oh. my. god.
Yeah, she's fricken lost it. It's over.
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Thursday, May 22, 2008
when to say when
Seriously, have the Clintons lost it? Mentally, that is. Because she's isn't going to win the nomination. I mean, some may have accused me of drinking too much of the Obama kool-aid, but Hillary is swigging some stuff that would make Snoop Dogg insist she back up off it. Perhaps she took some of the those shot-taking photo ops a bit too much to heart.
Look, at this point I can understand wanting to see it through to the end and make a good show for your supporters but the stuff she's drumming up and the crazy old white women out there lapping it up isn't doing any good for her, her legacy or her historic bid for president. And I can understand the passions running high for the candidate for whom you hoped, but the pathetic way in which she's claiming she could still win (if you throw out arithmetic and logic) has to make one wonder was she truly as noble a candidate one would have thought? It's one thing to go out with your head held high and gracious to a worthy opponent, it's another to blame everything and everyone else but yourself and claim the game was rigged. Being a sore loser is one thing, but I think she's beginning to veer off into some petty nastiness from which there is no respectable return.
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Monday, May 19, 2008
like whoa
So how's that for transcendent... Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) just announced his support for Obama. I wonder if Byrd is still trying to make amends.
Oh and Warren Buffet announced his support for Obama as well. Sweet.
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Thursday, May 15, 2008
the dumb are just dumb.
And we'd all really be better off if they'd just go somewhere else. Just how stupid can George W. Bush get? I mean really. How long must we suffer at the hands of the inept. It has to stop before it's too late. I think Keith Olbermann has once again captured my "bitterness". Watch. Add on top of that Bush's comments from yesterday, claiming Obama would "appease the terrorists" it's really hard to not wish ill will towards such an incompetent "leader".
In other news... I hit $60 to fill up the car yesterday. Egads. Never mind saving or paying off debt with my "stimulus" check.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
money, but not really
So I got my "economic stimulus package" refund check the other day. Yep, the full six hundred for a single filer. Actually, I was rather surprised considering my income, but then I remember I was out of work for a quarter which reduced my gross adjusted income.
At any rate, it is dumb that I’ve received this refund check (but no you can't have it). What was designed to get me to go out and spend, spend, spend will instead go directly to savings and paying off debt. And it’s what the rest of America should consider doing when they get their checks. We’ve been told that spending our way out of our economic malaise will be good for us. Um… say what? Do you give a shop-a-holic even more credit to get out of debt? NO. This country, much like it’s government, needs to learn that it can’t keep cashing checks its body can’t cash (a little Top Gun for you there). What’s more retarded is that the government borrowed this money to give to you (whether in the form of selling bonds to foreign investors or mortgaging future taxation) so you can go out and prop up an ailing economy which would better served if people actually had jobs and pay raises instead of political gimmicks.
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
"beware the terrible simplifiers"
On this day I can't help but feel dismayed at the possible outcome in the Democratic Presidential race, but even more so at the conditions that surround the election. Once again simpleton thinking and non-vital issues dominate an important election. What once held the promise of idealistic yet real change in politics has devolved into pettiness and divisiveness that would make Mr. Rove oh so proud. I’m sorry but if this is what the “blue-collar” voters need to decide who would be best to run the country, frankly in my opinion, they should abstain. Or anyone for that matter that responds to this type of politicking and thinks it’s a good way to make choices. But since the primary and possible election still hinges on those voters, they are still coveted. I’m so tired of the poor reasoning, uneducated and ill-informed making the choices on how things should be run. Please, I hope this ends soon.
Oh and here’s an essay from Bill Moyers on the issue of Reverend Wright. He eloquently sums up the opinion I’ve been harboring ever since the story broke. I’ve listened to the sermon that is oft played in distorted soundbites, the interview with Moyers and the National Press Club conference in their entirety. And nothing he’s said has even come close to being racist, unpatriotic or lunatic ranting as many have tried to label him (and then to try to force such a view on Obama due to their relationship… well that’s a whole other disappointed rant). Much of what he has said is, in fact, true. There are points that I can’t agree with, the most glaring is the idea of the government promulgating AIDS and drugs to destroy the Black community. But then again when you come from an era when the government did misinform black men with syphilis and watch them die over the course of forty years for scientific research, it’s hard not to have that sort of mentality especially when you see a disproportionate number of Blacks being ravaged by disease and addiction. But that still doesn’t make it true. What was true however was the criticism leveled by Wright against America and its history and continued course. Beloved as this country is, it is not without its own history of violence and deplorable acts which can not be ignored or slighted. And if it’s been you or your history that’s been on the receiving end of that violence, you tend to have a different perspective on things.
In evaluating what Wright has said that had been thrust into the public domain and trying to reconcile that with the vilification of him (mostly, if not entirely, by white commentators and opinion) it reinforces the notion that, at the very least, latent racism still exists among white America. Anyway, like I said, Mr. Moyers has put it in a much more fluent way. Here’s the transcript of that essay:
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, "Who's telling the truth over there?" "Everyone," he said. "Everyone sees what's happening through the lens of their own experience." That's how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: "Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical," one viewer wrote. A "nut case," said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.
Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.
But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, "We the people." Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.
That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle ? forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the "chickens come home to roost" remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright's absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You'll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.
But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.
Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.
Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.
Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".
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Sunday, May 04, 2008
that's not right...
Okay, not be insensitive or anything but we really shouldn't look at this as more than a coincidence right...
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - The filly Eight Belles finished second behind favorite Big Brown in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, then collapsed with two broken front ankles and was euthanized after crossing the wire.I mean, what are the chances? Senator Clinton picks the only girl in the race to win and well... read the wire again.
It'd be a heck of an omen... if one were to believe in such things.
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Thursday, May 01, 2008
happy happy joy joy
Hey! Great news this morning! Got a call from Tim that the newest addition to the family was born healthy and happy yesterday. So let’s all welcome Nathan to the world! Congrats Debbie and Tim! Can’t wait to meet him and hang out with Tyler. As always, I wish you guys the best!
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