Sarah Palin is resigning as governor of Alaska, effective near the end of the month.
As of this time, she is keeping her plans under wraps. But that didn’t stop the mainstream media’s punditsphere from spending the entire day running around in circles and speculating like an 1849 California gold miner on speed.
The main question that they threw around was is Sarah Palin gearing up to run for President in 2012?
My guess is that she will, regardless of whether she’s qualified, or how many people try to convince her otherwise, or how much damage she could do to her Republican party before it’s all said and done.
Even still, it’s a little bit early to start campaigning for President, so there’s certainly more to her decision than just looking forward to her next big thing. I think that Palin is tired of dealing with the mounting legal pressures on her, her family issues, as well as the media scrutiny that she’s faced since last summer.
Quite frankly I don’t think she can handle the pressure of being a national figure. But that’s not going to stop her from running for the most intense and stressful job in the entire world! Atta girl, Sarah! Show those media fatcats and liberal whitewashers that you don’t need to know all the countries in North America to be President.
Seriously, it will be very intriguing to see how the GOP reacts when the day comes that Palin announces her candidacy for the highest office in the land.
Some will be enthusiastic, even orgiastic, in response.
I’m sure that there will be others who will hang their heads and wonder how the once mighty Grand Old Republican party could sink so low.
And there will be others still who become registered Democrats and Independents for the first times in their political lives.
I really don’t know all that much about the internal workings of the Republican Party or of the people who bear their colors with pride. I don’t know exactly how many Evangelicals there are in the party or if they constitute a majority. Perhaps there aren’t enough of them to nominate Palin; perhaps there are more than enough. Time will tell on that.
While I don’t know what will happen in the 2012 Republican primaries, I do know what will happen if Sarah Palin faces off with an incumbent President Obama during the general election debates.
I have a very strong aversion to posting videos on my blog for a number of reasons. Namely, one of the things I like most about getting my news and opinion online is that it’s dominated by text. It’s harder to be manipulated by words than by images. Hopefully this trend of Americans getting most of their news online will also contribute to higher literacy rates, but we’ll just have to wait and see on that one.
Despite my misgivings about the medium, I’m going to share this video I found today with you. It’s footage from a town-hall style meeting in Virginia with President Obama addressing a woman’s personal health care crisis:
Before you lament that this is another crazy, ranting post about the need for single-payer health care in America, just take a chillax supplement. I don’t want to talk about health care, for once. Quite frankly I’m sick of writing about it.
What I want to talk about is Presidential style.
There are many things that I dislike about President Obama’s policies. I think he’s far more moderate than he led many of us to believe during the primaries and he runs the risk of becoming a mediocre President because he’s unwilling to play hardball with the far right wing. The legislation that will come out of the Obama years will more than likely be watered-down and won’t help ordinary Americans nearly as much as we hoped.
However, there is one thing that I certainly do like about this President: I get the distinct impression that he actually LISTENS to what people are telling him.
I found this video on a blog from the American Conservative, which included a cynical suggestion that the woman might have had to sign a waiver before being able to hug Obama. It’s entirely possible that the whole thing was an elaborate photo op, but I doubt it.
Yes, this health care bill will probably fall woefully short of what it needs to accomplish, but can you even imagine President Bush talking to Americans about their needs in a setting like that? Can you conjure up an image of W. embracing Debbie? I can’t. Maybe my conservative readers have a much more active imagination so it wouldn’t be a problem for them. In fact, I’m certain that they do, but that’s besides the point.
The point is that Barack Obama does an excellent job of making it seem like he actually cares what we think and feel. Could it all be an act? Entirely possible. But even a disingenuous performance by President Obama is far more reassuring than the stuttering, scripted remarks about competition in the market place being the best option that we would be subjected to by George W. Bush.
Is Barack Obama just a fantastic guy who cares about everybody and would get your cat down out of a tree if only he had time in his schedule? Not necessarily. What is clear however, is that Obama actually cares about his legacy.
Unlike President Bush, Barack Obama actually wants to be remembered as a man who did something for the American people, who listened to us and dealt with our problems as best as he reasonably could.
Stylistically, these town-halls are the modern day fireside chat. Like Roosevelt before him, President Obama is making a great effort to communicate to Americans the problems that we face, and he’s interacting with us on a regular basis to help address them.
What a change!
Compare that with Bush’s despicable responses to crises across the nation, not the least of which was Hurricane Katrina. It is just so thoroughly refreshing to have a President who seems capable of empathy.
In his most recent HBO special, Chris Rock gave a very punctilious description of President Bush’s attitude about his legacy:
“…If you was hangin’ from a cliff, gettin’ ready to fall to your death–that’s right–and Bush was at the top of the cliff, and all you needed was a fuck to save your life, and Bush had a pocket full of fucks…he wouldn’t give you one. ‘Hey, Bush, I need a fuck!’ ‘Ohh, you know I don’t give a fuck…“
Say what you will about President Obama’s unfortunate half-hearted measures towards getting us out of Iraq.
Say what you will about his dont-ask dont-tell policy.
Say whatever comes into your mind about his bailing out gigantic corporations while leaving the middle class to be crushed beneath their weight.
But at the end of the day, we can still say that President Obama at least gives a fuck.
“Global warming expert” Kenneth Chilton is the true mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He also is responsible for the death of Michael Jackson, and I’m pretty sure he had something to do with that Lindbergh baby thing.
Ok, so Kenneth Chilton probably didn’t do any of those things, but he deserves to be treated as if he just confessed to all three crimes.
Why?
In a column in the Detroit News, Chilton claims that the energy tax included in the Waxman- Markey climate bill hurts the impoverished, and therefore it would make Jesus angry.
And that’s not even the dumbest thing he wrote. Check out these gold-star winners from the post:
“Congress appears to be convinced that predictions from computer models of high levels of global warming 50 to 100 years in the future are unquestionably accurate. But the latest Gallup poll on global warming finds that 41 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is “generally exaggerated.“
As if that makes everything ok? Scientists say that we’re a generation away from catastrophic climate change, but because 41 percent of Americans don’t buy into all that hooey and malarkey, it’ll just go away. But wait! There’s more!
“On the cost side, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that any cap-and-trade bill that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent could cost the average household roughly $1,600 (in 2006 dollars).“
Really? 1600 dollars? That’s quite a number. I wonder where he got it from. Furthermore, I wonder what the time-frame is for that increase, considering he failed to mention one in his article? Maybe he just forgot. But Chilton isn’t done there. After running down the costs of the bill that he yanked from his own rectum, he transitions out of nowhere into this fine piece of freshly plucked fertilizer:
“As an elder in a 300-member evangelical church, I am aware of efforts to recruit church leaders to push for climate change legislation… But efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions necessarily result in higher energy costs that impact “the least among us” most harshly. The Biblical command to care for the poor and deal with them justly should give us pause as we consider policies with almost no benefit and great cost to the least of these.“
As a member of planet Earth, I’d like to start a petition here for Kenneth Chilton to get a vasectomy, because nobody this stupid should be allowed to procreate. (Direct your requestshere.)
If you’re a militant atheist, you might also want to thank him for driving away as many intelligent people from Christianity as possible.
I have always felt a strong, inexplicable pull towards liking and agreeing with Fareed Zakaria, without knowing why.
I remember telling a friend of mine about a year ago that I really like his articles, but that I wished sometimes he would just drop the proper, status quo act and just really tell it like it is for once.
Thanks to the greatest political blogger in the world, Matt Taibbi, I no longer feel that strange desire to nod my head at everything Zakaria says or writes. In his latest post, Taibbi rips Zakaria’s Newsweek piece defending capitalism into a million tiny pieces, and unlike the Fry book, it is chocked-full of unalderated truth:
“Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull and the outrageous commonplace, rendering horrifying absolutes ambiguous and full of gray areas.“
(In his original piece, he misspelled ambiguous. But it’s cool because I misspell things like that all the time.)
Suddenly it all makes sense. I found myself feeling the need to agree with Fareed Zakaria because he represents common sense; ie conventional wisdom. The problem with conventional wisdom is that it is right 99.9 percent of the time, but when it’s wrong, the consequences are disastrous. Example: the western mainstream media’s pitiful, even to this day, explanations for the roots and causes of Islamic terrorism.
I have expressed my displeasure with the general mediocrity in Newsweek’s reporting before, but seeing Zakaria in this new light puts the very integrity of the publication into question as far as I’m concerned.
Ok, Jonathan Alter is not and never has embodied anything close to the cavalier journalistic spirit of E.R Murrow, but I always held a certain degree of respect for Newsweek until very recently. Perhaps it has something to do with my upbringing. Newsweek was the magazine of record in my house growing up, so it’s afforded a special status in my subconscious, but now I find it hard to believe that I was blinded to their mainstream B.S. for so long.
There are many many drawbacks to the development of new media and the gradual decay and death of traditional newspapers and magazines. Yes, it’s cool that Twitter is available to the Iranians, but it’s also shown how unreliable it is by crashing every 8 hours.
Yes, blogs have promoted decentralization and democratization as far as how people get and perceive their news, but there’s also no fact-checker working behind the scenes, nobody to call an anonymous blogger out when they publish grade-A, irresponsible nonsense. (You shut up. Just shut up. We’ll discuss my nonsense another day.)
Yes, there are a lot of problems with the current trends in media. But my heart swells with joy when I envision a day when nobody has to pretend to like a journalist just because he represents conventional wisdom.
Dick Cheney is reportedly getting a huge book deal for his memoirs through Simon & Schuster.
So HARD... trying... to look..... human!
So, let me get this straight. All I have to do in order to get a multi-million dollar book deal with a big publishing house is invade a sovereign nation, jerk off on the constitution, shoot my buddy in the face, tell a senator to go fuck himself, and then claim executive privilege when somebody cries foul? Where do I sign up?
Predictably, the masses are not happy about this news. Here are a few of the gems from the comments section at CNN:
“I would not and will not spend one cent for his bunch of lies” -Carl Justus
“Ah, his new career as a fiction writer!!” -Gizzi 1213
“This book is not worth the trees used to make it!! Toilet paper has a better use of trees than this book. Cheney will go down in history as a war criminal no matter what he writes or thinks.” -Brett
Ok, so I’m an under-employed writer to begin with, so this was going to rub me the wrong way no matter what. But what’s really upsetting is the fact that the editor-in-chief (Mary Matalin) used to work as a Cheney aide.
Does the mind not rebel upon hearing that? Did nobody who brought this deal together think that this might represent a conflict of interest, given that the book is going to be a non-fiction manuscript?
Thank you, big New York publishing, for proving yet again that one can get away with anything if you wear a really nice suit.
Dick’s dyke daughter says that her father wants to set the record straight for his grandchildren: “”He wants to make sure that his story is told, and told in a way that his grandchildren will be able to understand and appreciate even 20 or 30 years from now,” which is ironic because his grandchildren will already be benefiting from all the great work Cheney has done for the last 8 years.
Because in 2039, chances are we’re still going to have at least 50 thousand troops stationed in Iraq, just as Cheney intended. People who have complained about a lack of an exit strategy need to tuck their naivete back in: there never WAS an exit strategy. We will be paying to occupy Iraq until the end of time.
In 2039, we will be facing an enormous refugee crisis due to the catastrophic effects of climate change. Poor third world nations near the equator will all experience a dramatic exodus. Where do you think all those millions of penniless citizens are going to want to go? No number border fences or chants about buying American are going to keep them out. We can thank Cheney and company for setting back the environmental movement for 10 years by rejecting the Kyoto protocol.
If we’re lucky enough to still be a functioning state in 2039, Cheney’s influence will be felt in the Oval Office. There have been egregious abuses of the executive branch’s power before, but Bush and Cheney broke into a whole new ballgame: they set the standard for future Presidents, who will not hesitate to trample on civil liberties regardless of their party affiliation.
If Ms. Cheney ever wants to be married, she certainly will not be able to thank her father for helping make that a reality one day.
So, I hate to brake it to you, Liz, but there’s really no need for your dear old dad to write a memoir to set the record straight. History will judge him by his actions, not his words. And I guarantee you that the account of his years haunting the White House will not be a generous one.
In a democracy the few are subject to the tyranny of the majority. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best damned thing that we’ve come up with so far in human history to make things fair.
Even though it’s imperfect, we must trust in democracy to meet the needs of the people in the most efficient way possible. Some people will say that this is the role of the market. These people are either ignorant, deluding themselves, or have something to gain from subverting democracy for the sake of monetary gain.
History has shown time and time and time and time again that when the will of the majority of the people is ignored consistently, it’s only a matter of time before a revolution takes place.
For instance, when a large majority of the people state that they want something, it would be very unwise of the government or the ruling elites to deny them this. Today in America 76 percent of us say that having a public health care plan option is important to us.
That’s a far greater majority than Barack Obama won to become President of these United States. Which means that this is far from a fringe group: 76% means that liberals, conservatives, moderates, and nutjobs alike support a public option. 76% represents more than just ample political capital to get things done. It represents A MANDATE. To sign a petition to show your support for a public option, visit here.
But, for some odd reason, the Democratic party’s plan for health care reform no longer includes a public insurance option.
Could this possibly have something to do with the fact that the health care industry contributed over 166 million dollars to candidates during the 2008 election cycle? Or is that just one big, giant, floating, pink-hued fucking coincidence?
It’s probably just a big coincidence, but just in case it’s not, I think that all 76% of us that support a public plan should take this opportunity to tell Congress that we want serious campaign finance reformright now. Because if we don’t, it’s highly unlikely that no matter who gets elected, no matter how much hope or change they promise, is going to give much of a flying fig about what we the people really want.
A collection of Henry Fairlie’s essays just came out. One of the more poignant passages that I’ve come across is this: (from 1976:)
“It is time that it was acknowledged that there are now only two choices: one can be either for strong government for the few and the rich, or for strong government for the unrich and the many. There is no longer a third way. This is what the American election this year is about: not whether there should be “big government” or not—that is a false issue—but whom the “big government” should serve.“
Too many of my intelligent, politically aware friends say that they just want the least amount of government possible. This can mean several things; normally that they don’t want beaurocrats deciding what they can and can’t do in the privacy of their own homes.
But the simple fact of the matter is that life has gotten too complicated for small government to be viable anymore, as Fairlie recognized.
This is why the founding fathers envisioned a flexible constitution: so that when circumstances dictated that change was necessary, the state could follow through without a violent hassle. Thomas Jefferson was all about independence and small government, but if he had lived in our times and gone through the process of tyring to purchase private insurance, I’m certain that he also would have supported a public option.
Intelligent people change their minds.
Whether the citizens voting for them know it or not, the Republicans abandoned the idea of small government about thirty years ago. They recognized that the strong central state wasn’t going anywhere, despite using anti-government rhetoric to trick people into voting for them. Since then they have willingly used that government to promote the interests of what Fairlie called the few and the rich.
Big government is here to stay, folks. Isn’t it about time that it started serving the needs of the many unrich?
Recently I characterized the White House’s official response to the election crisis in Iran as “tepid.” Apparently, I’m not the only one who chose this adjective. On the Today Show, senator John Mccain called out the Obama administration for failing to call a spade a spade:
“He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election; the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights. I think it’s possible to engage. But item number one is giving the Iranian people a free and fair election.“
Predictably, the mainstream liberal media (no, I’m not saying the media has a liberal bias. I’m saying that there are mainstream media establishments that are liberal out there) has stood behind Obama’s decision to not interfere, or even offer a worthwhile comment on what’s happening in Iran.
If ever there was a no-brainer that would help repair our broken image in the middle east, this is it.
An extremist President rigs an election and hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied, highly motivated, politically engaged citizens are demanding a recount and refuse to accept the result. These are the very hearts and minds that we have supposedly been trying to win over for the last decade. So, what do we do when an easy and obvious villain oversteps his bounds? Nothing.
That’s the Obama doctrine for you: don’t do anything that could be considered by anyone to be choosing a side.
Memo to you media sycophants at the Examiner and the New York Times: nobody is saying that we should send troops in to Iran. Nobody is saying that we should interfere directly and ensure that a fair election takes place. All we want is for the leader of the free world to make some vague statement of support for a nation that has just had its democracy pulled out from under it by a totalitarian regime.
Is that too much to ask for, Mr. President?
The throngs of Mousavi supporters rushing into the streets on a daily basis are the future of Iran. This scandal will bring down the Ahmadinejad regime, mark my words. The green-clad protesters out there are going to be the Iranians that we will have to negotiate with one day down the road. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that we at least tacitly supported them in their darkest hour?
According to John Kerry, Senator from Massachussetts and least charismatic Presidential nominee in American history, the answer is no.
“The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet.”
John Kerry’s logic makes sense if you’ve spent your life in a party that has been straddling the fence for so long that its testicles have been crushed so thoroughly that child-bearing is out of the question.
This is one case where it actually would be beneficial for us to take a side on a thorny political issue in another country. Ahmadinejad is not the shah. The year, as far as I know, is not 1979. In this case, the popular uprising in Iran is firmly directed against a corrupt, illegitimate regime. It would be foolish for us not to show our support for this Iranian grassroots movement. Sitting on the sidelines here would be a disastrously squandered opportunity to show that we have the common people of the middle east’s interests at heart, contrary to what their dictatorial leaders tell them.
Come on, Democrats. Show some balls for once in your life. Please.
Update: In response to the violence in Tehran on Saturday, in which the government killed 13 protesters, President Obama released the following statement:
“Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion… Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian people’s belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”
This is an improvement. Failing to criticise the thuggery of the Iranian government and ruling establishment would have been criminally negligible.
I hope that the people of Iran will continue to resist the Ayatollah’s crackdown on legitimate protests.
Keep fighting on!
To show your solidarity with the Iranian protesters, use this icon for your Facebook profile, or better yet, write your elected officials and ask them to condemn the stolen election.
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Upsetting News:
Today the United States Senate passed an 80 billion dollar spending bill to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this hardly even qualifies as news anymore.
This is how out-of-whack our priorities are. Every Republican in Congress has been crying and pounding their shoes on the podium about too much government spending under the Obama administration. But when a bill comes across their desks that spends nearly 13 figures worth of the taxpayer’s money to continue funding two un-winnable wars, not a peep is heard.
The final vote tally for this spending bill was 91-5. Which means that the vast majority of Democrats, who have spent the last 6 years pussy-footing around and half-heartedly calling for withdrawals from Iraq, also don’t seem to care how long we stay there or how much money we waste.
Sanity seems hard to come by with our elected officials’ logic as it pertains to spending. This same bill included a 1 billion dollar provision that would have given 4,500 dollar tax credits to car buyers who trade in fuel-inefficient cars to buy new, more economically and environmentally friendly vehicles. This provision just BARELY passed.
So, 80 billion dollars to continue babysitting the Iraqi military, which we disbanded coincidentally, doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. But 1 billion for bringing American cars into the 21st century nearly torpedoes the whole bill.
Who makes these decisions? Where do they come from? What possible life experiences could they have had to make them this incompetent? Why in the turquoise hell do we continue to re-elect them?
It’s sad enough that today we spent $80,000,000,000 more on these ventures in imperialism, but what’s even sadder is the fact that this will only cover the cost of these two wars until October. That’s 4 months. This means that on average, we’re spending 20 BILLION dollars a month in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That figure may slightly drop off as we start to “pull out” our troops from major Iraqi cities. But keep in mind that we will be keeping a residual force of over 130,000 there indefinitely. This means that every month for the foreseeable future we’re going to continue pissing these dollars down the drain. Now is a prudent time to ask the question: what are we still doing over there, anyway?
Officially we are in Afghanistan and Iraq to disrupt terrorism and prevent its spread throughout the region and the world.
The real reasons probably have more to do with Iraq’s oil and Afghanistan’s blossoming opium trade.
In conclusion:
Whatever the reasons, whatever possible good that might come from our presence in these countries, can we agree that the price tag, given our current economic troubles, has gotten just a WEE bit out of hand?
There will never be hope for this country until there is a legitimate liberal party.
The Democratic Party is at best a moderate choice in the grand scheme of things; far more conservative and spineless than mainstream leftist parties in Europe, Latin America, and all over the world.
Example: the new health care bill, which will not even attempt to pass any form of single payer, despite Obama’s promises during the primaries.
For some reason the Democrats don’t even think they can pass this watered-down legislation despite having majorities in both houses and enough political capital to choke an elephant.
The reason? It will cost 1.6 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Which sounds like alot, but consider that we’ve handed out about that much to the vermin on Wall Street over the last 10 months and it suddenly doesn’t sound so bad.
UPDATE: It turns out I was way off on that number. If you add up all of the government’s commitments to the financial industry, we’ve got over 12 trillion tied up to keep this system afloat.
12.2 Trillion dollars to rescue the financial services industry.
But 1.6 Trillion dollars is too much to ask to overhaul health care?
What a crock of shit.
The Dems are proving to be useless to progressive America once again. When will we wake up and embrace a really liberal party that doesn’t cower at the accusation of being soft on terrorism or run for cover when their corporate overlords crack the whips?
I have a novel idea for paying for this new health care bill:
Raise taxes on rich people.
It’s really quite simple. From the end of World War 2 until the Reagan years, we taxed the shit out of rich people, and it worked out extremely well. What few deficits we had were small, the employment rate was impressive, and the average American savings rate was actually respectable.
Even with a generous tax hike, wealthy individuals still would be paying far, far, far, less in income taxes in America than in the rest of the developed world.
If you call this class warfare, that’s because you’re either stupid or rich. If you’re not obscenely wealthy, please turn off your computer and go enroll in a remedial history course.
To my left-leaning, Obama voting, change and hope touting friends: don’t say I didn’t tell you so.
While Tehran is burning and the biggest political uprising in the Middle East in thirty years is going on, Neil Cavuto is whining about President Obama not appearing on his show.
Maybe it’s not such a terrible thing that the western media has been banned from reporting inside Iran. Of course it’s unfortunate for the protesters who will have to rely on social media (for fuck’s sake Twitter, get your shit together) to report the news. But at least they won’t be subjected to gross distortions and nauseating round-table discussions from the 3 headed monster.
Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN all deserve lambasting for their pitiful, soundbite style coverage of what’s going on in Iran. This is the most newsworthy event in the region since shock and awe, with reverberations that will be felt all over the world, but you stand a better chance of winning the lottery than finding any in-depth coverage on the 24-hour news networks here in America.
The story of the stolen election is important enough itself. But if you think about the possibilities and consequences, the story becomes absolutely critical. If Ahmadinejad stays in power, especially illegitimately, war with Israel is pretty much a foregone conclusion. What slim chances there might have been of new dialogue between the U.S. and the Iranians will suffocate for at least another four years.
No man is an island. The election results in Iran will impact each and every one of us in profound ways, but the sniveling, loathsome, rotten, disgusting fucking fellators working in the mainstream media are treating it like a recap of a night at the Oscars.
If you’ve ever wondered how George W. Bush managed to steal an election in 2000, there’s your answer. The media simply didn’t give enough of a damn to pursue the story and we fell right in line. The results of that election were felt profoundly throughout the middle east. Perhaps this is a karmic return of the favor, and we certainly deserve whatever’s coming to us.
I’m standing firmly behind the protesters and the moderate candidate, not because I am an Iranian political junky, but because I’m genuinely concerned about what can happen if we allow the democratic process to be hijacked by yet another incompetent right-wing extremist.
A recount has been promised for the people of Iran. Let this be a lesson for every democratic nation. It’s obvious that the elite establishment in the country engineered, if not passively accepted the rigged vote: for whatever reason, Ahmadinejad is the Ayatollah’s man. But the ferocity of the people’s response was unanticipated.
Iranians refuse to accept this bogus election. Keep on fighting- the world is watching. (At least those of us smart enough to care about what happens on the other side of the globe.)
You should throw out your television set. Your life will be enriched in more ways than you can possibly imagine. But before you do, you should watch the entire series of The Wire on DVD, or BlueRay, if you’re into that kind of thing. Personally I don’t see any difference between the two, but that’s why I’m not working for BlueRay’s marketing department.
You probably have had at least two friends tell you at some point that you absolutely MUST watch The Wire: that it’s the greatest, most poignant, most important tv show in history. You were probably annoyed with them and said that you’re too busy trying to keep up with Lost.
Unfortunately, your friends are right, because The Wire is quite simply, the best work of art that the medium has ever produced. If you’re leery because you think it’s just another cop show (as I was) you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s anything but. The Wire is about the city of Baltimore in its entirety; the police, the streets, the government, the blue collar workers, the newspapers, all of it. To put it more succinctly, The Wire is about what it means to be living in a poor city in America today.
But this post is not about The Wire, tremendous as it is.
Nay, this is about the book that served as the inspiration for The Wire; which affords it an immediate hallowed status in contemporary literature. Clockers by Richard Price is quite frankly one of the best books I have ever read in my life.
The story follows two threads: one is Strike aka Ronnie Dunham, a low-level drug dealer living and working in the projects in Dempsey, New Jersey. The other is a homicide detective named Rocco Klein. These two are brought together over the murder of Darryl Adams. Rocco becomes convinced that Strike did the deed, despite the fact that Strike’s brother, Victor has confessed to the crime.
Any writer who knows anything about the craft of fiction learns very quickly that you need to create an emotional connection between your characters and your audience. If I were to teach a class about this aspect of the art, I would use Clockers as its primary text.
We have every reason to despise Strike; he shuffles through half-assed justifications for his dope dealing and jeopardizes anyone and everyone who crosses his path. But because Richard Price paints such a complex portrait of this young man, you find yourself outraged when he is hounded by cops, cheated by other dealers, and shunned by his family.
Mekhi Phifer as Strike
It’s very easy to make an aging homicide cop identifiable. The trick is to not fall into cliches that you see on CSI, NY Undercover, The Shield, or on any of the other three dozen cop shows that cable networks shovel onto your screen every night like so many tons of manure. Like every other cop on TV, Rocco Klein is struggling with family issues, likes to take a drink every now and then, and has a passion for justice bordering on obsession, but Price somehow manages to keep this character refreshing.
Because you care so much about these characters, when they finally face off in an interrogation room, the emotional payoff is enormous.
What’s most amazing about Clockers is the fact that it keeps you engaged despite its length: at over 600 pages it’s easily the longest novel I’ve read that wasn’t part of a class requirement, and I wasn’t bored by a single sentence.
The book inspired Spike Lee to make a film adaptation, David Simon to create the glory that is The Wire, and me to work that much harder on my own fiction.
If you enjoy stories that reflect life as it is rather than junk-food style entertainment, then you owe it to yourself to read Clockers.
I am riting this letter fonetiklee becoz I sinseerlee want you to be able to reed it. Pleez forwird this letter to yer frends n’ relutivs.
A few munths ugo a homeland security report sed that there iz a growing thrett from rite wing extremist grups. At the time, a lot of cunservativs were reel reel mad at it becoz everebodee knows that rite wings reelee luv Americu.
Sinss then, there have been sum shutingz and killingz by rite wing terrorists: in Pitzburg, a man shot three poleese cuz he was scairt that they were gonna take his gunz away. In Kanzas, another gie shot an aborshun doctor in chirch becoz he was killin babeez. Then last week anudder guy shot a securitee gard at the holocost museum becoz he was hoping for a return to the grate areean empire.
These gize were probly mad cuz they think the blax and the gaze in the wite howss are gonna go and change evereething.
I kin understand you being scairt by all the changes and the soshulizm stuff you’ve been heering about in them e-mail chains. But allow me to ashir you that the blax and the gaze in the wite howss don’t care if you have got lotsa gunz. The tall black gie who cheeted John Mccain and that perrtty ladee from Alaska sed that he ain’t gonna repeel the secund ummendmunt no matter wutz.
Nobodeez gunna take ure gunz away and make yer kids into sochulist gaze or go on dates with the blax. So you kin just relax and put yer gunz away, or better yet, uze em on yerselvs.
The stolen election in Iran has led to massive civil unrest and rioting in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities. Foreign journalists are being told to leave the country, reformist candidates have been placed under house arrest, and police squads are beating non-violent protesters.
So far the response from the White House has been tepid and disappointing. Vice President Biden expressed that he had “doubts” about the legitimacy of the election.
The Obama administration cannot afford to sit this one out and hide behind non-confrontational language. It’s understandable that we don’t want to be perceived as meddling in Iranian affairs, but this is too important to remain neutral on.
I believe that the United States should not recognize the Presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This represents a perfect opportunity for the west to show that we support the ordinary citizens of Iran, who want reform and prosperity for their country rather than four more years of mindless, reckless saber-rattling and failed domestic policies.
The real power in Iran rests with the Ayatollah, but we cannot allow an illegitimate President to sit. I only wish that we had shown as much courage to challenge the American election results in 2000 as the Iranians are showing now.
The people of Iran are ready to rise up and cast off the hardliners who have done so much to damage their country. They need the support of the United States and our allies. If we recognize Ahmadinejad as President, we are betraying democracy and run the risk of encouraging the outbreak of yet another war in the middle east.
The controversy over Iran’s nuclear program will not go away but the presence of this volatile leader threatens to bring Israel and Iran to the brink of war.
President Obama spoke recently in Cairo about a new beginning between the US and Islam. It was a very moving, eloquent speech that demonstrated a sincere to desire for cooperation and peace. This illegitimate election in Iran is a chance for him to prove that he means what he says.
Only a crazy person would actually believe that the hard-line, far-right extremist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the Iranian presidential election legitimately.
The people of Iran are not taking this lying down. Following the extremely controversial election results, the people have taken to the streets to protest the obviously corrupted final vote, which states that the nutjob won with a plurality of over 60 percent of the popular vote.
This is perhaps the most important electoral protest in the 21st century thus far. If the far right wing is allowed to remain in power in Iran, it will have disastrous consequences for the rest of the region and the world.
Both Israel and Europe have seen their most recent elections swing to right-wing parties. If the most volatile and powerful state in the middle east stays in the hands of the extreme conservative block, then war will become a sad inevitability.
I am not a leftist extremist by any stretch of the imagination. But if far right wing parties are allowed to flourish in the middle east, Israel, and Europe, then the chances of avoiding a catastrophic third world war are almost slim to none.
If you have any interest in maintaining the viability of the human race and the continuation of makind’s history, I strongly suggest that you hope and pray for the official results in Iran to be overturned.
I have tried to turn away from politics as much as possible, but ignoring these latest turns in the news would be criminally negligible.
Both Benjamin Natenyahu and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s credibility rest on the idea that war between Israel and Iran is inevitable.
If both of these war-mongering psychopaths are allowed to hold legitimate office in their respective countries, then we will all be soon drawn into a confrontation of unprecedented proportions.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama speculated that mankind was about to enter the final phase of human history; one where democracy and neoliberalism reigned supreme and we are all entered into a utopian, humanitarian future.
In a way, he could not have been more wrong. But given the availability of nuclear weapons in today’s political climate and the catastrophic meltdown of Bretton Woods-style capitalism, he may not have been so wrong after all. If far-right wing governments in Israel and Iran are able to flourish, we will indeed be seeing the end of history much sooner than any of us could have possibly imagined.
The latest chapter in baseball’s ongoing PED saga unfolded this week when Raul Ibanez of the Phillies completely flipped out on a blogger who insinuated that he might be doing performance enhancing drugs.
Since the story broke there’s been a tit-for-tat in the Philadelphia media as well as the online sports world. The much condensed version of it is this:
Ibanez is leading the National League in ribbies, hitting .327, and having a career year at 37 years old.
If this sounds suspicious, that’s because it is.
Ibanez has always been a steady, if over-looked power hitter. He usually hits 20-30 home runs a year and habitually knocks in over 100 runs. But the numbers this season are a real anomaly, if for no other reason but his age. Very, very, very few major league stars get better once they’ve had thirty-five candles on their birthday cakes. (Hopefully at their age they still don’t have that kind of birthday party, but that’s another story.)
Anyway, all of these incredible numbers have prompted some speculation, mainly from sportswriters and fantasy baseball fanatics who have far too much time on their hands. Seriously, check out the length of the original article by Jerod Morris.
Now I’m certainly in no position to tell anybody to get a real job but that was just absurd. After the 3rd graph I took a nap, then went out to Taco Bell, came back, read War and Peace, and then tried to finish reading the post but I fell asleep again. And I LIKE baseball.
So after hearing about the blog, Raul Ibanez called this guy a 42 year old who lives in his mom’s basement and then said he was willing to take any kind of drug test imaginable to prove he’s clean. Also, he said he would put up all of the money he’s ever earned playing baseball if he failed any of the tests. He’s probably clean, but doesn’t that sound just a little bit too much like a jock offering to go down on Judi Dench just to prove he’s not gay?
The point is, Ibanez and the blogger both need to get a life and Commissioner Sealig needs to do something to convince the fans that his sport is still legitimate because right now there’s no reason why we should take any ballplayer at their word.
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Posted by Tim Weaver 
Posted by Tim Weaver 
Posted by Tim Weaver 
