Albany, NY -- Wag the Dog Redux
In his column this week, Frank Rich explains the importance of Cindy Sheehan's campaign and gives us a sneak preview of the Bush administration's Iraq War marketing efforts: "The marketing campaign will crescendo in two weeks, on the anniversary of 9/11, when a Defense Department "Freedom Walk" will trek from the site of the Pentagon attack through Arlington National Cemetery to a country music concert on the Mall. There the false linkage of Iraq to 9/11 will be hammered in once more, this time with a beat: Clint Black will sing 'I Raq and Roll,' a ditty whose lyrics focus on Saddam, not the Islamic radicals who actually attacked America. Lest any propaganda opportunity be missed, Arlington's gravestones are being branded with the Pentagon's slogans for military campaigns, like Operation Iraqi Freedom, The Associated Press reported last week - a historic first. If only the administration had thought of doing the same on the fallen's coffins, it might have allowed photographs." Simply Orwellian, no?
As Iraq's constitutional process burns, our fiddling Emperor's approval rating slips again.
I am really enjoying my new Ovation LX roundback acoustic-electric. Here's a podcast of my first recording, a cover of Nirvana's All Apologies. I just learned this one this weekend.
Labels: George Bush, Iraq, Music
Albany, NY -- Introducing Google Earth
As promised, three segments from last night's Daily Show:
Headlines -- He Said, Sheehan Said
MC Dubya (AMAZING!)
Christopher Hitchens Interview
Enjoy!
The UK's Telegraph says that Iraq is melting down before our eyes. Bush tried to break the constitutional impasse today with a call to a top Iraqi official. White House shill Trent Duffy said, "It reflects ... that this is an Iraqi process and that the United States is here to help them." I don't get it. Doesn't that reflect a lack of a process if they're not getting anywhere at this point?
Meanwhile, Cindy Sheehan shows that, she, too, is nuts... "I'm just so honored that the universe chose me to be the spark that has set off a raging inferno." Substitute "God" for "universe," and those words could've easily been uttered by the President. I guess they're fit archnemeses.
Unsurprisingly, Bush's man John Bolton is wreaking havoc over at the United Nations. He apparently wants to make 750 changes to its reorganization plan, including removing language instituting the standards pushed by Bono and his boys at Live-8 in July. It's going to make billions of rock fans really pissed off!
Bill Weld is preparing to oppose Eliot Spitzer in NY's 2006 gubernatorial race... I know he's a skilled politician, but does he really think he stands a chance against Spitzer? This former Weld staffer does.
If Google Earth is godly, A9 Maps (by Amazon) resides somewhere near Mount Olympus. It may not have the whole world mapped, but it has street level imagery of all 20 or so cities in its collection. Ever wondered what Fargo looks like up close and personal?
On an impulse, I picked up another new guitar today. Always needed a roundback acoustic-electric.
Oh, and a serious thumbs up to whole wheat pasta.
Labels: 2006 Election, Helpful Stuff, Politics
Albany, NY -- MC Dubya
As mentioned in the last post, the Daily Show was great last night. At the beginning of the episode, Jon did a long piece on Bush's evasion of Cindy Sheehan, reporters, and reality (and did his trademark Bush snicker), which culminated in a rap video montage of "M.C. Dubya"'s repetitive talking points. I couldn't do it justice in text; you'll have to see it. If the Daily Show posts the video tomorrow, I'll put up a link.
The third segment was an interview with Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens. If you're not familiar, he's a British chap who considered himself a liberal for several years, and suddenly became a rabid neocon sometime in the last ten years. He now writes column after column bashing liberals, including a recent one which aimed to portray Cindy Sheehan as an anti-Israel nutjob. According to this blog post, he owes Cindy an apology. Anyway, Jon Stewart ripped Chris a new asshole, giving him a temporary comeuppance. Do catch this episode tomorrow in reruns if you didn't see it tonight.
My OC conservative compadre Tenchusatsu from Silicon Investor got a kick out of this photo he took on the freeways of Southern California. He is right; there is potentially a certain degree of hypocrisy in being a liberal who drives a large SUV; however, if someone needs an SUV (has a large family or a lot of cargo), then there's nothing wrong with that. I have a problem when someone who could do just fine driving a small car that gets 40 MPG and opts for the 15 MPG SUV. But, of course, we all look for the hypocrisy in the other side, and to an extent, we're all often hypocrites ourselves. Good stuff, Ten -- great to see someone else trying to master the art of one-handed photography at 80 MPH!
Labels: George Bush, Politics, TV
Albany, NY -- Watch the Daily Show!
Listen to me and watch the rerun of tonight's Daily Show on Comedy Central at 1 AM EST... you'll thank me later.Labels: Humor
Albany NY -- God: Thou Shalt Not Skeet
Really funny work-related coincidence... this week on Stephen Colbert's latest installment of This Week in God on the Daily Show, Stephen Colbert did a segment on how
three different religions punish the "sin" of masturbation. This afternoon, I was poking through
MyJewishLearning.com's site statistics for July, and found that our 13th most popular page was an article by Rabbi Elliot Dorff entitled, "
Masturbation: A Touchy Subject." So, for the Jewish view on the topic, check out that article. For three other viewpoints, check out the Colbert piece.
Labels: Humor, Judaism, Religion
Albany, NY -- New Blackberry
I finally got my new Blackberry 7250 set up yesterday, after weeks of wrangling with Verizon Wireless. Of course, when I received it and opened the box on Tuesday night, it wouldn't let me activate it and when I called tech support they said they couldn't help me because I was on a corporate/government account and it was after 5 PM. Hmmm... where have I heard that one before? I still can't believe that Verizon had the 7750 18 months ago, which was a pretty good model, and replaced it with the 7250, which, as you can discern from the model number, isn't really better and probably worse than the old one. The pluses? Bluetooth (it's cool to be talking on your headset three rooms away from your phone) and a faster processor. The minuses? Smaller screen, no cradle.
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, will be speaking next month at a gathering of American Jewish community leaders. That's big news, and I'd figure it to be a possible leap forward for Jewish-Muslim relations.
In its entry today, the great blog Abacaxi Mamao highlights a New Yorker article on the U.S. health care system. The short of it: "The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance." Our health care system is among the worst in the industrialized world in many important categories, such as life expectancy and infant mortality. Not only is it the most expensive, but if you take all of the private expenses off the top, the amount our government pays per capita is higher than what their governments pay per capita, and rising fast. Yet people are still uninsured here!
Labels: Health Care, Islam, Judaism, Politics
Albany, NY -- Robertson: Chavez Must Die
Pat Robertson did in fact indicate that the reason he wants to see Hugo Chavez assassinated is because of Venezuela's oil. Said Robertson, "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop." Of course, he "clarified" his statements today, saying that he didn't mean that Chavez should be assassinated, but, see above! What was he thinking? The Christian Science Monitor shares its thoughts on the subject.Finally, some reinforcements in Iraq, but of course the gesture seems half-assed. We've been hearing all along that we have only about half the troops we need there, so we add another 1%? Does this make any sense? If there aren't enough troops there, we just endanger the lives of all those who are involved. Cindy Sheehan speaks out on Huffington Post today about her return to Crawford to see the President after her mom's stroke. William Rivers Pitt compares the way Bush is handling the situation to Nixon's behavior during Vietnam and concludes that it's worse. Isn't that the second time in the last two weeks someone's written an article on this topic (and I've posted it)?Labels: Iraq, Politics
Albany, NY -- Flying Spaghetti Monster Rapture
Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four isolated settlements in the West Bank concluded today, with nearly no violence. However, many settlers believe that they'll be back there someday.
Televangelist and lover of all men Pat Robertson called openly today for the assassination of Venezuela's elected president Hugo Chavez. The NYTimes notes that Robertson is being "pilloried" for his comments, and Newsday has a reaction from Chavez himself. I'd heard from a friend at the gym that he'd heard that Robertson had specifically referred to a desire to overtake Venezuela's oil fields as the motivation for his comments, but can't confirm that to be the case.
From combjelly on Silicon Investor: "Part of it is historical, the US has rarely behaved decently in Central and South America. But there is some more recent stuff. Venezuela, like so many third world countries, had gotten themselves into a bad economic situation and turned to the IMF for help. The IMF, per usual, imposed strict austerity measures. Note, the IMF is usually right with their measures. But they aren't going to be popular. Chavez's predecessor, Perez, fully supported the measures, or at least didn't openly oppose them. Plus, he was encouraging ties between the US and Venezuela, I am sure the Venezuelans saw it as sucking up. So the US got closely identified with the ruling regime. including the corruption, nepotism, exploitation of the poor and all of the things that are so common in that part of the world. Any way, Chavez led a coup attempt, failed, got arrested and then later pardoned. He then started a party and was elected in 1998. He then made a lot of sweeping changes, including changing the way their government operates. This didn't sit well with the previous power structure, and possibly even rightly so(frankly I never was interested to dig up all the details). Suffice it to say that in 2002 there was a coup attempt against Chavez, the trigger being his talk about nationalizing the oil industry. Looking at the Wikipedia, Chavez actually had negotiated stepping down, but the agreement was violated. So he wound up in jail. In a fit of stupidity, the Bush administration fell all over themselves to hail the toppling of Chavez and welcome the new leaders. However, like often happens when a coup is attempted of a popular leader, the lower ranks in the military mounted a counter-coup and Chavez was back in. It was strongly rumored that it was the wealthy and the techno-elite that were responsible for the coup and the US backed them in their coup attempt, financially and otherwise. True or false, it certainly could look that way. And Chavez encouraged that interpretation.
"I personally don't know enough about Venezuela to have much of an opinion about exactly what happened and is going on. I do know that we did exactly the wrong thing in supporting the coup. It gave credibility to the rumors because we have, in fact, done things like that in Central and South America. So even if we were completely innocent, it is a reasonable suspicion that we weren't. So now Chavez is stronger than ever and has had his image burnished in the eyes of the average Venezuelan."
Bush took a moment out of his five week vacation at his palace at Versailles, ahem, I mean, the Crawford ranch, to address Cindy Sheehan's concerns to reporters. Now, how would pulling out of Iraq "weaken the United States?" Hasn't the frittering away of $200 billion from the Treasury, not to mention nearly 2,000 American lives, done much more to harm us than pulling out could ever do?
Also at the ranch, Lance Armstrong, who harbors political ambitions himself, is cozying up to Dubya despite opposition to the war.
And a new religion wants to have its creation story taught in Kansas... Just remember, whenever you have an important life decision to make, think to yourself, "What Would the Flying Spaghetti Monster Do?"
Labels: Iraq, Politics, Religion
Albany, NY -- Cindy in the Spotlight
Quick post tonight; I'm in the thick of it at work.Cindy gets just a bit more attention.... hopefully it will help more disasters like this one from happening. Meanwhile, some other protesters unfriendly to her cause have been amassing as well. Don't they realize that they're just promoting the death of our soldiers?
Paul Shirley, the former Phoenix Sun benchwarmer/blogger, has resurfaced on Sports Guy's blog. He's one of the funniest sports personalities I've ever read, and certainly has a second career ready-made when he retires.
Labels: Iraq, Sports
Albany, NY -- Bankruptcy Bill
The LA Times has a compelling story
concerning people who aren't getting disability payments when they're supposed to. Not surprisingly, the laws are increasingly being changed to favor the insurance companies over real, live people. And those real, live people are
now declaring bankruptcy in record numbers. A big problem we face in our country is that it's too easy for the average Joe to enter into debt. I receive several envelopes weekly from Wilmington, in the home state of Joe Biden (D-MBNA). Everyone appears to be offering credit these days. The house of cards is going to come crashing down when interest rates rise again. And, if it weren't for our convoluted semi-private medical system, people wouldn't have these medical debts, which account for half of bankrupcies in this country. According to this article,
health care costs are making it difficult for people to start small businesses.
The right-wing press is
all over Cindy Sheehan, but according to Frank Rich
is failing miserably. Maybe Ms. Sheehan should've been Kerry's campaign manager?
Labels: Democratic Party, Economy
Albany, NY -- Gaza Evacuation
I went to Matt and Molly's wedding last night, and ended up having a great time. I didn't bring my camera, but a former classmate did and photos will hopefully be forthcoming. After the reception, I went to a party held by a friend of a friend, where I met the boyfriend of someone with whom I used to go to school. He was an eight-year veteran of the Marines who had served a term in Iraq, and I asked his take on the war. He said that even though he didn't think the administration was handling the war well, but he thought that after September 11th, we had to go into either Iran, Iraq, or Syria to make a point to the Muslims. I don't know about you, but I don't like my country going to war to "make a point."
Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said the V-word today on ABC's "This Week."Following the story earlier this week about the Taliban regrouping, Afghanistan is starting to creep towards being Iraq, circa mid-2004.
It's good to know that in the midst of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and lots of other bad stuff we don't yet know about, that there are still groups of Americans who don't like the whole torture thing.
The Gaza evacuation is almost complete, according to the LA Times, and protests in the West Bank are heating up. Baruch Kimmerling of Haaretz believes that the pullout is all a big show, and I happen to agree with him, though let's see if we get some more settlement dismantling activity in the West Bank over the next few months. And, of course, the good people over at Arutz Sheva think that Israel is going to get Gaza back someday.
Labels: Iraq, Israel
