every case the reaction at the possibility was admiration.

What really worries Quinn is "who are [Obama's] people". She's okay with Hillary because she knows the bad boys she's bringing to the table, like Harold Ickes and Terry "I couldn't beat a drunken Grant" McAuliffe. And besides Hillary, we know who everyone else running might bring with them to Washington (obviously!). But just who will this smart PERSON Barak Obama bring, WHO ARE HIS PEOPLE?!?! Once we know we can decide....

This is all fairly ridiculous, but what is amazing to me is Quinn doesn't seem to think a column like this is unflattering to whatever cosmopolitian image of herself she is trying to present. There seems to be no real point to the entire piece than to say she's down with (well-spoken) black people, doesn't even notice they are black, but secretly (and still open-mindedly) worries about the kind of people this black person will take into power with him. Smush's statements make more sense than this.

I guess Quinn should feel good about not seeing Obama as a person of color, what with all the evil hippiedy-hoppiedy culture destroying our youth and our very best talk radio hosts. As AH pointed out to me the other day with the video below, they are even going back and destroying the greatest American movie of all time. What will we "normal" people do with this destruction of our cultural landmarks???

I personally won't vote for Obama till he goes through every Public Enemy song lyric and denounces it line by line. And when he tells us who is people are.

Grading isn't about the money, it's about the passion!

2007-05-05T03:16:00.000-07:00

Why care about sports? Cause sometimes you think about all the pressure and stress you are facing in your day to day life, and then you realize how luck you are your horrible breakdowns won't be the focus of months of media coverage. It is a bit silly to feel bad for someone who makes millions a year and will probably pick up the highest individual achievment reward for his profession next week, but how can you not feel bad for Dirk? Who I don't feel bad for is Smush Parker, who still doesn't seem to get it. As the Lakers struggle to figure out how to get Toronto to trade them Chris Bosh or Orlando to give up Dwight Howard for Brian Cook and the 19th overall pick, one thing is crystal:

One thing Jackson did make clear -- Smush Parker will not return next season. Parker started 162 straight regular-season games before being removed in favor of rookie Jordan Farmar with two games left in the regular season.

Parker, an unrestricted free agent, said he lost motivation late in the season.

"The game wasn't fun anymore," he said. "I don't play for the money. I play for the passion, the love of basketball."

When asked if in a perfect world he'd return to the Lakers, Parker paused before saying: "I don't know. Next question."

So Parker lost motivation before the beginning of the F-IN PLAYOFFS because he plays for the love? Does that make any sense to anyone?

His comments reminds me of some of the student papers I've been reading this week. Some are full of statements that are so powerfully empty of any sense of logic, reason, or fact it just boggles the mind. It kind of related to the recent Indian University study that found Bill O'Reilly goes to name calling 8.88 times per minute (nearly twice as much as good ol' anti-Semite Father Coughlin). In a country where 40% consider this guy a journalist (compared to 30% who say the same about Bob Woodword) and the starting point guard for the Lakers quits before the playoffs because he doesn't "feel the passion", why not turn in a paper on a topic you know nothing about, with no research, poorly written, full of unsubstantiated opinion, condesending to the reader, and expect to receive an A? You feel you deserve it in your gut, and you can just demand a detailed explanation for why your shitty work doesn't get what you feel from your loser TA who made a terrible life choice.

Too bitter?

Happy May/Loyalty/Mission Accomplish Day!

2007-05-02T03:01:00.000-07:00

It's a couple of hours late, but the Mavs/Warrior series is ruling my world and I don't even live in Europe. With the Lakers all but eliminated and the focus being who is going to be blown out when the team is blown up (Lamar, really?), the great drama left is that shocking grudge match. Game 6 in Oakland Thursday = Game 7.

But yesterday might be more noteworthy for the clusterfuck of observances/anniversaries that happen on May 1st. It was the fourth year anniversary of the fantastic "Mission Accomplish" speech, which Bush now claims wasn't really a mission accomplish speech. It's mostly noteworthy for a specific example of just how glorious our glorious leader once was (and how well everything has actually turned out!). People on television, who are still on television, actually said things like this:

MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

I don't know if Matthews knows this, but Putin actually is a guy. A guy who will kill you with low grade radioactive waste and then suggest his enemies killed you just to make him look guilty. They don't say Putin '08 for nothing!

May 1st is also May Day and this year marks the one year anniversary of the enormous, politically earthshaking immigration march in LA and elsewhere. Guestavo Arellano has a very interesting op-ed in the LA Times about how huge those protest were, essentially saying the immigration "debate" and immigrants won. I want to believe this is true, but I don't think any of us are in the mood of believing progress actually happens.

Especially on Loyalty Day. AT sent this to me not believing something like this was for real, until she found a similar resolution from Clinton. It does sound way weird, but after doing some in-depth research (on wikipedia), I confirmed what I originally suspected: Loyalty Day is capitalism's answer to May Day. For real. Supposedly it was first celebrated in 1921 when it was called "Americanization Day". For real. Too bad that name never caught on, otherwise we would read headlines like "Large groups of protesters demand amnesty on Americanization Day". That way it would probably be harder to vilify people who wish to become Americans and have lived in America for years for being "illegal", lazy, and untrustworthy.

It would be harder, but not impossible.

Pay a dog to burn down a hospital!

2007-04-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

At The Crackpot Times we are huge homers and crazy. Lakers in six! There has been some shocking happenings in the playoffs, mainly the Mavs/Warriors and the brink of being swept Miami/Bulls. But if you have any doubt how huge the NFL is, think about how the biggest sports news today was probably the NFL Draft. I don't have much to say than "boo-hoo" about Brady "He shows courage in 24 point defeat!" Quinn and the Eagles picked up a QB who recently was bagging groceries at ShopRite.

The NFL draft now just reminds me of the massive Pat Tillman cover-up that is only just now being uncovered. Actually, take "uncovered" back and replace "reported on nationally". This Frank Rich column makes much of the timeline surrounding Tillman's death by friendly fire in relation to the exposure of the tortures at Abu Ghraib and other events in April 2004. This is a good point, but I think another, often unspoken reason was Tillman's death occuried the week of the NFL Draft. Why bother saying he was killed in a senseless, bizarre act of friendly fire when you could just say he died a hero, bury him, and hope the family never asks anymore questions? Here's a key section of Rich's column and this weeks White House Correspondents' Association dinner:

It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

But the revelers in the ballroom last Saturday could not raise that discrepancy and challenge Mr. Bush’s hypocrisy; they could only clap. And so they served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt, lending their credibility to the president’s sanctimonious exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy for his own political self-aggrandizement on national television. Meanwhile the war was kept as tightly under wraps as the troops’ coffins.

But whatever, this is depressing sports and politics related stuff. Let's learn and laugh by watching this educational video about sloths. Enjoy!

Paradoies have so much to teach us about the NBA

2007-04-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks SC! (who would like to draw your attention to Bynum in the upper left...)

Double double standards

2007-04-26T15:11:00.000-07:00

Maybe you know about Luis Posada Carriles, maybe you don't. He is an anti-Castro activist with an extensive history with the CIA and has been accused of various acts of terrorism including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. While in Venzualian jail awaiting to be put on trial for this crime he escaped and eventually showed up in the US. Where he was arrested for immigration violations and freed on bail.

So a suspected terrorist is found, and let go because, well, we're down with HIS terrorism. Needless to say this isn't going over well with some people and is providing a clear example of the hypocricy of American foreign policy that calls for the invasions of nations based on fears of attacks against "the homeland", but could care less about the daily violence inflicted elsewhere.

Of course it isn't just this that makes the US look like huge assholes, its the site of US reps yelling I HOPE IT'S YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS WHO DIE at other foreign, elected officials who have the adacity to question the legality of black prisons and secret rendition (torture) flights. When/if the next attack happens here, will anyone in the world really care?

I don't know, but I do know that Bush and his wife will climb on top of the burning bodies and remind us all how no one suffers like they do. NO ONE BITCHES!

And we're back!

2007-04-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

So the festival "wrapped" (as they say in the biz) Sunday night. It was a pretty cool experience, interesting to be so involved in such a big production, and I got to see Deewar, which was amazing.

But I know you don't read this blog cause you care about me, you read it because....actually I have no idea why. Anyway, sorry for being away for a while, it won't happen often. In that vein, I would like to post some stuff sent by all you great (six) readers!

1. Ken Burns Hates Mexicans is a great blog not only for the obvious reasons, but because I think its the first blog ever to link here, like ever! A friend's of CG and based out of Echo Park its a site I'm going to keep reading because I'm down. He has a recent post about the latest THE F-IN WAR (Subtitle: These 17 hours are not meant to be comprehensive) and the hiring of well-known Chicano documentarian Hector Galan that points to the work of Defend the Honor on this issue. Check it out!

2. I don't agree with the argument made here about the irrelevancy of the NBA playoffs to mainstream America, but it is an interesting view and the comments section has a good exchange. I think its funny that the photo along with the post is of Kobe because here in Los Angeles you KNOW its the playoffs, even with this current group. I remember interviewing the head of programming for the American Cinematheque and him telling me during late April and May they usually had a noticeable drop off in attendance. Then again, this was during the three-peat years and as EV (who sent this post) said today, there probably won't be any playoff ball in LA this time next week...

3. SS told me about this amazing, amazing goal Lionel Messi scored a few days ago in the Copa Del Rey where he breaks down nearly half the team from the center of the field:

Obviously, the Maradona/World Cup comparisons are not over-hyped.

4. Yes FN, myspace has jumped the shark. Soon you won't be able to become president of the World Bank without having a myspace page AND personal blog. By the way, I'm half-way there World Bank board, keep me in mind!

5. It might not be true, but AT sends this angry, sad rant from the Best of Craigslist that reminds us to Fuck this Fucking Fucked War lead by the Fuckhead in Chief.

6. Okay, last thing from me: George McGovern has responded to my prediction regarding Cheney's eventual departure and up-ed it a Bush! From his Los Angeles Times Op-Ed:

The Vice President spoke with contempt of my '72 campaign, but he might do well to recall that I began that effort with these words: "I make one pledge above all others — to seek and speak the truth." We made some costly tactical errors after winning the nomination, but I never broke my pledge to speak the truth. That is why I have never felt like a loser since 1972. In contrast, Cheney and Bush have repeatedly lied to the American people.

It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972. Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over.

McGovern is a kind of a hero of mine, but I don't know about Bush being forced to resign before the end of his term. Homeboy says he doesn't CARE that people hate/disagree with everything he says and does. I don't think he's talked to a non-military public audience in MONTHS. He is so arrogant, entitled, callous, and delusional that it will take nothing short of a battalion to remove him willingly from office. It is kind of like saying the Lakers are going to beat the Suns this year. It could happen, I hope it happens, but it's a kind of crazy dream.

No more extremely long posts like this for a while, but I just wanted to point it out. With the end of one project and the avoidance of the next: the blog is back.

Bow before the power of the blog

2007-04-12T23:41:00.000-07:00

Obviously there is a straight line from this to this. I guess I shouldn't be too celebratory, it is a dark day for making jokes mocking someone's race or sex. Without our hilarious dumb blonde, "me so sorreh...", "Obama is a pimp, really!", and "boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jew boy" jokes, the terrorist have won. There is lots to say about this, like how in the last moments Imus began to show real bitterness at people like Harold Ford, Jr. not standing up for him. You know what, after showing scenes from Birth of a Nation to students in section today, I'm over slamming Don Imus. So much has changes, and really, so much hasn't. Imus is a loser and I'm happy a career of belittling others humanity has lead him to this humiliation. And I'm not sorry. Okay, last thing, this post from Digby and this post from Athenae from First Draft best sums up the role of the national (white) news media and their role as enablers in all of this.

What I'm not letting go though is how lame its the Olympics are in China next year. Well, not lame cause the Olympics are lame. How to describe it...Mia Farrow?

Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.

Apparently activist like Farrow have put enough pressure on the Chinese government to actually distance themselves from the Sudanese government. The Chinese official that traveled Sudan to give them the message though also made a point to say:

During a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Zhai called activists who want to boycott the Games “either ignorant or ill natured.”

That's funny because "Ignorant or ill natured" was an alternate name for this blog when it started.

Is Smush Bush then?

2007-04-11T03:47:00.000-07:00

Kobe just blew your mind:

BRYANT CONCEDES

Lakers guard Kobe Bryant was asked if he's pulling himself out of the running for Most Valuable Player.

"Yeah," Bryant said. "I'm Al Gore-ing myself."

Bryant, who was getting some support for MVP after a March scoring spree, doesn't believe the Lakers (40-38) have a good enough record for him to be considered.

"I don't think so," Bryant said. "I'd like to one day be fortunate enough to win the MVP and be on a team that has one of the best records in the NBA to do so."

Thanks to SC for sending me this. Is he "giving up" like Al Gore, or is saying he's been railroaded like Gore? I personally think he's saying he's not interested, but secretly wants to be wooed into the race as the obvious solid choice against the inevitable and the still unproven. You know what I'm saying!

Speaking of Los Angeles and tortured connections, the LA Times has a nice article about the you-are-here.com guy. He's a German engineer who spends his vacation time visiting LA, taking architecture photos around town, and putting them on the web. Check out the site, seriously it's really cool. Except for his leaving out Little Aremenia, what's up with that?!

Only small men where cowboy hats, indoors, on-air, in NYC

2007-04-09T01:42:00.000-07:00

Imus might have just told his last not-funny, actually pretty insulting racial "joke". For those of you who don't know, Don Imus is a daytime nationally syndicated radio show that is simulcasted on MSNBC. Many years ago he and Stern were the battling local shock jocks, and after Stern pretty much beat his brains in ratings, Imus took a strange, more "respectable", political turn, but kept its high school level of humor. He couldn't run with Stern, so now he does his same lame material (jokes about blacks being monkeys and women being dumb whores, funny stuff) but with Senators and Tim Russert. Stern gets George Takei and fined millions for cursing; Imus gets Joe Lieberman, does comedy consisting of racial slurs, and is seen as a "get" in the cable news machine.

The recent controversy is over him calling the Rutgers women's bball team a bunch of "nappy-headed hos". You see, that's the joke, funny right? The big problem for Imus this time though is this isn't the first time and he might have finally exposed himself in a way that isn't easy to dismiss. Cause see, calling a bunch of black women athletes hos isn't really funny, that was a trick! It really isn't being, gasp, non-PC! Its sort of like also laughing as your guest rifts that "The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the [National Basketball Association's] Toronto Raptors": it's a bigoted, insulting, and, the most important, NOT FUNNY!

Is the big old bad National Association of Black Journalists piling on by calling for a boycott of his show? Even after his wonderful apology where he said the comments were "ill-conceived" and "inappropriate"? (By the way, your mother is subhuman and you are a skank. You know what, that was ill-conceived, let's move on!) There is this lovely section from Imus's wiki page:

Imus and his crew, Charles McCord and Bernard McGuirk, are frequently accused of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Imus referred to sports columnist Bill Rhoden as a "New York Times quota hire" and PBS anchor Gwen Ifill as a "cleaning lady".[5] Imus has repeatedly referred to Arabs as "ragheads."[6] He has berated many female newsreaders, most recently being his last one, which caused her, Contessa Brewer, to quit the show. After she quit or was fired, depending on who you believe, Imus went on a tirade. “With that fat ass she’s got, she wouldn’t be one of ‘em,” (a beautiful woman). Imus said on the air, "That skank has to spend three hours with makeup in the morning." That tirade was also tied to comments that were overheard of Contessa calling Imus “a cantankerous old fool” at some dinner in a restaurant in 2005, when she was the newsreader.[7]

There was an interesting story on On The Media about Imus's game of serious/racist split. The "shockingly bad taste" here is saying the Williams sisters are "animals" that should be in National Geographic instead of Playboy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Earlier this summer one of Imus's second bananas, Sid Rosenberg, made a joke in shockingly bad taste about tennis players Serena and Venus Williams. Imus fired him. And then promptly re-hired him. He explained that back in the bad old days of his own drug and alcohol abuse, people gave him about 50 second chances. Imus is all about forgiveness. But he admitted in an interview with Mike Wallace a few years back that he hired his staff to make racist jokes.

MIKE WALLACE: You told Tom ANDERSON, the producer, in your car coming home that Bernard McGuirk is there to do "nigger" jokes.

DON IMUS: Well I've n-- I never use that word.

MIKE WALLACE: Tom?

TOM ANDERSON: I'm right here.

DON IMUS: Did I use that word?

TOM ANDERSON: I recall you using that word.

DON IMUS: Oh, okay, well then I used that word, but I mean-- of course that was an off the record conversation-- [LAUGHTER]

MIKE WALLACE: The hell it was!

The fact this On The Media story was from 2001 (!) you get the idea Imus might have reached the end of all the morning zoo forgiveness. Al Sharpton is going to start picketing his studios tomorrow, and I'm not to sure Imus's response will be reasoned and measured. Especially when Sharpton says about Imus's apology,

"I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation,"

Then again, we should never underestimate the lack of concern of slurring blacks in the national media. Chris Matthews, Senator McCain, see you soon!

UPDATE: Atrios provides an example from THIS MORNING that proves my point above. Howard Fineman, a Newsweek columnist, says its a "different time" because Obama made a lot of money, and Imus exposes the hypocracy of the NABJ for not being interested in his fight against sickle cell anemia!

Yes, this is the weak stuff he's bringing. I think he's going to dust off the good ol' I'M NOT A RACISTS, THAT'S WHAT SO INSANE ABOUT THIS!

Two weeks till the NBA's crowning drama

2007-04-08T00:32:00.000-07:00

Hype for the playoffs. It's not for Game 4 Lakers v. Suns, but its from (for me) the second most epic game of the playoffs last year, scored by Arcade Fire. EV found it during his 5 hours a day looking on YouTube for Mavs stuff.

And while I'm stealing/HYPING EV, he's right, this Free Darko post about Kobe is awesome! Kobe for MDGFP!

Y yo pensé que hablo espanol terrible!

2007-04-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

Newt Gingrich is standing up for English in the United States (about time someone did!).

"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto," Gingrich said to cheers from the crowd of more than 100.

Wow, 100 people! Anyway, apparently people don't like hear their mother tongue is the obvious language of poor, dispossessed people. Or blacks, or Jews. Actually "the language of the ghetto" is not entirely clear what he means other than "America ain't that shit, and if it is, it's poor Americans who probably deserve it!" Gingrich did issue a "I'm sorry you don't understand my point" non-apology...wait for it....in SPANISH! OH DAMN, DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING!! WHAT, WHAT?! or QUÉ, QUÉ?!

So let's sum up: "Hey 100 members of the National Federation of Republican Women (Federation? Sounds classy!), Spanish is weird, poor people in bad neighborhoods speak it!....Yo, hombre! I shouldn't have said Spanish is from the ghetto, I should have said English rules and you should totally learn it! But Spanish is cool, check it, I've been learning it to reach out to you fast breeding LEGAL immigrants! Muchos gracias, de nada!"

This is the untenable position the GOP is in, the way the country is changing they can't keep winning national elections with white males. Even Bush understands this. But how do you reach out to other groups when so much of your message is based on dividing groups (GAYS! FEMINISTS! SCARY BLACKS! JOB STEALING ASIANS! DIRTY SPANISH SPEAKERS! IMMIGRANTS THAT I DO NOT PERSONALLY KNOW! OMG, DIFFERENCE!). It ends up causing candidates to publicly diss a language, and then dropping a YouTube video speaking that same language.

Its kind of like being an all around sleaze ball, like divorcing your wife as she gets cancer treatment or having an affair while you are leading an impeachment of a US President for having an affair, and then "confessing" about all of it to a conservative Christian POLITICAL leader to prep for a 2008 White House run. Eat it Federation, this man has your class right here.

Tony P!

2007-04-05T18:10:00.000-07:00

Giving a bad name to French hip-hop!

(thanks EV...I guess)

On the Tony Parker related front, the AOL Fanhouse NBA blog had a post a few weeks ago calling Parker annoying (agreed!) and theorized its because he's French (don't know about that, but why not!). What's great about this is after getting attacked for Francophobia, Parker's coach, Greg Popovich complained about essentially the same thing. He actually said Parker is too "laissez-faire" with his training and attitude.

This reminds me: Caché is sick!

And this is a great magazine cover

2007-04-04T01:51:00.000-07:00

Adam Nagourney is gay?

I just love this image

2007-04-04T01:31:00.000-07:00

Ken Burns is a jerk

2007-04-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

Seriously, what is up with this guy? Ken Burns of the Ken Burns effect has been spending four years putting together his 17 hour (SEVENTEEN HOURS!) documentary series for PBS about WWII from "the bottom up" with extensive interviews and research. Apparently the series, titled The War, doesn't include a single interview with a Latino soldier who fought in WWII, even though there were lots of them involved in key battles (like the Philippines) and they won more Congressional Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group in proportion to the total. People are pissed. And people understand why they are pissed:

“If you had to hit a sore point in the Latino community, this is it,” said Chon Noriega, a filmmaker and associate director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California in Los Angeles. “The Second World War,” he said, “is where the community felt it had earned the right to citizenship that had been denied since 1848,” the end of the Mexican-American War.

“This is a critical turning point in their recognition as citizens and they’re not there” in Burns’ series, Noriega said. “You can understand why people would be upset.” PBS is a “public entity receiving public funding to describe this history and they’re just not there in the image.”

Now I'm not sure about making PBS change the documentary series like some are calling for, and if this is Ken Burns "vision", the last thing we would want to do is pollute the artist's vision! I guess.

What really bothers me is Burn's response to these complaints as "it's not that kind of movie":

The filmmakers weren’t looking for representatives of specific ethnic groups. “That is not what the film is about,” Burns said. “It’s about the experience of combat from the perspectives of a handful of people—most of whom are from [the four towns focused on].”
...
“People, when they see the film, they will see the universality,” Burns said. “The comments that people make are not based on their ethnicity but on their humanity.”

Besides belonging in the Colbert realm ("People say I'm white, but I don't see race"), the quote from Burns shows he fundamentally does not get the point of the protests. These groups aren't looking for Latino representation in the film as a victory on some PC checklist somewhere, but want acknowledgment of Latinos' inclusion within this great American universality/humanity. Acting as if Latinos fighting for America in World War II (or Vietnam, or Iraq today) is some kind of one-off, minor story that fails to capture the true essence of what the war meant belittles those soldiers and the ideas they were/are supposedly dying for.

At seventeen hours (SEVENTEEN FUCKING HOURS!) to not have ONE interview with a Latino soldier and to actively argue against it shows a real, and frankly bizarre, refusal to acknowledge these groups as really American. If you think that's not true, just take a saunter at the message boards on the Free Republic about this issue. Lots of great stuff! Latinos were fighting, and dying, as Americans, together with other Americans. Now when they and their representative groups ask to be remembered as part of the "greatest generation", they are labeled as trying to divide the country, not being loyal, or required to prove, once again, their claims to American history being their history too.

Why not just be cool Ken Burns and find some time in your seventeen hour (seriously, seventeen hours?!) doc for this story? Its telling when the best argument against this is the ridiculous "well, what about representing transgender people or people with bad hair cuts???" (actually said). We aren't talking about that you moron, we are talking about this topic, about Latinos, about how they have been citizens and an active part of the nation's history for hundreds of years but are still treated like they and their families just got here and are stealing Medicaid. Media obviously creates these public perceptions, especially historical, "good for you" multi-hour public broadcast programming that merely maintains national myths of a certain type of American saving the world in the 1940s.

I say let's move on to the next battle: trying to include Latino non-US citizens who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Burns's planned 20 hour series for 2016.

Bob Kraft, Paul Allen, 5 NFL fans, and this guy devastated

2007-04-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

Peter King, the Bob Woodward of the NFL, is reporting on SI.com that the NFL pre-season game this August to be played in China between the Pats and Seahawks has been canceled. Did the NFL decide it is somewhat distasteful to promote their mixture of graphic violence and hyper commercialism in a nation full of people getting by on dollars a day who might be thrown in prison for years for suggesting things like voting for their leaders and being able to question their decisions? Um...sorta. They'll wait till after the Olympics do it!

And the league won't take just a one-year hiatus from the Asian experiment, according to those with knowledge of plans for the game the NFL was calling the China Bowl. Because the Summer Olympics are set for Beijing in 2008, the league will skip 2008 and look to put a game in Olympic Stadium, now under construction, in the summer of 2009. The Pats and Seahawks were to have played Aug. 7 (the morning of Aug. 8 in the United States) in the well-worn Workers Stadium in Beijing, built in 1959 and renovated three years ago.

It's too bad, because I can't wait till the NFL opens up the Chinese nation to democracy and freedom and all that good stuff, like how electronic products and manufacturing have done so far! I'm sure the Communist Party would love to learn more about how to better deal with their own Pat Tillman situations.

And their white!

2007-04-01T23:22:00.000-07:00

Even the Dutch like Snoop over Bill O'Reilly...

Focusing on the real problems: keeping steroids out of t-ball

2007-03-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

Its been a while so lets just clear the deck with a bunch of stuff.

1. It maybe a bit "inside bloggerball" for you all, but conservative/contrarian liberal/tenured law professor/nutjob Ann Althouse flipped out recently on blogger Garance Franke-Ruta during a bloggingheadsTV thing for daring to mention in passing something Althouse brought up. The original incident is referred to by several names but I prefer calling it the "feminist with breasts are hypocritical sluts" controversy. Former President Clinton met with a bunch of liberal bloggers and took photos with them afterwards. One of the bloggers was....gasp...A WOMAN and she STOOD NEXT TO CLINTON. Althouse wrote about Jessica Valenti:

Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?

It's obvious that you're bending over backwards -- figuratively and literally -- to keep the attention on your breasts.

Jessica should have worn a beret. Blue dress would have been good too.

Jessica's breasts are definitely a distraction…

Or she was standing next to him, wearing clothing. Same thing I guess. The link above is to Jessica's response, here's a link to my delicious bookmarks for more about the original incident (first time trying that!).

Knowing this context makes Althouse's explosion even more crazed. I'm posting this because it really is a perfect example of the arcs of right wing smears: replace actual discussion about the points of policy/political view with ungrounded personal attacks; when called out for your attack, claim to be the victim of unfair attacks by those who can't respond to your logic on the points. Also blaming the "liberal media" or "PC thugs" works as well.

2. This post by Glenn Greenwald now of Salon, The most revealing three-minute YouTube clip ever, is great. Watching the clip and reading what he says is way better than me just rewording it all here, but it really hits what is so depressing about our NATIONAL news media. "US Attorney scandal? Boring!!! The Dems just want to get Karl Rove because he's like Darth Vader to them! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Who will stand for the genius Karl Rove? I! But the Dems better watch out, because the people will think they are just picking on that Hispanic Gonzalez! Hey...Gore! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Okay, that's kind of a rewording.

3. Okay, it is from a hack party site, but this blog post most clearly highlights how nonsensical McCain is on Iraq. Pretty much he's now arguing the Bush administration is divorced from reality for saying things might look different in a few months....something McCain has been saying consistently for the past few years. Ja?

4. This is funny:

But this is still better:

Back from hiatus

2007-03-30T01:59:00.000-07:00

Watching the "Making of the Island"

2007-03-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

and sick in a Macau hotel room. Ugh. But this article is in the Nation about NCAA Division 1 Men's basketball is great. Particularly the ending:

6. Last Shot

"College basketball is genuine." -- Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski to Jeremy Schaap of ESPN

Six years ago, Sonny Vaccaro said to me, ''The kids these days know what's going on. They also know they're the only ones not getting big dough. If the kids had a plan, they could cut themselves in. All you need is one kid who can rouse the posse.''

That seemed like an invitation to tell him my longtime Final Four fantasy: Just before the title game, the opposing captains demand $50,000 per player from the TV producer. No cash, no game.

The devil chortled at my innocence.

''Almost been there,'' he said. ''Some years ago, one of the Final Four teams had T-shirts and statements ready. The team leader was a terrific spokesman -- he's playing pro now--but they were upset in the semifinals. But that's their story to tell, not mine."

Read the whole thing. Who do you think the team leader was???

Hong Kong in your face!

2007-03-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

This is great and all, but let's get to the really important stuff: Kobe scores 50+ in four straight games! There is no way he can beat Chamberlain's record of seven straight games...unless he does it until I get back to the States. Do it for me Kobe! Now I got to go and watch the Spurs game in Mandarian. Well, not really. More like the Aussie v. South Africa World Cricket Match...

Leaving on a jet plane

2007-03-22T03:13:00.000-07:00

But I know when I'll be back again. Soon. Anyway, till then I thought I would revel in Barbara Boxer obviously (obviously!) reading this blog by referencing a previous post. Mostly watch the clip to see how much of a jackass Inhofe is: actually asking questions that attack Gore personally, but then telling him he'll have to respond back in writing cause his answer will "take too long"!

Also, this is good for the argument over "executive privilege", a model of honest and honorable debate. What's even more funny than the total transparency of what Snow is now saying is his claim Rove and Meirs can't testify under oath because it would taint the advice the President is given....in a case (the firing of US attorneys) the President claims he had no involvement in. Okay.

And, let's all hope the Edwards press conference tomorrow is horrible, horrible news.

I guess the original Donald and I will see you on the other side.

What part of "you lost" do you not understand?

2007-03-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

There is much to say about Bush's latest temper tantrum about keeping his advisers, mainly Karl "Walking Douche" Rove and Harriet "Brian Trust" Miers, from testifying under oath to Congress about the fired US attorney controversy. As has often been true in the past, what is most noteworthy is the vaunted Bush administration's inability to recognize a new reality that doesn't conform to their perceptions of what reality should be. On Sunday, Pat Leahy, the FUCKING CHAIRMAN of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said:

“I do not believe in this, ‘we’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t,” Mr. Leahy said on the ABC News program “This Week.” adding: “I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this.”

Later in the same article though we read:

In response to Mr. Leahy’s comments today, Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said the Bush administration was standing by its earlier promise that Mr. Fielding would give Democrats an answer on Tuesday.

“Fred has been talking with folks on Capitol Hill, analyzing various statements and conversations with folks on the Hill, and we will get back to them,” Mr. Snow said in a brief telephone interview.

We'll get back to them? This isn't Frist or Santorum or Cornyn or McCain or some other GOP Senator who doesn't talk to his or her mother before getting talking points from the White House. This is the oppositional party that is IN CONTROL OF A CO-EQUAL BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT WITH SUBPOENA POWER. That means if they say you have to come testify, YOU HAVE TO COME TESTIFY. Not that they are asking you, pretty please, if you have time. It is more like: don't come, go to jail.

Well, what did the White House come back with? From the first link:

Under growing political pressure, the White House offered to allow members of Congressional committees to hold private interviews with Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff; Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel; and two other officials. It also offered to provide access to e-mail messages and other communications about the dismissals, but not those between White House officials.

Except for the fact this is the exact opposite of what Leahy was demanding, he was totally happy with this situation. Oh, wait:

“I don’t accept his offer. It is not constructive and it is not helpful to be telling the Senate how to do our investigation, or to prejudge its outcome.

"Instead of freely and fully providing relevant documents to the investigating committees, they have only selectively sent documents, after erasing large portions that they do not want to see the light of day. Testimony should be on the record, and under oath. That’s the formula for true accountability.“I hope the President will agree to be forthcoming. The straighter the path to the truth, the sooner we will finally know the facts.”

The President stood up for his decent, always truth-telling staff:

“We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants,” the president told reporters in a brief and hastily convened appearance in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

Bush is right though. How dare the Democratic Congress turn a controversy over non-partisan political appointees possibly being fired for not prosecuting Democratic officials (an interpretation that arose after the repeated attempts to explain the "real" reason for their dismissals have been prove to be lies) in to a "show trial" with "sworn testimony". OH DARE YOU SIR!

How surprising is this really though? This is what is going to happen with the oppositional power in office, it is pretty basic 12 grade civics stuff. Plus, we live in a post-Lewinsky world where various Clinton administration officials were compelled to testify about the president's sex life. I don't know if people are going to buy the separation of powers has a liberal, pre-9/11 bias. Especially when no one believes a single word you say.

Let the conversation BEGIN!

2007-03-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

You might have already seen this Hillary Clinton = IBM = Big Brother circa 1984 ad, but if you haven't check it out. While I agree it's not really fair to compare HRC to Big Brother, this fake, apparently untraceable, ad does a real good job visualizing the utter blandness of her political leadership and vision. People, especially Dem primary voters, are sick of the mendacity and double talk of the Bush administration (see above), and she announces her campaign by calling for a conversation. Apparently it's a conversation that doesn't include anything about Iraq, and if you think invading Iraq was something you should apologize for, well you can go vote for someone else you goddamn dirty hippie.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

She's right. If you are so short sighted as make some minor vote about invading some foreign country and has lead our nation down a dark, endless tunnel full of blood, oil, and hard currency, well, you can go ahead and vote for someone else. She doesn't need you loser!

What she does support is a woman's right to choose! Um...actually...as long as we can find a "middle ground", i.e. abortion is legal (for the non-poor), but shameful and disgusting.

At least she didn't do something crazy like SPONSORING a flag burning law by comparing it to the KKK burning crosses! .... What, really? Wow, she does suck!

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism

2007-03-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

No it won't It just won't. None of that will happen.
-The Onion, March 26, 2003.

Fuck this illegal war

2007-03-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

Not cheering

However, it might not be as simple as that.

Consider what happened in Basra last Saturday when there were air raids. The Qatari television channel al-Jazeera had a team in the city and it sent back graphic pictures of dead and wounded civilians which were widely shown in the Arab world.

But these images were all but ignored in the West, which seemed more interested in pictures of the American prisoners of war.

Pictures used in the West tend to be sanitised. The photograph with this story, taken after an air raid in Basra on Saturday, shows a wounded girl. What it doesn't show is that her foot has been blown off.

People do not take kindly to being bombed, even by "friendly forces".

Bush's Top Ten Mistakes in Iraq during the Past 4 Years

Saddam Hussein down, next...Gandhi!

2007-03-18T23:37:00.000-07:00

Former Senator and Law & Order DA Fred Thompson has launched his not yet launched 2008 Presidential campaign with a stirring radio address exposing the truth about Mahatma Gandhi. Seriously.

Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”
And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER.

Okay, first of all Saddam Hussein had OPEN IRAQ TO UN INSPECTORS DURING HIS "LAST CHANCE". THEY WERE FINDING NOTHING WHEN BUSH REFUSED TO WAIT TO BOMB/INVADE. How can conservatives still point to the decision to attack Iraq as some proud, visionary moment for our glorious leader? I guess I answered my own question.

Gandhi's call for the British and Jews to "surrender willingly" to the Nazis during WWII is easy to demonize and it seems to be Thompson's whole point here. Saying Gandhi's views of non-violence is "unamerican" is both crazy (would it have REALLY been better if the US desegergated through armed insurrection?) and meaningless. Is this really what Thomspon is talking about, the removed tactical analysis more about Gandhi's political situation than the actual war in Europe over 60 years ago? This is what you are bringing? And as horrible as it sounds, as Chomsky describes in an interview, this is essentially a tactical suggestion.

Q: You know what he said to Lewis Fisher in 1938 about the Jews in Germany -- that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which would "have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."

A: He was making a tactical proposal, not a principled one. He wasn't saying that they should have walked cheerfully into the gas chambers because that's what nonviolence dictates. He was saying, "if you do it, you may be better off."

If you divorce his proposal from any principled concern other than how many people's lives can be saved, it's conceivable that it would have aroused world concern in a way that the Nazi slaughter didn't. I don't believe it, but it's not literally impossible. On the other hand, there's nothing much that the European Jews could have done anyway under the prevailing circumstances, which were shameful everywhere.

The main point though, as Sepia Mutiny points out, Gandhi’s enemies aren’t America’s enemies. The protesters Thomspon is trying to smear with an association with GANDHI (?!) aren't advocating a "suicidal foreign policy", they are advocating a humane one. Gandhi was talking about social justice and equality, not how to maintain a global super power through arms.

But Thompson is right, you can't really learn anything through what some towel wearing freak had to say. The only visionaries are hack actors like Ronald Regan. And that guy who allowed Cole Trickle to race again at Dayton, and the dude who fired that gay ADA, but not for being gay, or that "actor" who played white supremacy huckster Knox Pooley on the 1987-90 TV show Wiseguy. Seriously.

Internet actualy is television, maybe

2007-03-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

EV suggested blogging about this, and I'm totally doing it. So a group of six huge technology companies have delivered a device to the FCC that will be able to receive Internet access through unused television signals. A look of the six companies gives a hint at the kind of change a product like that could bring: Google, Microsoft, Dell, H-P, Intel, and Philips. Beaming the Internet as television signals would totally change how wireless connected devices work. It definitely wouldn't limit it to computers, broadband could be added to lots of smaller devices, all without hard wiring. As one of the FCC commissioners says in the Post article, Wi-Fi would be taken to the "next level". I think that's another way for saying, "BLOWING YOUR MIND"

What does this have to do with the Airbus A380 landing in the US for the first time at LAX and JFK Monday morning? As the LA Times :

"It's not going to be a revolution; it's going to be an evolution," said Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. "You and I, and everybody else who flies, will determine whether this airplane is a hit or a flop."

To be sure, the A380, which is about 30% larger than Boeing's 747, is considered by many to be an engineering marvel. But it doesn't represent change on the scale its older cousin did. When the 747 came into service in the early 1970s, it was 2 1/2 times larger than the airplane it replaced.

The device the FCC will start testing could be the Internet's 747, forever changing individuals connection and access to the larger, mediated world. It will become TV.

Wikiworld

2007-03-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

Friedman unit explained and demonstrated

My brackets are busted...screw the NCAA!

2007-03-16T17:56:00.000-07:00

In retrospect, it probably wasn't a good idea to pick George Washington University to go to the Elite Eight. The first two days (so far) of the NCAA tournament have actually been kind of dull. There hasn't been any truly shocking upsets (VCU over Duke isn't exactly shocking) and only one OT game. Not so much Madness as Frazzle-ness.

Anyway, over at True Hoop Henry Abbott has a good post about the ambivalence of watching the tournament. On one hand it is undeniably fun to watch, and on the other hand its yet another showcase for the hypocrisy of the NCAA. The players aren't so much amateurs as unpaid semi-professionals, not students as much as a self-segregated group with (often) their own dorms, dining halls, courses, and grading schematics. Abbott talks about some of the common "defenses" for the NCAA, but I want to quickly mention two particularly lame aspects of college athletics:

1. The idea students are being paid through a free education at the school. Oh really? Cause I'm sure Nick Saban will understand that his starting left tackle has a paper due in class that week and won't be able to make it to practice: sorry coach! For some kids athletic scholarships are great opportunities, but in the pressure cooker of high level NCAA athletics, with the travel, the film study, the practices, the work out sessions, the games themselves, the student's educations often are dealt with as an afterthought. Think about the legions of stories that come out every year about college instructors, either willingly or through corrosion, giving athletes passing grades for lacking work. The bigger issue about this isn't the student athletes failing as it is the universities' willingness to cut corners and give breaks to insure a winning team. Often, kids aren't even getting the real college education they are supposedly getting for "free". Which leads to the second point:

2. MONEY MONEY MONEY
Everyone, EVERYONE, from the coaches, to the networks, to the merchandise sellers, to the shoe companies are literally making BILLIONS off these kids. CBS signed a 11-year, $6 billion contract for exclusive rights to the NCAA bball tournament in 1999. How much do you think that will be when the contract expires, less? Nike, Reebok, and Adidas sign contracts directly with college coaches for the exclusive right to dress their student players for 6 figures, possibly even more, but we don't know because these deals are SECRET. Ohio State this year isn't even wearing the Nike swoosh on their uniforms, but will be wearing Lebron James - Nike logo (James didn't actually attend Ohio State, but would have if he wanted to work for free). Meanwhile if Greg Oden gets a work study job or allows someone to BUY HIM LUNCH, the NCAA would launch an investigation.

The NCAA talks about greatness of amateurism and education, but most of us, athletes and viewers alike, are actually learning about the power of greed, exploitation, and corruption.

Well, I better go. If USC doesn't win this next game my chances of taking the money from the pool is gone!

Quick, before they put Friedman's incredibly wrong analysis behind a firewall again!

2007-03-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

TimesSelect is allowing university professors and students to use the service for free. Sign up here. I think they just realized most universities have access to Lexis-Nexis and could read the selected TimesSelect article anyway if they wanted too. So, pretty much, sign up now for something that should have never been taken away from its free site, and that most of you could read any way for free!

Smush was probably updating his myspace

2007-03-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

when he got ejected from the game on Sunday. There so much to say about Smush's myspace page, but I want to focus on three main things. One, his women "friends" scream "NBA groupie". Most of their pictures look like they double as ads in the back of the LA Weekly! Two, at the very bottom of the page he describes his time at Fordam as:

Major: Ball-ology
Minor: Women-ology

That's actually kind of funny. Third, couldn't he have found a better picture of his dad? It is kind of sweet, but there has to be a photo of his father that doesn't make him look like a drugged-out, hammer-threatening weirdo he met in the subway?

I'm sorry to say it because its not really fair, but Kobe's site is way, way, WAY better. The difference actually is akin to the difference in talent level! Realizing I could never get Kobe though, I should talk to Smush about his ideas for this blog. I can hear it now: "Blog-calade"

Willing to sell out

2007-03-14T01:03:00.000-07:00

Television Without Pity is a great site. Its original, complete recaps of reality and serial shows lets you follow shows you don't actually want to watch (cough...24...cough) and geek out by READING over what you just WATCHED (or debate the latest dictates of the Laura Roslin administration). It was announced today that TWoP has been bought by Bravo:

"If Television Without Pity didn't exist, we would have built it," said Bravo exec VP Jason Klarman, who's at the center of Bravo's online strategy. Klarman said the purchase will change the Bravo digital suite services overnight by nearly doubling, to more than 2 million, the number of unique visitors to Bravo-owned online sites.

On one hand, good for TWoP. It's probably a lot of money, or at least to be secure and allow them to grow there site of retold primetime television and gossip about it. One the other, its kind of weird as a frequent visitor to a website that really delivers the promises of the brave new world of niche media be bought by a much larger, and often older, media entity. A similar thing happened about a month ago with the NBA blog Truehoop by sports writers Henry Abbott, another great site, bought by the "ESPN industrial media complex" (trademark pending!)

Its nearly a cliche to talk about the level of media consolidation these days, but when you read this in the Variety article about the TWoP purchase:

Bravo execs said the site will maintain complete editorial independence, despite now being a tiny division of General Electric.

It is hard not to reflect on the uniformity, reach, and pervasiveness of our current system. And how a couple of dorks on Blogger while watch BSG isn't going to change that anytime soon.

That being said, I am making plans to get THIS blog bought by a television network, cable or over the air. Top candidates include Verses, which apparently exists and covers the NHL, and Spike, which has reruns of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and those Japanese game shows with the horrible dubbing. Class all the way.

Stampy to get new, severly depressed friend

2007-03-13T02:23:00.000-07:00

Its good to see the Mayor announce the "retirement" of the only female elephant left at the LA Zoo to a santuary in San Andreas, not unlike the one Stampy goes to at the end of episode 1F15 "Bart Gets an Elephant". While this is great news for the elephant, its important to mention how much time, effort, and suffering on the part of the animal it took to get to this point. Activists, like Bob Barker, had to pledge they would help put up the money for the transfer. Llyod Levine, an LA state rep, has a bill in the State house that would mandate every zoo have at least 5 acres of land for each elephant. Anything less then that is unnatural for the animals as it causes serious joint pains. Only one zoo in the state could qualify with those standards, and it ain't LA. Levine has a very unique view explaining why he even cares:

"I've said this about elephants repeatedly — nobody has an inherent right to see an elephant in the zoo. Nobody has an inherent right to see any animal in the zoo," said Levine, who is wading into the national controversy over whether zoos are humanely keeping elephants. "It's a privilege, and with the privilege of seeing an animal in the zoo comes the responsibility of providing it care that's appropriate."

That's a good way to put it, but I worry about State. Rep. Levine. You usually don't get far telling the American people they aren't entitled to something, unless its private phone calls and habeas corpus.

Why the Dems won't debate on Fox News

2007-03-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

So with Edwards's withdrawal and Fox News President Roger Ailes again linking Obama with Osama (again, only as a joke!), the Nevada State Democratic Party is pulling out of their agreement with FOX News to co-sponsor a candidate debate in August. Over at Welcome to Pottersville they have gathered some of the hilarious, disturbing, and just bizarre moments that compelled Dem activists to push for this change. I had put one of the images labeling disgraced former-Congressman Mark Foley as a Democrat on this blog a few months ago.

My favorite from the Welcome to Pottersville collection is this one above. Why not just say "I want to kill those damn ragheads, I love talking about killing ragheads, but I don't want to kill ragheads"?

"We got broads out there who keep your kids from being run-over by some hard-on"

2007-03-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

All it took was one particularly symbolically filled drive to work for this man to get the importance and necessity of unions, what will it take you!?

Daylight Saving Time's blues

2007-03-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

Well, the Lakers lost. By 36. In a dramatic flip-flop, there no longer is even a shred of shred! Even if Lamar says he'll practice tomorrow and maybe even play in Denver on Thursday, the big worry is they don't embarrass themselves in the first round of the playoffs. If they drop lower in the West and play a Dallas-like team (or even...DALLAS!), it might turn ugly.

Still there is some good news: MY MAVERICKS ARE WINNING IT ALL BABY! With this win the Mavs tie the win streak of the 2000 Lakers, the year they won the first of three consecutive titles. Does this random connection really mean anything? Yes, yes it does.

BTW: Kwame could have started but didn't come on-time, AND didn't blame DTS? On the ESPN broadcast Jim Grey said he did blame DST AND the fact his birthday was last night. No worried if a $200 cake was destroyed during the festivities.

I hear you, Flea.

2007-03-10T22:47:00.000-08:00

Flea has a blog on NBA.com, obviously. And in this post I think he has it right on, I guess the Lakers are not very good this year. Even the faintest bit of hope seems gone with Phil throwing some cold water on everyone by reminding us Pippen coming makes no sense and couldn't happen anyway.

Still, even with tomorrow being SELECTION SUNDAY (brought to you by the ESPN industrial complex), I'll still be watching the Lakers/Mavs game tomorrow(...which is brought by the same industrial complex). I got all week for the brackets, and, come on, Championship Week sucks. Seriously, the losing team in the Big East Final had 14 POINTS AT HALFTIME!!! Even though I have no hope, I also have to agree with Flea about empires, shreds, and such:

i honestly believed. earlier in the season, that they were at the same level with dallas and phoenix
but i was wrong
my shred of hope is nothing but a shred of hope
but great kingdoms have been built from a shred of hope

Preach on brother.

Something to get pumped for tomorrow's game: It's My Dirk in a Box

Iraq's children + basketball in the Holy Land = I needz my money!

2007-03-10T01:45:00.000-08:00

Through my regular surfing I was directed to two amazing blog posts that demonstrate the appeal and promise of the form. The first was a post entitled Tears and Blood and Shit at Gorilla's Guides about the horrible suffering of Iraq's children today, right now. Its also a stirring denunciation of American's occupation, something that you don't see much in the newspapers or televisions in the US.

The second blog piece was about young Arab and Jewish kids playing together on a team called PeacePlayers entering the Old City of Jerusalem to play against another team. The NBA better get a hold of these guys quickly for their "Basketball without Borders" because they're doing it! As they explain:

The team walked bravely though the New Gate together and into unknown territory. For the Jewish children from Beit Shemesh it would be the first time they had ever entered an Arab dominated section of the Old City. For the Arab children they would be walking next to their Jewish teammates, not into a obscure gym, but right out in the open and in their own backyard. All this against the backdrop of the turmoil surrounding the excavation near the Temple Mount.

How hardcore are these kids? They court they played on in the Old City is walled in on two sides BY THE OLD CITY WALL!

While this is happening its nice to know others are working on how to monetize the blog form in the tried and tested way of getting people to sell out. But this is selling out with a twist: not just a few, but lots, and not with the large novelty check, but with small dollar amounts in secret, in the way that eats away at the soul. In the LA Times business section the story "Blogging for Dollars Raises Questions on Online Ethics" describes how company named PayPerPost pays bloggers to mention certain products in their blogs. It could be soap operas, wireless speakers, cruise vacations, whatever!

So it is in that spirit I ask: where's mine?! Can some pay me to hype their socially conscious media source? Not too big though, maybe something like Z Magazine. They'd pay someone like me big bucks, right? I guess I could figure out something with those sick and in danger Iraqi children. After all, our country gave them freedom and democracy, how about they do something for us (meaning me!) for once?

CBS convering the NBA....in 1975!

2007-03-09T10:06:00.000-08:00

This is a few days old, but over on the AOL Sports blog NBA Fanhouse they dug up this amazing video of the opening of a Eastern Conference Final Game 7. Seriously a must watch, from the Schoolhouse Rock soundtrack to the warning after the opening that the NBA owns the announcers souls. On one hand its amazing how much more technologically advanced live sports coverage is today, on the other hand the music they used is way sicker than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Dick Cheney Resigns

2007-03-09T00:09:00.000-08:00

At least before the end of this year. That's the prediction/future reporting from The Crackpot Times staff. And by staff, I mean me, my prediction, but saying stuff like staff or administration or regime makes it sound much more official and considered than some loser on a laptop.

Seriously, I'm coming back for realz post-2006 midterm elections with this vision: Dick Cheney will be gone before Dec. 31, 2007, if not much much sooner. With the dismissal of Rummy, the conviction of Libby, and his increasingly deranged views, he has entered the Willy Loman era of his tenure.

Sure this sounds ridiculous and really means nothing (Cheney's defeats actually doesn't mean Al-Quaeda wins). So what's the point of this? One, to give me something to write about in saying I'm starting this thing again (for the third time). Two, so I can shove it in your faces when I'm right! In your face blog reader!

Leslie King dies

2006-12-26T23:18:00.000-08:00

We here at The Crackpot Times don't go much for "great man" history, preferring a more "bottom-up" reading of events and significant changes. That being said, President Gerald Ford's death gives us yet another look at just how huge a jerk our current president is. And we're not talking about the pardon, but the pardonee. Check out the end of Nixon's short statement after learning Ford pardon him:

No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency -- a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.

I know many fair-minded people believe that my motivations and action in the Watergate affair were intentionally self-serving and illegal. I now understand how my own mistakes and misjudgments have contributed to that belief and seemed to support it. This burden is the heaviest one of all to bear.

That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.

It definitely has the elements of the self-pity party that seems to be part of Nixon's own personal psychodrama. However, to publicly announce something like that just one month after resigning in disgrace, without a corresponding sense of entitled forgiveness so common in apologizes, takes some amount of courage. At the very least, the depth of difference between the end of Watergate and today says volumes about the kind of political culture we are living in. Back then the president was ashamed at being exposed as a criminal, and people were upset at the next president who was calling for forgiveness! Today the president brags about spying on Americans, needlessly invades and occupies foreign lands, and attempts to resurrect a pre-Magna Carter legal system, while the press wonders why those who have a problem with it hate this country

Let's compare Nixon's statement to another recent high point of political rhetoric:

I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best.

That was from April 2006 and the very next sentence is: "And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense." This is how he explained his eventual decision to get rid of the guy he was decider-ing after saying essentially the same thing a week before:

THE PRESIDENT: Right. No, you and Hunt and Keil came in the Oval Office, and Hunt asked me the question one week before the campaign, and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they're going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

Its a sad day when NIXON and FORD look like the men with integrity. You want to say it was another era, but then again, Cheney and Rumsfeld were there too...

Protecting us from non-ID carrying dark skinned people

2006-11-16T03:25:00.000-08:00

From the Daily Bruin:

An incident late Tuesday night in which a UCLA student was stunned at least four times with a Taser has left the UCLA community questioning whether the university police officers' use of force was an appropriate response to the situation.

There's a video at the site that starts playing right away. Its pretty disturbing. By the way, the UCPD says they shocked him because he refused to leave and then "encouraged library patrons to join his resistance". Yep.

The LA Times has an article too, but whereas the Daily Bruin article has quotes from people at the scene and a description of what tasers do to people, the LA Times ends with a bunch of quotes about how the campus is so peaceful and a second year saying the cops are "really good".

The LA Times article also describes the video as "grainy". It might be poorly shot, with most of the action happening off frame, but it isn't grainy. It is actually surprisingly sharp!

Total coincidence, nothing to see here, move along…

2006-11-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

Guess what, after three years in custody, a nine-month trial, and some three months after its end, Saddam Hussein's verdict and sentence will be announced on Sunday.

Iraq’s Defense Ministry, bracing for possible violence, announced Friday that it has canceled all military leave and placed the country’s forces on heightened alert ahead of the verdicts on Mr. Hussein and the other defendants. “We are on alert for any possible emergency,” said Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Shaker, the ministry’s spokesman.

Isn't this great news, really makes you see the Iraq invasion was a good idea. Hey, isn't something else happening next week? The New York Times article doesn't mention it, but I think there was something important...What is that crazy-ass Hussein defense team?

It has been reported that the fifth of this November will be the date of announcing the verdict in the so-called Dujail case, so that the verdict will precede the date of the U.S. Congress elections, which are scheduled to take place on 7 November 2006. ...We are sure that President Saddam Hussein is innocent and we do not accept anything less. The legal procedures to which the court should base itself to, in any decision it would take, should be perfect. The court and the trial are still going on in their gross violations to humanitarian laws and International human right laws and their applicable provisions. (The last and not the least) of these violations is that the court is still procrastinating in receiving the final defense submissions which were prepared by the defense lawyers, although these submissions were sent to the court on the 4th of October 2006. This procrastination constitutes a violation to a guaranteed right of defense in the national law, the Iraqi Constitution and international law.

Oh yeah, the US ELECTIONS! That's right. Well, these people are obviously nuts, I mean, they are defending Hussein, think he is innocent, and should get a fair trial! We don't have to acknowledge their baseless charge that the verdict date for his trial would somehow be manipulated for US political purpose. I mean, would our government be that craven to hold on to power?! Besides, if there was anything to this, we would have heard someone in the media mention the closeness of these two events. Right?

By the way, did you hear about Kerry disrespecting our troops?! I was going to vote Democratic, but after that and Micheal Fox's horrible lying, I'm going with the other guys!

Re-elect Laura Roslin!

2006-10-30T02:06:00.000-08:00

Brad R. from Sadly No! (the photo is from there) has a great piece up in the American Prospect Online about GOP punditry and Battlestar Galactica, which is, seriously, great. The article and the show.

Brad talks a little about Jonah Goldberg's musings on the show and the links to the war on terror, and just to give a little color to how profoundly stupid and arrogant this man is (a dangerous combination), I say we take a short look at a column he wrote recently for the LA Times titled "Iraq Was a Worthy Mistake". Goldberg replaced Robert Scheer at the LA Times (and they wonder why they are losing money....).

In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly...

Oh yeah, that's totally silly.

...I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side....

And that's NOT silly. Anyway, after admitting the war was a mistake (but Democrats are still losers, and we are all so unfair to Bush for thinking he is using DEMOCRACY! (tm) for his own cynical purposes):

I'm now supposed to call for withdrawing from Iraq. If it was a mistake to go in, we should get out, some argue. But this is unpersuasive. A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn't rush to pull the knife out. We are in Iraq for good reasons and for reasons that were well-intentioned but wrong. But we are there.

I do love this line of argument because it absolves one of any responsiblity for what happened, and, more importantly, for being so totally wrong about what happened, leaving that person in the unreflected upon position to STILL TELL US WHAT WE SHOULD DO! "Why should we listen to anything you say after admiting your, yourself were wrong?!" "Look, we are were we are." "Wow, good comeback, you obviously care more about the world and Iraq than I do!"

So what's Goldberg's great idea for the mess, err, FOREIGN, ILLEGAL, HORRIFIC OCCUPATION we are involved in? Wait for it:

I think we should ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay.

Polling suggests that they want us to go. But polling absent consequences is a form of protest. With accountability, minds may change and appreciation for the U.S. presence might grow.

If Iraqis voted "stay," we'd have a mandate to do what's necessary to win, and our ideals would be reaffirmed. If they voted "go," our values would also be reaffirmed, and we could leave with honor. And pretty much everyone would have to accept democracy as the only legitimate expression of national will.

Finishing the job is better than leaving a mess. And if we can finish the job, the war won't be remembered as a mistake.

Refering to a past post, "what's necessary to win" means kill every last motherfucker, so why, why, why would they vote to keep us there? And voting for us to go? Iraqi polls say (by larger margins then people here want to) we should go, some major Iraqi political figures have said publicly they want us to go, AND Bush has said he can't see ANY CIRCUMSTANCE we would leave Iraq as he is president. But Goldberg is getting paid money to present this childish idea that if they really, really mean it and showed it in a cool vote, then the US will be restored to its moral greatness to the rest of the world.

I sometimes think the Cylons' plan for New Caprica is more honest, realistic, and humane than the GOP's for Iraq. This is not a joke.

UPDATE: Tapped has another chapter in Jonah Goldberg's bizarre musings on BSG.

It has come to this: time for a clip show

2006-10-26T00:32:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write something about Obama announcing he's thinking about running for president, but I realized a few things. One, maybe its a little to early to be thinking about an election two years from now when there's going to be an election in two weeks (!). I think some of you have heard my "I'm sick of being told what we need to do to win instead of the guy just f--- doing it" rant about Obama, but after reading this I realized maybe I'm wrong about the guy. And then after reading this maybe I'm right.

More importantly though, and number two, I'm too busy right now with my real life to be posting to a blog! By busy I mean watching documentaries about heroin users and exotic dancers in Sheffield, trying to pull something together for a conference in fabulous Dallas, and beating EV in Sudoku (at a Moderate level!). Anyway, lots of kids and tenured professors are talking about this thing called YouTube (its like "the Google"), so here's some ads for the upcoming race people have been talking about.

First there's the HILAROUS ad in the Tennessee Senate race. Man, is this funny! Just so you know, Harold Ford, Jr. is A BLACK MAN!!!

It would have saved the Corker campaign lots of money if he just put of a screen saying: "The boy sleeps with white woman!" Oh wait, I'm sorry, this ad isn't trying to drop that in the minds of viewers at all. It’s more about the joke Democrats think terrorist need privacy and want Canada to fight North Korea. That makes more sense.

This ad is an internet ad from the Ned Lamont campaign comparing Nixon with Lieberman. It is a bit long at over two minutes, but seriously, this will BLOW YOUR MIND!

By the way, Iraq has nothing to with Vietnam, unless its about those liberal wimps pussing out!

I was looking for this next one on YouTube, but I saw this comprehensive clip from the MSNBC show Countdown with Keith Olbermann up on Crooks and Liars (maybe the best site on the internets you will find from the google). It’s about the Michael J. Fox ad backing a Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri because of her support for stem cell research. You probably have heard about this by now because the humanitarian Rush Limbaugh claimed Fox was "faking" the effects of Parkinson’s, or purposely didn't take his medication, to look the way he does in the ad. The fact Fox's movements are actually caused BY his medication, that's just the liberal media at it again. Well, the Olbermann clip has the visual to go along with Limbaugh saying Fox is faking by wiggling his fat ass around and an interesting analysis of the whole debacle afterwards. Its a good clip, the most amazing part being that the Republican candidate is running an anti-stem cell research ad that has athletes and celebrities in it, including the wife from Everyone Loves Raymond and Kurt Warner. Hey Kurt, thanks for your views on stem cell research, how about you tell Jesus to help you not fumble for five minutes? Or at least get him to convince you your career is over, either one is fine.

Wow, this is long, again. Maybe it’s wrong to use YouTube in this way, and I'm breaking some kind of blogging etiquette. Maybe. Anyway, here's the last clip. It’s not about politics, its viral advertising from EA for its new FIFA 2007 game. This one with Wayne Rooney is the best one. It's not "I met Harold Ford at the Playboy mansion and I'm white!" funny, but its still pretty good.

Our president cares about US casualities...well, not really

2006-10-23T12:03:00.000-07:00

By now you've probably read about Bush's interview with George Stephanopoulous on ABC's This Week. It was the first time I have listen to Bush talk in something like four months because I would be in physically pain when I did, but for some reason I sat down for this one. There were some great moments, like the classic Bush/Cheney "I never said that thing I totally said" maneuver:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Exactly what I wanted to ask you about, because James Baker said that he's looking for something between cut and run...

BUSH: Cut and run and.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... and stay the course.

BUSH: Well, listen, we've never been stay the course, George.

Listen, Bush has never been stay the course, and anyone with evidence to the contrary is politically motivated, therefore untrustworthy!

There was also the much commented on comparison of the current violence in Iraq to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968-69. On one hand this would look crazy for Bush to mention, considering his administration has been saying this is nothing like Vietnam, but Tim Rutten in the LA Times has a good piece explaining the internal logic to this spin.

...In classic reverse spin, the president was sending two messages — one designed to rally a key component of the Republicans' electoral base, the other a warning shot across the bow of the American news media as they weigh their reports on the bloody events in the shadow of what is shaping up as a critical congressional election.

To understand just how Bush spun this particular pitch, you have to recall that Tet occupies a particular prominence among the revisionist lessons drawn from the Vietnam debacle by the GOP's neoconservative wing...

Many people don't understand that there is a segment of the GOP (which happens to be surprisingly represented by people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush!) that believe the US lost the Vietnam War not because it was unwinnable, or poorly conceived, or a battle against a repressed, highly motivated nationalistic force, or a horrendous crime, or a mistake, but because there was a lack of political will to win, and that lack of will was created by those pussy anti-war liberals and their punk friends in the press. From the above link:

Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?

President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.

Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.

President Bush: No, I didn't....The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions, and it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to the set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective. And those are essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War....

It is important to understand that when these people say the lesson of the Vietnam War was to not let "politics" get in the way, they are essentially saying we need to kill as many motherfucking people as it takes regardless of how many mothers are crying for their dead children and how disgusted the rest of the domestic populace gets. Vietnam would have only been won if we bombed the fuck out of it and stayed forever. Then we would have won! This is the "stabbed in the back" myth of conservatism that has been going on for decades, and is standing in the wings ready to come out right after we leave Iraq. "If only Howard Dean and the crazy liberal coast dwellers didn't demand we leave Iraq, then we would have won, for sure!" Wait for it....

Those two points are familiar territory from the interview, but I just want to point to the, frankly, really disturbing moment in the interview with Stephanopoulos:

BUSH: The fundamental question is: Are we on our way to achieving a goal, which is an Iraq that can defend itself, sustain itself and govern itself and be an ally in the war on terror in the heart of the Middle East.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It seems like, every month, we're going farther from that.

BUSH: Well, I don't know why you would say that. I mean...

STEPHANOPOULOS: The casualties are going up.

BUSH: ... if that's the definition of success or failure, the number of casualties, then you're right. But that's what the enemy knows. See, they try to define success or failure.

I define success or failure as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to defend themselves. I define success or failure as whether the unity government's making difficult -- the difficult decisions necessary to unite the country.

I define success or failure as whether schools are being built, or hospitals are being opened. I define success or failure as whether we're seeing a democracy grow in the heart of the Middle East.

Because a democracy in the Middle East, a society based upon liberty, will be a defeat for the terrorists, who have clearly said they want a safe haven from which to launch attacks against America, a safe haven from which to topple moderate governments in the Middle East, a safe haven from which to spread their jihadist point of view, which is that there are no freedoms in the world; we will dictate to you how you think.

I know some Americans don't think that is a threat. I view it as a threat because -- and the reason it's a threat is I can conceivably see a world in which radicals and extremists control oil. And they would say to the West: You either abandon Israel, for example, or we're going to run the price of oil up. Or withdraw...

Once again, postmodern theorist George W. Bush is dropping some mad knowledge and blowing your mind. You might think an increasing number of casualties means we aren't doing so well, but you are just in line with terrorist thinking. By killing more Iraqis and more American soldiers, they are making you think we are losing which is their goal, which you just end up accept without seeing we are winning. Get it? There definition of winning is killing a bunch of people. We don't care if they kill a bunch of people, we care about if the Iraqi government is difficult decisions. Well, they aren't doing that either, but still, stop thinking with the terrorist!

(On a related note, what the hell is Bush talking about in the second part of this answer? Its like a stream of consciousness international policy vision: success, government, hospitals, democracy, oil, jihad, Israel...)

The right-wing acts as if the problem is people aren't understanding what Bush is saying, not the fundamental failure of his policies. Does any find it amazing that Bush is claiming the number of causalities is not a good way to define success or failure a few moments AFTER he said this:

BUSH: Yeah, absolutely, I read every casualty, and it breaks my heart, because behind every casualty is somebody with tears in their eyes. Behind every casualty are families that will be mourning the loss of life for a lifetime.

I'm sure your heart breaks, dude. I'm sure it does.

What happens when you take procrastinating to a new level

2006-10-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

It might not look it, but I actually have lots of stuff to do. However, I still find time for the Internet (my values are more refined than yours I guess) and am now in a strange non-argument with a blogger on the other side of the country. A friend of mine told me about the University Diaries blog because of a personal connection and I started read it fairly regularly. Written by an English professor, I was interested because it was a place to read about things related to academic life generally. As the months went by I started catching on to things about the blog I didn't like, but whatever, I kept reading it.

Then I noticed some of my comments were being deleted. It's not like there are tons of comments on posts, just two or three, but for some reason mine were being deleted. The first was in response to this post, which is just a long quote from Don DeLillo's essay on 9/11 and its aftermath. I think it’s a really good piece, but I made a smart-alecky comment that was along the lines of

all this talk about language doesn't highlight the threat of islamofacism, there isn't a war against the past and future (what delillo says), but between evil and America, and his last line in the article (allah akbar) sounds somewhat appeasement driven.

I know I'm just a jerk on the internet, but seriously, why delete that? You either think I'm serious, which is crazy, or you think this type of response has no place on your high class BLOG.

I decided I either had to comment on every single post or stop reading it all together. Deleting comments to posts that aren't defamatory or highly offensive seems to say, "I don't understand this whole internet thing". I stopped reading. Anyway, like I mentioned before, better values, and I came back. Again, I started commenting and, again, UD started deleting. The latest deleted comment was in response to the ONE AND ONLY other comment to this post about a Harvard prof. having his title stripped for stealing manure. The other commentator said if people were looking for horseshit, they should go to

Kendall Square and dig into Mt. Chomsky, which has a never-ending supply.

I made a post saying,

What does Chomsky have to do with theft, corruption, and Harvard professors? Oh, I get it, you don't like him! Funny.

Deleted!

Why am I boring you with all this? Because of two points, which surprisingly have to do with two recent posts by UD. The first from yesterday was about a controversy involving a department chair removing quotes from associate professors' doors because he thinks (ridiculously) others might find them offensive. UD, with no irony, mocks the department chair and university president for doing ESSENTIALLY WHAT SHE IS DOING WHEN SHE DELETES MY COMMENTS. Maybe I am wrong here, but I think the parallels and different responses are shocking. I made a comment, check it out before its deleted!

The second reason for all this is her very next post about a recording on ABC of various Democratic senators, like Kennedy and Kerry, meeting with lobbyist on Nantucket. I don't want to say Democrats are on the side of angels, cause they aren't, but to compare this meeting to the type of corruption from the Republicans from the last few years as UD does is not only lazy thinking, but shows a lack of knowledge about the depth and severity of the accusations against what GOP legislators. Several GOP congressman are not just losing their seats, they are GOING TO JAIL.

The real crime of this meeting for UD though is some stupid, silly limerick recited by Kennedy about the Dems taking about Congress. The horror, the horror. Somehow this means...I don't actually understand her point, but I do get she is attacking Kennedy for poor writing. The Democrats suck, but I don't know if I would link bad poetry with torture and crimes against international law, or other issues regarding this upcomming election. But hey, that's just me.

Ezra Klein has a good post on the somewhat, if not extremely tenuously linked, similar issue, mainly how it seems liberal academics don't seem very concerned about the pubic shere, or life generally outside the university walls. Even when it is about how subjects they are experts on are misrepresented:

A few weeks back, David Brooks massively misrepresented the positions of Lawrence Katz, a former Clinton administration economist and current Harvard professor. I'd read a bit of Katz and noticed the discrepancy, so I gave him a call and convinced him to let me set the record straight. What astonished me, however, was that Katz himself had no interest in challenging Brooks' distortions. It sucked, to be sure, but he had things to do, and why dwell? That the nation's most popular op-ed page was misinforming Americans on the inequality debate was a shame, but whaddayagonnado?

I think the disdain for public affairs outside the self-referential bubble of academia is endemic, and quite possibly the main cause for softheaded thinking that sees hangin' on Nantuckt and writing bad limericks with trying to destroy some of the fundamental tenets of our democracy like habes corpus and the seperation of powers.

By the way, have I mentioned UD has expressed an admiration for David Brooks?

Cindy Sheehan = Mark Foley

2006-10-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

This video made me throw up in my mouth.

According to these people's logic, not only is Sheehan's internet activities relevant to discussing the war in Iraq, to NOT talk about it and to talk about Mark Foley's actions is hypocritical. Wow. It's the enduring question: are these people that stupid to belive that, or that cynical to make such a ridiculous argument.

By the way, braintrust/American hero Sean Hannity was one of the conservative talk-radio hosts given a private audience with Bush a few weeks ago. My friend (who I would reference with initials if that wouldn't be pointless considering) sent me this article in the NYTimes about the meeting. Hannity had this to say about meeting Our Glorious Leader:

Mr. Hannity said of the meeting, “I think he’d have an 80 percent approval rating if he could bring people into the Oval Office six people at a time and explain it all to them.”

Yeah sure, Bush's problem is people doesn't understand his complicated arguments. He needs to stop saying "Listen!" and go for the more egalitarian "Hey you!". If only Bush could just talk directly to people! Except for that crazy bitch Cindy Sheehan! Did you know she looks at internet porn? And she thinks that makes her qualified to talk about her dead son?!?!

Listen, basically this is unacceptable

2006-10-17T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post ran a piece that indirectly points out the increasingly crazed nature of Bush's rantings by remarking on his growing reliance on the word "unacceptable":

Bush's decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd time, a phase of his presidency in which all manner of circumstances are not bending to his will: national security setbacks in North Korea and Iraq, a Congress that has shrugged its shoulders at his top domestic initiatives, a favorability rating mired below 40 percent.

But a survey of transcripts from Bush's public remarks over the past seven years shows the president's worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush's rising frustration with his declining influence.

So instead of actually doing something about these problems, like negotiate or seriously reflect on his options and work towards solutions (for example, actually defining what victory means in Iraq) or, I don't know, RESIGNING, the President tells whoever will listen that the world is unacceptable. Yet another practice of the Bush administration I wish I could use in my everyday life.

Meter maid: Well, the meter is expired, so I'm going to have to write you a ticket.
Me: Considering I was only five minutes late, I find this ticket UNACCEPTABLE.
Meter maid: Okay sir, but I still have to give you a ticket.
Me: This seriously is UNACCEPTABLE!
Meter maid: Oh, I see! Well, sorry, carry on!

Oh, that would be sweet...

The Washington Post article ends though by referencing one my favorite Bush speech patterns, and something I think is inherently better than declaring things incontinent to your world view. Good ol' fashion raising your voice and condensation!

Bush's proclamations are not the only rhetorical evidence of his mounting frustrations. One of his favorite verbal tics has long been to instruct audiences bluntly to "listen" to what he is about to say, as in "Listen, America is respected" (Aug. 30) or "Listen, this economy is good" (May 24). This year, he made that request more often than he did in a comparable portion of 2005, a sign that he hasn't given up hope it might work.

For me, starting a sentence with "Listen" works just as well as using "basically", which I believe is a fav of VP Dick. Both serve well in letting your audience know something along the lines of "I have little respect for their ability to understand things, so I am going to speak to you like a moron in hopes my words will get through that mush of cells you call a brain." Here are two great examples from the Dick VP in the same interview in March of this year on CBS's Face the Nation:

..Q Mr. Vice President, all along the government has been very optimistic. You remain optimistic. But I remember when you were saying we'd be greeted as liberators. You played down the insurgency. Ten months ago, you said it was in its last throes. Do you believe that these optimistic statements may be one of the reasons that people seem to be more skeptical in this country about whether we ought to be in Iraq?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I think it has less to do with statements we've made, which I think were basically accurate, and reflect reality, than it does the fact that there is a constant sort of perception, if you will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad.

...

[in response to former Scowcroft's "I don't know Dick Cheney anymore quote"] And I think a lot of my friends out there look and see some of the policies, we've pursued and disagree. But to suggest somehow I've changed, or my fundamental views of the world have evolved over time, basically, I don't think that's valid.

Oh man, here's another great example from Cheney from just this June, using it twice in the same sentence!

...What the Democrats are suggesting basically you can call it withdrawal, you can call it redeployment, whatever you want to call it, basically it's -- in effect, validates the terrorist strategy.

What it really is unimportant. Basically, I could care fucking less about your questions, but I pretend to do. Listen, that's how it's done. Now, let me tell you about how all this shit is unacceptable!

Here's a google search full of more examples

Ah, good times.

Great ad

2006-10-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

Diss!

I am actually in favor of negative ads. The whole point of elections is to draw distinctions, not to be all nice and "look at my family, ain't I great". Seriously, what do I care if your wife loves you, tell me why the other guy is fucked up. What matters is the actual content, not the mere fact the ad might be mean.

Plus, I promise to get back to the California initatives. I've been meaning to do it, but seriously, do you have any idea how boring that shit is?

Where have you gone Christopher Hitchens?

2006-10-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

Our political spectrum turns its lonely eyes to you.

This week The New Yorker will have a profile of writer Christopher Hitchens, which unfortunately is not online yet, but has generated some talk already. Apparently one part of the profile recounts Hitchens chewing out fellow dinner party guests for having the gall of not thinking Howard Dean is a "raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag". Good times.

Before starting the pile-on of wondering and mourning about what has become of Hitchens though, I just want to point to the selective memory of the The New Yorker. Is Hitchens crazy and delisiounal for contining to not only support the Iraq War, but for attacking those who opposed it as moronic "fellow-travelers"? Yes, but at least he doesn't now publish articles about the incompentance and criminality of those who he supported with this "project". I'll probably write more about this later, but from just a little over a month before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, editor David Remnick had these comments:

...What is most unfortunate about the President's lack of public engagement in the argument for force is that the objections to it are answerable. There are, of course, some who oppose an invasion of Iraq on the ground that, say, peace is better than war, or that the "real issue" is a conspiracy of oil interests, or that the President is an avenging cowboy and all his advisers a posse. Far more seriously, there are questions of why now and why Iraq (and not North Korea or Iran); there are profound concerns about the loss of life (can't we just foment an Army coup?), and about what happens the day after Saddam is arrested, or killed, or lands on Elba. Do we really expect a Jeffersonian legislature to rise from the rubble of Saddam's palaces? Are we prepared for years of rebuilding in Iraq when we already seem to have lost interest in the continuing chaos in Afghanistan?...

The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.
Saddam's abdication, or a military coup, would be a godsend; his sudden conversion to the wisdom of disarmament almost as good. It is a fine thing to dream. But, assuming such dreams are not realized, a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.

"Sure, we have no idea what will happen, but damn it, we have to do what's right unlike those soft-headed, peaceniks!".......[three years later in the same magazine]....."Wow, what a fucking disaster, only an idiot wouldn't have seen this happen!"

Back to Hitchens though. Ever since 9/11, when he came to believe he alone understood the true nature of the threat facing liberal democracies in the West and all others who had the gall to suggest otherwise were weak-kneed, sympathizers who had no intelligence or interest in justice and the like, Hitchens has progressively gone deeper and deeper to what can only be called (I believe this is the professional term) "gin-soaked madness". As someone who enjoys a drink, it might be unfair to call it that, but for a man who proclaims loudly to be dedicated to righteousness and logic, it is hard to understand how else he could still fail to see his horrific misjudgement and continue to still act as if events have somehow vidicated him.

It is especially painful for those of us who always admired Hitchens for his truth-telling, morally driven, belligerent style. I still think his book No One Left to Lie To is one of the best assessments of the Clinton administration, in all its hypocrisy and selling-out to the values and political views that they supposedly lead with. In the recounting of Clinton's rushing home to execute a mentally retarted inmate, the lie of "welfare reform", and the ugliness of "triangulation", Hitchens was one of the first political writers I read that actually seemed to speak about politics from a clear point of view, from an understanding of right vs. wrong, instead of it just being a sporting event with winners and losers.

Today, his best book only serves to show how far off the path he has strayed, how deeply he has become identified with those just a few years prior he damned in the strongest words possible. The Trial of Henry Kissinger was, and still is, an important work that looked at American foreign policy and its results honestly. Its entire premise, if one were to take things like the Geneva Conventions, international human rights law, and the Nuremberg trials seriously, the actions of Henry Kissinger during the 20th century have to be judged as crimes against humanity and should be punished justly, is a view he may still have, but is unreconizable in his writing and comments today. With the latest revelations that Cheney and Bush actually meet with and take advice from Kissinger, a man who Hitchens discribes in detail as being linked to both mass slaughter and individual murders, how can he still honestly believe all the actions he advocated for the last five years have been right? And that those, some who were his former allies and friends, who suggested otherwise were so wrong?

I know Hitchens would probably point to some misspellings and rhetoric problems in this as evidence I am a fool and don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I actually don't know what the fuck I am talking about, but I just want to give you the preamble to that book he wrote on Kissinger and ask again, what happened?

For the brave victims of Henry Kissinger, whose example will easily outlive him, and his "reputation." And for Josehp Heller, who saw it early and saw it whole:

In Gold's conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as Bismark, Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious schlump who made war gladly. (Good as Gold, 1976)

Notes from an enraged misanthrope on North Korea's nuclear test

2006-10-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Well, not really, I kind of like people. Al Martinez seems to think differently:

...I have learned that, with some notable exceptions, blogs are largely the habitat of unemployed writers, enraged misanthropes, retired teachers, aging journalists and people who normally pass their time doodling or making obscene telephone calls....

For the record, I pass my time with sudoku, I've never made obscene telephone calls, just crank calls, and I'm an unemployed grad student, thank you very much.

Anyway, there is some good commentary on the North Korean's nuclear test on the dreaded blogs today. John Marshall puts it in historical context, Glenn Greenwald goes back to that amazingly prescient Howard Dean foreign policy speech during the 2004 primaries, Jesus' General assures us this is all part of building the case to bomb Iran:

Why would Our Leader bomb Iran to punish North Korea? For the same reason he attacked Iraq to punish Al Qaeda. It's what emperors do.

This all reminds me of the story about Jimmy Carter and the overthrow of the shah of Iran. Carter was so furious this huge event happened with no warning from the CIA he wrote a handwritten note to the head of the agency calling it one of the greatest failures of American intelligence ever. I just find that story interesting considering the North Koreans had been telling the US FOR NEARLY FOUR YEARS it was going to build a nuke and the Bush admistration just let it happen. Bush refused to negotiate with them because....I don't know, it would make them look like pussies, and that was what Clinton did, so you know that's horrible? According to that calculus, it's better to look tough and be a failure than actually achieve your goals. Great plan, asshole.

Seriously, on ever level this administration has been a failure and has made us more unsafe. The worst thing is I think the Jesus' General is right: this, like all their fuck ups, will be used to justify more military action.

I'll go back to the California initiatives tomorrow, but keeping with the irrationality of our political discourse, check out this response to a well-written review of Woodward's new book on Amazon sent to me by AR. I mean, wow, get that guy a talk show! Or better yet, a blog!

Proposition 86

2006-10-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

Short version: No

Long version: Proposition 86 would raise cigarette taxes for emergency room hospitals, health care for uninsure children, and stop smoking programs. So, yes, I'm a heartless jerk for suggesting you don't vote for it. Actually, a heartless jerk in the tobacco industry's pocket. Seriously though, these programs are great, and they should totally be funded. I'm just of the opinion the state should be finding money in its budget for it and not just hiking taxes on cigarettes, which, like sales tax, is mostly a poor tax.

First of all, we aren't talking about a small hike. The bill would increase the tax per pack from 87 cents to $2.60, nearly a 200% increase. Second, a majority of its predicted revenue, nearly 2.1 billion, will not be going to non-smoking programs, or child insurance, but to hospitals, which aren't exactly strapped for cash. Third, since one of the goals of these tax hikes is to get people to stop smoking, there is no guarantee this money would actually be a continuous flow of revenue (which again brings up the point if children's insurance is so important, why not actually fund it in the budget?!). Fourth, law enforcement is against the proposition because they think it will lead to increased gang and criminal activity for illegal, tax-free, cigarettes. With a 200% increase in price, its hard not seeing that happen.

Fifth, and to me a HUGE point, it would be put into the state constitution a strange provision exempting hospitals from antitrust laws. The backers say this is to guarantee on-call specialist, while the opposers say it could lead to things like price-fixing. Considering the backers answer to that is "SMOKING KILLS", this proposition seems highly dubious to me.

The top link is to the Official California Voter Information Guide. Here is some other good info on this and other propositions:
Article in the SF Chronicle on Prop. 86
California Voter's Foundation page on Prop. 86
League of Women Voters information on Prop. 86
And go here for Warren Olney's Which Way, LA? debate on Prop. 86

Funny stuff, upcoming programming

2006-10-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not posting for a bit, but I went on a trip. Look at that lyricisim, you can only get that kind of stuff here! Anyway, I plan over the next few weeks to do post on the various California initatives. There are alot of them, and honestly lots of them are confusing. I don't claim to know everything about them, but I will try to do a little bit of research on them, present them, and give you my completely liberally bias, anti-family, pro-drinking opinion on them. Here's a preview: down with the cigarette tax!

Till then, there's a great post on the pro-Fox news op-ed in today's LA Times. Great stuff! In that spirit, above is an example of the "anti-elitist" Fox News view, and below a great moment in punditry from the Editors. Enjoy!

"Independent" is meaningless

2006-09-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

So the Senate just passed a bill that will in part deny suspects the right of habeas corpus and allow the President to set interrogation rules (which in itself wouldn't be terrible if our current leader didn't openly wonder what "outrages on human dignity" meant). While not a single person has been put on trial for charges stemming from 9/11, that's over 5 years for some detainees, this bill was shoved through Congress right before a mid-term election and was obviously designed with the goal of making Democrats look "weak" on "terror". This is very clear with statements like this:

“It is a kind of difficult vote to explain, at least where I come from,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Well, Senator, you should be coming from a background of being a judge, but fucking with some of the most fundamental bedrocks of our judicial system to make some people look like pussies because they are the ones not scared shitless, yeah, it's hard to explain.

This shameful act, one which will probably be challanged immediately and thrown back to Congress to rewrite anyway, was brought to us by the "independents" as David Broder has classified them. You know, people like Lieberman, who get all worked up about video game violence, but don't seem to be that bothered by waterboarding.

Apparently, being mad about what happens these days makes you just some angry loser according to Broder. But real "independents" like Schwarzenegger, they're the future. You see, Schwarzenengger is an independent not because he took his humiliating defeat in 2005 as a sign people don't support his right-wing policies, but because he:

..now works comfortably, convivially, on forging compromises with the very same Democratic legislators and lobbyists he once tried to run out of town. In turn, they have responded by cooperating instead of conniving to defeat or embarrass him.....Schwarzenegger is providing his party -- and the country -- with an object lesson in how to survive and thrive in that kind of independent political environment. Others will have to learn.

Don't understand how listening to a majority of your constituents is somehow "independent" and not just a sign Republican talking points won't just work? Well, obviously you don't understand the need to debase our legal system because THEY MIGHT KILL US ALL!

This man is a genius

2006-09-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

I was trying to find footage on youtube of George H.W. Bush's coin-flip at Monday's Saints/Falcons game at the Superdome. When he was announced, a strange, hard to describe sound came from the audience. Not quite cheering, and not quite booing, but both, perhaps combined with cursing.

Anyway, I was hoping to see it again, but instead this came up in my searches. This guy makes some good points, the Falcons do suck! Take that Katrina!

She talked about the Civil War AND the Cold War. Neat!

2006-09-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

It is hard to say what is more embarrasing, Katie Couric's interview with Condeeleza Rice or her blog post about it. That's right, she has a blog, and it doesn't exactly strengthen her REAL SERIOUS NEWS credentials. It actually kind of reads like Harriet Mier's paradoy blog, with the difference of being real. Anyway, the best part of the blog post is the comments, that vary between funny, insightful, and scary. From the very first comment:

You begin by talking about her great memory, but fail to note that she repeatedly testified to not remembering key conversations when she was before the September 11 Commission.

Why do you hate America JMEhrlich? And do you get together with your friends to play Brahms? So what do you know?!

A quick word of the interview, Rice actually compares those who say "Muslims can't handle democracy" (people who DO NOT EXIST IN THIS DIMENSION OF TIME AND SPACE. SERIOUSLY, CAN YOU NAME A SINGLE PERSON, JUST ONE?!?) are like those who said blacks were sub-human during the civil rights struggle. The crazy analogies just keep coming from these guys! "I don't think your Iraq policy is thought out, going to work, or even takes in account the realities of the country today" = Racist KKK leader.

At least Couric confronted her with a quoted from a major Iraq war critic, her teenage daughter. That's right.

My political education

2006-09-25T01:52:00.000-07:00

With the President equating the deaths and lives of hundreds of thousands to a comma and yet another chapter in the continuing reverse Roots saga of everyone's favorite senator, things look bad. It seems American politics is in the gutter, that personality triumphs policy, that our leaders are stupid, criminals, liars, crooks, and generally not admirable people. It seem like it has reached an all time low. Maybe it has, but then again, I was reminded this weekend it probably has always been like this. At least as long as I have known or cared about it.

New York magazine's cover story this month is former New Jersey governor James McGreevey's "confession" for his hiring of his gay lover into a state job and the eventual scandal that ended his political career. Its a pretty sad and torrid story, and while McGreevey hurt alot of people, his family, his wife, his supporters, with his deception, it almost seems like he had no choice. The call to power was so strong he was willing to sacrifice everything for it and, as his telling makes clear, not just the truth of his sexual orientation, but his general morality and ethics.

In 1997, in his first run for the governorship against then Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, McGreevey nearly won, which in itself was a victory and lead to his landslide in 2001. That summer I was about to be a high school senior and with a drivers license for the first time. Excited, and thinking about college applications, I volunteered for the McGreevey campaign in Woodbridge, and somehow ended up as a "Policy department intern", which I think was a totally made up title to make me feel good about working for nothing. I realize now I had a naive view of how government and elections worked, one weaned on bad movies, history/civics classes, and my debate club.

Anyway, I don't remember much of what I did. I mostly filed newspaper clips, shocked to see most articles were written very similar to each other. It was as if there was some sort of "release" given to the "press" that most journalist just reworded and sent to their editors. The one thing I clearly remember though was calling hospitals to see if any children had died from neglect or abuse. There was a scandal involving the DYFS (a kind of HHS for NJ), and a large number of deaths caused by a combination of abuse and terrible government oversite and lack of funding. It was a campaign issue, and worried they weren't getting all the info, they asked the lowliest person in the office, me, to pretend I was a Rutgers student doing research and call hospitals to see if any kids died. In a sick way, they kind of were hoping there were more dead kids, so they could hammer Whitman for it. I did a really shitty job, I felt horrible about lying, and about the whole disgusting thing.

I kind of stopped coming a few days after that. I was accused of being a flaky teenager, and since it was easy to agree with that, I did. To this day, when I think about sitting there, with just a phone book, trying to find information numbers for hospitals, lying about who I was, and "hoping" to find kids died, I feel terrible. Even though I didn't come up with the idea and I was just 17 hoping to make a good impression, it just seems like I did something wrong. Reading McGreevey's apology today reminded me of all of this, and that feeling.

I can't be that mad at someone like McGreevey because he's been publicly humiliated and he has not just admitted he did wrong, he seems to know it. There really isn't much a point to this post. We all know the ideal of democracy, public policy, public service is far, far away from the actual work of politics: the electioneering, the marketing, the slogans, the soundbites. For me, that divide is too much and that's why I rather post this, here, anonymously, and maybe read by just you. Maybe its a weak excuse, but all that counts is our equal ability to evaluate freely available information to help choose our shared destiny, our obligation to do so based on what is right and what is wrong, and to argue openly with each other about those decisions. The politicians and the processes might all be horrible, but as long as we have that everything will be okay.

That and voting machines that actually work.

Did Lincoln play squash?

2006-09-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

The top story on the New York Times site right now? Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat. Wow, that sucks. What else is going on....now here's a much more facsinating, insightful piece:

There, no matter how the war in Iraq was going or how many Democrats were calling for his head, Mr. Rumsfeld could uncork his deadly drop shot, leaving his foe helpless and himself triumphant, at least for a moment.

In some ways, squash offers a window into Mr. Rumsfeld’s complicated psyche, revealing much about his stubborn competitiveness and seemingly limitless stamina. Pentagon officials and employees say Mr. Rumsfeld’s play closely resembles the way he has run the Defense Department, where he has spent six years trying to break the accepted modes of operating.

I'm not saying that people in positions of power shouldn't have personal lives with hobbies, or even if such hobbies shouldn't be the subject of news stories. Why not? But the contrast between the two articles, which are given similar amount of space and attention, is pretty fucking weird. Especially Donny "my critics are Nazi appeasers" Rumsfeld's signature project, the war in Iraq, is not only making us less safer, but is a complete failure in its own right. Rumsfeld has helped usher in one of the darkest periods in for the American military, where torture and war crimes seem to be the order of the day. He then goes around comparing himself Bush to Lincoln and the war in Iraq to the US Civil War? And then the Times writes an article about his squash playing and the great insights it has into his (incompetent) management style.

I guess.

Where the White House explains it is charge of deciding laws are unconstitutional

2006-09-22T13:17:00.000-07:00

and not the Supreme Court:

Me: But isn’t it the Supreme Court that’s supposed to decide whether laws are unconstitutional or not?

Tony: No, as a matter of fact the president has an obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. That is an obligation that presidents have enacted through signing statements going back to Jefferson. So, while the Supreme Court can be an arbiter of the Constitution, the fact is the President is the one, the only person who, by the Constitution, is given the responsibility to preserve, protect, and defend that document, so it is perfectly consistent with presidential authority under the Constitution itself.

Okay, that's pretty disturbing, but I think there is another very telling part of this exchange. What brought it up was good ol' John "Separation of Powers is just a suggestion" Yoo recent (repeated) assertions that the President can just ignore court decisions if he wants. Yoo was behind the infamous, and since disavowed, torture memos that said anything short of organ failure was cool. His recent op-ed was much derided by progressive blogs and commentators. Well, when Snow is asked about Yoo's comments, there's this "great" moment:

Tony: So, who was John Yoo deputy assistant attorney general for?

Me: Um, President Bush.

Tony: OK. Was he really?

Other reporters: Yeah, yeah. The architect.

Tony: Wow. He was the architect of this….WOW! This is great! In any event, uh…boy, I stepped in that one, didn’t I? (laughter) Uh, but the fact is that the theory here all along has been that you don’t do it to evade your constitutional obligations, but, in fact, to meet them.

That's right, you know about the recent history of this "war on terror" and the Bush administration than Tony Snow, who literarily has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

Thanks BTCNews

Hugo Chavez and George Allen: ideological buddies?

2006-09-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

By now everyone has probably heared that Chavez called Bush the "devil" at his speech at the UN yesterday. As a drunken, hate-filled liberal, I was kind of happy to hear the less civilized response to our dear leader, especially considering he compares himself to Lincoln and FDR several times a day to audiences who ponder the depths of his comments. That being said, Chavez actually made some thoughtful points that get at the heart of why the world's view of the US is so radically different from than the Bush "spreaders of democracy" version:

They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.

What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.
What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?
The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, right here, in this room, and I'm quoting, "Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom."
Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother -- he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there's an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him.
...
The president then -- and this he said himself, he said: "I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace."
That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes.
But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.
It wants peace. But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?

He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision?
This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.

Well, read the whole thing, it isn't just sulfer and the devil. But Chavez's presence in the news reminded, again, of good ol' George Allen. I know, I promise to drop talking about this guy, but in this debate with Jim Webb on Sunday on Meet the Press. Talking about how Iraq is going to be great, Allen suggested the following:

The other aspect of this that I’ve, I’ve asked Maliki, I’ve said it to Jafari and all the ministers, is the key for that country, for their economy is oil. And I think that their oil ought to be a national asset, and they ought to create something like the Alaska Permanent Fund where everybody in Iraq, regardless of where they live, regardless of their ethnicity, has a share in that oil. They’ll care about building up the oil capacity, upgrading it—and they’ll certainly care about anybody who’s blowing up the pipelines, because that would be money out of their pockets. Alaska they get a dividend. Every citizen ought to get a dividend in Iraq as well.

Um....is Allen suggesting a socialist, nationlization of the country's wealth? Isn't that what Chavez has been trying to do and why he's been treated with such disdain, as if he's Stalin II? I mean, it sounds like a good idea to me, but I'm a drunk and I haven't run in several election as a tax-cutting conservative, bad mouthing the ability of the goverment to affect positive change. Maybe Allen and Chavez should get together and share their passion for helping the poorest in society....

Allen: Okay, I am from Jewish heritage, but I eat ham sandwiches!

2006-09-20T12:05:00.001-07:00

Seriously....

Speaking with The Times-Dispatch, Allen said the disclosure is "just an interesting nuance to my background." He added, "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

kay, I know this is getting kind of boring, but there is just two other things about all of this. One is related to the whole macaca thing. Others (I did!) suggested that Allen knew 'macaca' was a racial slur when he said it because his mother, the one who has now "confirmed" the family's history, is from northern Africa where macaca is, in fact, a slur against blacks. Now, Allen is calling his opponent's campaign, and others, anti-semitic because, as he says,

"the question, the assertion, the offensive remarks that your mother taught you this slur, and that somehow it's because she has -- either she or her father was -- was Jewish."

Um....what the hell are you talking about?! No one, NOBODY, is suggesting he called the only person of color in a room 'macaca' and welcomed him to America because Jews are racists, or that macaca is a slur used only by Jews, or Jewish mothers teach racism to their children! I really don't get what he is trying to say here, that if you point out the actually meaning of words you are anti-semitic? It makes no sense.

And secondly, considering Allen's use of the Confederate flag (and the noose) as a symbol of Southern heritage, and not, you know, slavery and institutional racism, it is really telling and weird that this whole Jewish heritage thing "never came up". The guy grew up in Southern California, acts like he's some protector of Southern history, brags about his grandfather's incarceration by the Nazis, yells at a reporter for asking about his Jewish roots, and NOW explains he just found about his family's history, and it really isn't important. What a sad, sad man.

Here's the Washington Post article

George Allen: First Amendment defender

2006-09-19T15:29:00.000-07:00

How dare you suggest my mother, who I keep telling you was held by the Nazis during WWII, is Jewish?!?!?! Never has there been a more vile slur!

The Senator's Gentile Rebuke - Dana Milbank, Washington Post

"It has been reported," said Fox, that "your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?"

Allen recoiled as if he had been struck. His supporters in the audience booed and hissed. "To be getting into what religion my mother is, I don't think is relevant," Allen said, furiously. "Why is that relevant -- my religion, Jim's religion or the religious beliefs of anyone out there?"

"Honesty, that's all," questioner Fox answered, looking a bit frightened.

"Oh, that's just all? That's just all," the senator mocked, pressing his attack. He directed Fox to "ask questions about issues that really matter to people here in Virginia" and refrain from "making aspersions.

Allen actually started his shocked outrage by quoting from the 1st amendment. He's right, when will you crazy liberals learn religion has nothing to do with these elections. I guess you'll do anything to draw attention away from our crusade-like mission led by our God-chosen leader against the evil Muslims!

You Tube has the video up here. It is somehow worse than it sounds in text. What's the deal with the booing?

the deal of a life time

2006-07-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

If you want to write a 200 page dissertation I could offer you a cool $25. Cash. American cash. One Jackson and one Lincoln. I'd appreciate if it could be on US television news, but I'm flexible. Romantic literature, Rawls political philosophy, some crazy new managment plan that involves electric shock, I can make it work.

Actually, that electric shock plan sounds pretty good. Just do that. Or winning lottery number creating system. I'd give you $30 for that! One Jackson and one duel victim Hamilton. Or one Jackson and two Lincolns. I'm flexible!