Frankly, here is my latest fantasy. Be it the state governor, a precinct president, local fisherman or resident: President Obama is due to visit Louisiana Friday, May 28th, and I would appreciate one of these citizens clipping my president in the jaw.
It’s called being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mr. President.
Welcome to the responsibility you ran to own.
This AM on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, Chuck Todd asked both GOP primary candidates from Kentucky for the Senate seat if they believe the Deepwater-Horizon event was an accident or man-made. If I Google 60 Minutes+Deepwater Horizon, I get CBS sites and a few blogs. Excuse me, MSM, but this isn’t enough for you? This kind of reporting cemented 60 Minutes’ reputation for decades. Its dismissal by the main-stream media now cements theirs. Wake up, people.
Here’s the easy recipe: Ingredients: 2 oz. ready prepared shark’s fin, soak in cold water for an hour and drain
Directions:
Now to obtain that prepared shark’s fin, you will need a fisher’s boat fat with gear and bait (seal parts probably do), some robust body strength to bring the shark on board, machete those fins off and shove the torso back into the water before the shark can render the weapons in its mandible against you. This, as opposed to the hours of potboil tenderizing that must occur once you’re back onshore, must happen very swiftly. Do not linger any look upon this massive force that you have just caught on a line, and do not pause even a second beyond your gastronomical massacre. Push it, kick it, rid of it…back to the waters, useless save for its bleeding a new trail predators require. You can see from the recipe that you only need the fins. A delicacy in disguise.
Like Man.
This is why there will be no Rapture.
And I Thank God for that every day.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/03/the-party-of-cruelty.html
If only I could convince Ron Paul to agree…
Recently, boy wonder Ezra Klein, Washington insider blogginhead employed by the Washington Post Company, announced to his readers that he had accepted another assignment just down the hall to write a biweekly column for Newsweek. He’s, like, 25 years old? Maybe once a week he has an ‘Open Chat’ where we cyberclods can question The Oz and his posts. Honestly, this young man is wonderfully informed, and, in senior-speak, pretty impressed with himself. So should he be. But he left my question out of this online conversation; I asked what was the point in reading his “liberal” write if The Washington Post newspaper had just hired Marc Thiessen, former Bush administration speechwriter and staunch defender of waterboarding interrogation. Of course, Newsweek has George Will, who will probably be bouncing off young Ezra the way he did the phenomenal Anna Quindlen. It’s not that I don’t get the game: The New York Times has Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne and The Times also has David Brooks and (here I lose my ability to swallow) William Kristol. I’m fairly sure George Will is comfortable with my calling him conservative; Ezra came from The American Prospect, a progressive journal that hires progressives. Anna voted for Hillary, Paul and E.J. were pretty excited about Obama, while Brooks and Kristol were probably wishing Cheney had held the Republican ticket instead of McCain, but wasn’t Palin a pretty though?
I had not heard of Thiessen back then; he’s out front now and ugly, condemning Obama for endangering our lives with his anti-torture stance. Order the book on Amazon.
So…what Fox News calls “fair and balanced” is practiced with great discipline by every news outlet except Fox. Even liberal Combes abandoned the hawk Hannity a few years back. My point to Ezra Klein was that these are terrible times that require commitments to decisions we make about policy and performance and priority (on which he daily insists, but fails to get, from a washrag of a Congress) and yet he will submit his views into a receptacle that is accepting his opponent’s argument simultaneously. Just blend and serve.
What we get out here is hash. Not jobs, not health care, not conservation, not financial reform, not infrastructure fix. Republicans refute even when Democrats are dawdling, and then one of each gets a Sunday seat on Meet the Press. To debate about the debate. Soon enough print snatches up the talking points and you don’t have to pack The New York Times in your bag with The New York Post because the Times has it all. But I don’t want it all, and this reality-TV numbed electorate doesn’t need it.
What Ezra and his troupe have forgotten is that back in much of the last administration we didn’t have it all. The April 25, 2007 segment of Bill Moyers’ Journal entitled Buying the War shows how mostly all voices coming from the media, heard, seen, or Brailled was forming the posse for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, WMD and the great Iraq invasion. Two known skeptics? Knight-Ridder newspapers, which had no outlet in Washington or New York and Phil Donahue, on MSNBC, who was fired. Yes, September 11th was a terrible day, 2001 was a terrible year but what I find predicted now is worse. More than one economist warns of additional dires in the financial markets (WTF is a “financial market” anyway? Is the produce local?), one I listened to professed the Federal government will default on its loans. 1 in 6 Americans is already using Food Stamps. Ice sheets that supply spring waters are disappointing outstretched cupped hands. (I’m sorry, but who is rebuilding Haiti?) Commercial loans will default en masse this year, according to Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor chosen to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a congressional implant facing dilation and curretage because of…you guessed it… disagreement.
The Capital’s snows will melt long before the pundits have ceased argument over climate change, and droughts will return. And the media will continue to describe, detail and diagram the view from opposite banks of a threatened river. You can’t claim the ratings on cable news if you don’t have political strategists (this is a job title Headhunters has?) shouting at eachother. Even the PBS Newshour needs Mark Shields to talk off what David Brooks just said so that the problem addressed becomes no more than the can to be kicked down the road. The government fails to act and members of the press give cover with diatribes against eachother. They solve nothing.
After lessons from my high tech son-in-law, I tweeted that what the world needs now is a benevolent dictator, chosen by the United Nations. Our uncontrolled numbers are spilling over borders anyway, so why do we need nation-states? Shame on me: I just fetched another topic for argument. If I were an entity that mattered to Ezra, he would be right up front with his powerful prose, too soon diluted by Mr. Brooks. This country did invade Iraq in 2003. And the man who delivered the State of the Union was reelected in 2004, even though we knew the WMD thing wasn’t going to crystallize and the war was being enveloped in a fog deserts don’t know. I think some lips on some journalists were starting to quiver, but they pretty much held fast, probably because of 9/11. (Dear Jon Stewart, Maybe that’s why nothing has been built on Ground Zero.) Like I said, it was 2007 when Moyers did his report, and that same year Frontline edged in with a 4-hour study on the failure of the press. Editors’ confessions on screen: it’s better than civil service adulterers. But instead of feeling the pinch and correcting her posture, the press jumped on the pendulum, and swung to the other extreme. The new instructions were question everything, as if Creationism isn’t enough of a struggle for a rational mind.
The press, at least in America as I have been taught, is supposed to be a check on government. When my mother was alive and active in the public concern, it was. My memory of Watergate and her enthusiasm seems like an old wet dream (which I can revisit now thanks to Wildwood Enterprises). Two guys got an inkling mixed with small but nagging facts, jealous competitors scurried to their sources, and a crime was revealed and ended. Revealed and ended. Unfortunately what I also know is that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would today throw this post in the trash because it suggests the abandonment of the dialectic when what I want Woodward and Bernstein to see is that the dialectic was sacrificed long ago. The dialectic, by definition, struggles until it finds the truth. All the press wants now is any props that will sustain the doubt.
Probably a safe bet that the West Wing is not as well informed as I am on the raging partisanship defining Washington. Poor slobs, trying to instigate crucial legislation when David Gregory just confirmed, “So, Senator, you’re saying that the votes just aren’t there for this.” And here’s a personal favorite: a poll plops on the screen showing that a majority of the American people support the inclusion of a public option in a health care bill, break for commercial, return and the viewer finds himself counting the microphones that half-moon Senator Mitch McConnell as he reiterates the Republican opposition to any health care legislation because the people don’t want it. Confused? That’s the goal. Fair and balanced is a neutering machine. And the latest intelligent offerings of young men like Ezra Klein are on the chopping block of “the political roundtable” as you read this.
Stumbled upon this from a site (Internet incredeeble) and it reminded me of my initial impression when I sat through The Godfather in San Diego back in 1972. After all the film tinting, nostalgic set decoration, horse head and impressive acting, I wondered if the cat laying on his lap in the opening sequence, was indeed, his.
Cats don’t like laying on their backs unless they are comfortable, very comfortable, with their surroundings. This cat’s surrounding was Brando’s lap: he didn’t seem to care about else. And we are talking cameras, blinding lamplights, techs mulling around and supporting actors in the scene pushing out their lines. I decided then and there that he wasn’t sedated because he responded so quickly to Brando’s arm and hand moving over his space: his paws lurched up for the grab of the prey, in a moment of play.
Either this cat belonged to him or he belonged to this, and therefore all, cats. People at the ceremony booed and hissed when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor that following year and sent to the stage a squaw to protest the violation of Native American rights. But I was pleased. For me, the circle was complete.
Men who choose to move and groove among cats are extraordinary men.
I know this one was.
CNN Poll: Do you think Barack Obama deserves to be reelected or not?
Yes, deserves to be reelected 44% No, does not deserve to be 52%
Let’s play fair. If CNN had done a poll in February 2002, Bush would have scored very high having just recently been the victim of 9/11; in 2005, there would have been no poll because of term limits.
So…imagine. What if George Bush had had to serve as president through 2009? This exercise is just one step in many towards an educated electorate.
Once again, the best political screenwriter alive, Aaron Sorkin, delivers in The American President-
President Andrew Shepherd breaking into White House Press Conference:
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage, advocating at the tope of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of this country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, celebrate that, defend that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.
We have serious problems to solve and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”
Art preceding life. Andrew Shepherd becomes Barack Obama, Bob Rumson morphs into Sarah Palin.
The internet, I’ve discovered, has everything. And I am going to start finding it now. I am not about to let this president be smothered by nonsense.
Game on, girlfriend.
“How’s that hope-y change-y stuff workin’ out for ya?”
Really, Ms. Palin?
In all actuality I guess, about as well as that dopey mangy persona is working out for you…there.
Here you go, Washington. It’s pretty simple.
