| Gnlsmo Franco epilogue |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|12:27 pm] |
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Alright, this is ridiculous and disgusting. ESPN2 in the middle of their daylong Wimbledon coverage has to talk about how the local newspaper headlines are all about Michael Jackson, and what the tennis players at the tournament had to say and Twitter about it and how many times Serena Williams met him! This is the absolute limit of stupidity, irrelevancy and bad taste. You're covering a tennis tournament, stick to the damn tennis! If I wanted to hear about MJ, I'd be watching the freakin' "news" channels, not the tennis. F**K! |
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| Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead and I'm getting a little sick and tired myself |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|07:09 am] |
Does nobody in the news/journalism industry have any respect for their profession anymore?
Ever since O.J. Simpson took a white SUV for a long ride with cops behind him, the assumption of news editors every-freakin'-where in America, and I suppose other countries as well, has been that the public desires to consume nonstop 24-hour coverage of hyped sensationalist irrelevancies in lieu of the various other events happening on the same day that actually affect our real lives and those of thousands and/or millions in direct ways, rather than as bemused but disconnected spectators.
If you want to suggest that many people will be inclined to dredge up memories of Michael Jackson when he was an entertainer upon hearing of his sudden "premature" death, and that that justifies reviewing his life for all of us, yeah, there's some validity to that. But it doesn't require nonstop 24-hour rehash. 20 minutes out of every 2 hours for half a day would be more than enough of an obituary to be spoken on the TV and radio. The stories will be available on our web browsers or in newspapers and magazines whenever we have a few minutes to spare to read them for a very long time, if we really feel a need to. And in the grand scheme of things, there are enough other things of genuine import still happening today and for the next days or weeks or months that affect real people in real ways that acknowledging that Michael will still be dead tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and letting the story subside until something new yet equally unimportant happens (like an autopsy report) is the right thing to do to leave time in broadcast schedules to report REAL freakin' NEWS.
Maybe I'm a little biased about this story because I only see the reality of the sad, physically and mentally decayed phantasm Mr. Jackson devolved into overwhelming the bright light that was his once immense talent. To try to remember him happily as the singing and dancing superstar is to buy a fantasy and ignore the dangerous freak that replaced it. It doesn't work -- not for his ex-wives, not for his children, and not for the children of other parents who were preyed upon by him. I don't want to keep thinking about him because it just makes me mad what he could have been instead of what he was, and it ought to do the same to the rest of us. His life is over; it was not a happy good life, he's better off dead, lay him to rest already. 40 million Iranians don't give a shit that Michael Jackson is dead, or that Farrah Fawcett is dead; the real story is that Neda Soltan is dead and democracy is being killed in Iran at the very moment that all this nonsense is the only stuff being reported, and those stories have a closer connection to more Americans! (not just Iranians) than Michael Jackson has had in close to two decades. Iranians can't spare the time that their news is shuttered from us by this "event".
News editors have no business letting Michael's death overshadow hypocrisy in Congress on health care reform, and hypocrisy among elected officials on aspects of family values that they trumpet as the foundation of their political platform, and continued domestic terrorism and media commentators' disingenuously barely veiled exhortation of same. We didn't have that whole day and counting to spare for nothing but Michael, that's just plain irresponsible. I expect crap like that to happen on Fox, or CNN or commercial broadcast networks, but when I tune in to MSNBC and it's there too, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna watch it anymore. Someone please let me know when they start talking about something relevant again. |
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| Public health care costs |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|11:14 pm] |
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I'm really worried that the "Cialis option" is going to result in rising Texas and the rationing of erections to the rest of US. |
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| Specter vs. Smersh |
[Apr. 29th, 2009|03:03 am] |
So there's this sorta good, mostly almost earthshaking news that Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) will run for reelection as a Democrat next year, and caucus with the Democrats in the Senate from now on. And the talking heads are accusing him of being opportunistic, self-interested, self-promoting, disloyal, untrustworthy, you name it. I don't buy any of those labels.
The party whose standard he bore into office has already told him they will support someone else in a primary against him, so who the hell is being disloyal? Clearly, the Repugnican party has deserted Specter, not the other way around.
Untrustworthy? I don't think so. The man will continue to vote with his somewhat independent conscience as a Democrat, the same conscience that made him a more-acceptable-than-average Republican for three decades.
Opportunistic, self-interested, self-promoting? Senator Specter likes his job, and his state has made it clear they like how he does it for them. He doesn't need that particular job, he can take any job he wants at this point, he's earned a hell of a lot of respect; or he can enjoy a well-earned retirement. But he wants to keep it, not for himself, but because he honestly believes he's the best man to do it in his state, and I think he's probably right. Would any other Democrat beat Pat Toomey in a general election? In the current political climate, of course! But would any other Democrat be as qualified? Why should Specter desert the people of Pennsylvania just because a party that has dwindled to little more than its lunatic fringe has both alienated and virtually expelled him? He has some very important issues he'd like to address with his continued service, and he'd likely be a stronger force for getting action on them than some greenhorn but lifelong Dem. He *should* take the sure route to reelection instead of the sure route to the private sector, and both Pennsylvania and the nation need him to.
Welcome to the party that gives a shit about the real world, Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA). |
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| Rick Warren, Mike Huckabee, Mormons, Jeremiah Wright, John Hagee etc. |
[Dec. 19th, 2008|10:55 pm] |
Does there really have to be any invocation at all at a ceremony celebrating a secular government?
There's hardly a preacher out there these days who is not capable of saying something that somebody is going to find offensive, so why not stop inviting all of them? I mean, isn't it about time our leadership recognized and did the obvious? Just stop implying that our democratically-elected-by-Constitutional-mandate government is still willing to tolerate association on any level with any entity that espouses distrust, fear, hatred and exclusion to any degree, in any form. |
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| Unthreatening shoe throws |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|04:56 am] |
Okay, this is absolutely priceless footage.
http://video.ap.org/?t=By%20Section/U.S.&p=&f=MAQUI&g=1214dv_bush_shoe
Of course Bush didn't feel threatened, the guy had lousy aim, shoulda gotten Rothlisberger or Randy Johnson (of pigeon-exploding fame), or Imelda Marcos (probably knew shoes well enough to be intimate with their aerodynamic tendencies) to stand in for him.
This poor journalist probably got beaten up pretty badly for his effort -- anyone who tried that here would surely get shot several times. I'd like to shake his hand, give him a medal of valor, and kiss his hairy, smelly, unshod feet.
Keep an eye on Nouri al-Maliki in the video. Notice that altho he puts his hand out to try to block the second shoe, he barely moved a muscle when the first one came flying. Also worth noting that the journalists surrounding the thrower made no attempt to stop the second throw when they knew who threw the first one.
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| The cynic revisited |
[Nov. 16th, 2008|02:11 am] |
Stories like this are why I don't take anything enough for granted to celebrate prematurely: "Election spurs 'hundreds' of race threats, crimes"
And the sickest item cited is: "_Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said."
Kids that young didn't learn that much hate in their school, this comes from parents who are so dangerously stupid they should have been sterilized.
The second sickest is that two of the items occurred in Maine, a state that Obama carried by a rather large margin, 58-41%!! OTOH, maybe it was predictable, in light of their U.S. Senate race being carried by a Republican by an even larger margin 61-39%. :-((
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| "No Currency Left to Buy the Big Lies":John Cusack on Huffington Post |
[Nov. 6th, 2008|01:25 am] |
http://tinyurl.com/65a7o9
He says a few things here that were on my mind to write a few days ago, but I was too tired and I decided to sleep instead. He also happens to say them a lot better than I would have, (which makes me a little jealous, as does the fact he's taller, better looking, drives and still has plenty of his own hair ;-) ), and with clearly a good deal more background reading than I've ever done to inform him.
The passages that are particularly cogent, and representative of my thoughts are these:
"...All that's left is derivative debts -- bets between liars and lies. Trillions of dollars. Turned capitalism into a Ponzi scheme for trading worthless paper. No real value anywhere. No matter how much money Ben Bernanke prints..."
"...So we have laws that allow borrowing money against derivatives -- basically a bet between two people who create nothing without collateral. They leveraged the public financial health on something you wouldn't be allowed to do in Vegas..."
This is roughly similar to how Enron created its own wealth, on paper, and because it created nothing other than wealth, why it could not sustain itself. And when it finally was gutted to collapse by its officers, it sent a loud warning, several years ago!, of what was bound to happen to other companies depending on similar schemes, including, shockingly, banks. But the warning went unheeded, because the government existed only to enable the profiteers, not to regulate and audit them, and now we are where we are today. Cusack's post is basically an outline of the systemic virulence that President Obama will have to try to cure. The question is: how much of what Cusack mentioned is or will Obama be aware of or open to understanding, and how much of it will his brilliant, experienced, successful advisers be willing to inform him of so he can institute the right reforms to navigate a couple hundred million debtors thru a vast sea of massive financial icebergs?
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| The optimist and the cynic (both within me) |
[Nov. 5th, 2008|02:16 am] |
My mother, who died just over 20 years ago at the relatively young age of 65, and who instilled in me both of my chief loves in life, music and Scrabble, wasn't the most careful of teachers. As I grew through adolescence in the middle of the civil rights movement, insulated from the sometimes violent side of the struggle by my residence in the Bronx, NY part of the "tolerant" North, she displayed an ingrained cultural bias, both as a Jew and a white American that could have made me an out and out racist -- I never heard her say the word "nigger", but she used the Yiddish version of the term, "shvartze", pretty much without giving it any moment's thought. Her distrust and contempt for them as neighbors (not on the same block at the time, but merely within a few blocks, as my public elementary school in easy walking distance was, and is, surrounded by a low-income housing project and I went to school with them) were clear. Eventually that bias was one of the things that made me realize my born religion was no better than anyone else's. Jews were supposed to be smarter, and have a greater interest in justice due to their history of being persecuted than goyim, but we were not immune to convincing ourselves that those "characteristics", among other things, made us superior people, and therefore capable of judging or merely living with the implicit understanding that others were inferior.
I honestly don't know what Gertrude Sherman's reaction would have been had she lived to see tonight's news. I don't know how strong her conviction was that the equality this country has finally deemed fit to bestow upon people who clearly didn't need its seal of approval needed to reach this level. I believe she supported the civil rights movement in spite of her bias. I don't actually remember well enough what she may have said about it (if anything) when I was little.
What I do know is that I had grown proud as a youth to live in a country that was gradually granting inalienable rights to all human beings, and disappointed as more than a youth to see how slowly that still went. In my twenties, I actually did not dare force myself to believe that I would live long enough to see a black President of the United States elected. In my forties, I still did not, even as first Jesse Jackson and then Carol Moseley Braun and the clownish Al Sharpton finally became candidates seen and heard on the national stage. My father had to live to 94 to see it! I suppose tho, it was not as foremost in his mind of things he wanted to see before he dies, as it was in mine. At any rate, the optimist in me appreciates that such a man as Barack Obama has been given the opportunity to lead us, and hopes that he will be allowed to fulfill the promises, of demonstrating the equality if not superiority of his abilities to those of presidents who have come before him, and bringing our nation closer together internally, and restoring our reputation externally.
The cynic in me still has to wonder, tho, would white America have been as ready to accept Obama enough to let him ascend the final step on the ladder if George W. Bush had not been the global disaster he is, and made it so easy to identify John McCain's party as the source of destruction and the enemy of hope? All the talking heads on the telly are awfully busy expressing their pride in America for tearing down the race barrier to the White House, but I think it's a little early to be patting ourselves on the back. I think any Democrat (alright, maybe not John Kerry) would have won this general election, and Barack Obama was just lucky to be in the right place at one of the worst of American times. It was merely a coincidence he is black, tho perhaps that allowed him to galvanize the black voting block that would otherwise have been more generously split between the parties (thanks only to churches) for the Dems. If I'd been born one generation later, maybe I would be less suspicious of the nation's motivations, for having seen less evidence of the residual hatred during my lifetime, less of just how hard it is for Americans to part with their prejudices. OTOH, I would be just old enough to have seen how powerful a voting block could be fashioned out of what remains of those prejudices, because, after all, that's how we got 8 years of W. And on a night when we elected a black man president, some parts of this country still showed how strong their ties to the dark ages are, by amazingly sending Michele Bachmann back to Congress, and maybe not so amazingly revoking gay marriage in California (last numbers I've seen indicated Prop 8 was passing [only the margin was astonishing], but this could have changed by the end of the night) even while the state showed a 60-38% preference for the President-elect.
Yes, a historical cataclysm occurred tonight, but the true measure of what has happened will be how Obama's administration comes to be represented in history after it ends. His accomplishment as a politician has peaked, (with defeating Sen. Clinton; McCain was the easy part!), and now accomplishment as an executive and statesman must begin, lest the old prejudices are restored for several more decades and he becomes merely a speed bump in the white brick road. |
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| HUAC returns |
[Oct. 18th, 2008|09:10 am] |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Bachmann
Okay, this story is thoroughly intriguing to me. I really need to know just what kind of campaign platform this person could possibly have put together that convinced voters from a state I don't ordinarily think of as being among the dumber ones that she is anything but the out and out nutjob she is. Holy crap!!! |
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| Congressman Tim Mahoney... |
[Oct. 16th, 2008|09:08 am] |
... I knew Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani and Gary Condit and Jim McGreevey and David Vitter and Larry Craig and Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards and Mark Foley... and you're all of them! What makes this particular incident annoyingly ironic is that he got his seat by proclaiming himself a return to the moral high ground that Mark Foley vacated. How can Democrats convince the voters to trust them to govern everyone when they can't be trusted to govern themselves, any more than the Repugnicans? Our public policies are supposed to make us better, but when we act privately the same as the other guys, how can we hope to be around long enough to provide useful responsive government? If you're a Democrat who reaches elected office, you have an obligation to yourself, your constituents and the institution of representative democracy to maintain the standard of ethical rigor that the Republicans can't, otherwise you're just as worthless. Of course, if this country would get the stick out of its ass about sex, monogamy and marriage, these guys couldn't be made examples and could just do their jobs without all the bullshit and hypocrisy. Sigh. Until then, however,
you all know what the community standard is, remember you have a crucial job to do and act accordingly. |
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| The final debate |
[Oct. 15th, 2008|10:45 pm] |
Holy cow, I actually disagree with Rachel Maddow about something! She said she thought this was McCain's worst debate of the three. I thought it was his best. Of course, that doesn't say much for how he did in the first two, and I thought the second ("that one") was his worst.
McCain again came out very strong in the first half. While he didn't convince me his ideas were right on dealing with the economic crisis, he at least sounded like he had some command of what he was talking about, didn't stumble too much, and got the last word in for much of that discussion, which will leave a strong impression with some viewers who are desperately hoping he would provide them some excuse to vote against Obama. But he again bogged down in the second half, and he did himself no good whatsoever bringing up Bill Ayers, and probably hurt himself plenty with his thrust on the abortion issue. And McCain's mention of the Washington, D.C. school voucher program scored him no points, because anyone who knows that issue knows that community's education success rate does not benefit overall from letting 1,000 underprivileged kids go to school with rich kids, and it still sucks mightily and is a major reason that only about 20 square blocks in the center of that city are safe to walk around. And that droning about "Joe the Plumber" really numbed the senses by the finish. McCain's positions are so weak that Obama didn't even have to bother saying what he really thought of Sarah Palin when asked directly.
Finally, if Sen. McCain says "I don't care about an old washed-up terrorist", then why does he still bother claiming "we need to know the full extent of that relationship"? He contradicts himself within the same sentence, and thinks viewers won't notice? And he knows damn well that Obama has already given the full answer, and knows it's entirely innocuous, so getting the question asked in the debate doesn't gain him anything other than to reinforce the accusation for the wackos in his party who hate enough not to bother listening to the answer, which presumably gains him no new votes, and doesn't cement a block large enough to elect him. Well, I guess he just had to take the dare rather than back down from it. Real mature. |
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| Cheaper by the dozen (condoms, not kids!) |
[Oct. 15th, 2008|08:38 am] |
http://www.parentdish.com/2008/10/13/economic-crisis-means-more-babies/
"People are losing their retirement savings, their jobs, their homes, their sense of security. Many of us have altered our normal spending habits and instead of going out to dinner or a movie, we stay home and find something else to do. Apparently in Britain, that 'something else' is sex. And according to some, this at-home recreation is having an impact on the sales [of] maternity clothes, pregnancy tests, and sex toys (not necessarily in that order)."
Paul Rodriguez, in a 1998 cable special "Idiots and Armadillos" (before we'd even seen the tip of the iceberg, let alone the completeness, of George W. Bush's idiocy!), did a riff that eventually led to a line like "fucking idiots, they're the worst kind..." '...they'll just make more idiots.' What galls me most about this story is AOL's welcome page headline linking to the "article": "Odd Upside to the Economic Crisis". More babies is NOT an UPside in this situation, and the sad thing is, it's really not "odd" at all, it's rather predictable. The last people on earth whom society can afford to have procreating are the ones that can't figure out that if they can't afford dinner out and/or a movie, they sure as hell can't afford to raise a child, yet they're always the ones that will do so regardless. And the box of condoms is still cheaper than the box of popcorn.
I know, I'm just a mean sonuvabitch if I can't tolerate babies. Well, my only answer to that (after "tough noogies, bugger off") is CONTEXT! -- every thing and idea has its place and/or time.
[And hey, Spellcheck did not flag sonuvabitch!] |
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| Cleopatra Palin, Queen of Denial |
[Oct. 14th, 2008|09:54 pm] |
The woman actually said dark red is bright green! (I'd say she said black is white, but that would be appearing to reference the race issue, which isn't really the point.) And she said it with such conviction. Proving yet again that she not only can't read a legislative document, but doesn't read any newspaper, cuz they all said she had committed unlawful abuse of her office. This nutjob is not only not going to be Vice President of the US, but she probably won't even get her own party's nomination for reelection as Governor. Anyone want to take bets on how soon she gets divorced when her term is over? And how soon after that, she's living in a trailer on welfare? Alright, that's prolly an exaggeration, I'm sure she can still go back to being the local TV news sportscaster.
[Oh, this is beautiful, Spellcheck puts the curly red flag under the contractions "isn't" and "doesn't", but has no problem with "prolly." Dumbass robot.] |
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| "no calorie, bacon-flavored aphrodisiac" |
[Oct. 14th, 2008|07:18 am] |
The ability to author that phrase is why I love Rachel Maddow so much. If memory serves**, she used it in the context that the McCain campaign couldn't even sell that right now.
**[Edited 10-15:] it didn't; tho what I said *could* easily have been the context, please see Dianagram's comment for the correct context from show transcript. |
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