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The Empowered Entrepreneur Mastering the art of a thriving business An inspiring business book for our time, by Elizabeth Cairns The way we do business is changing Entrepreneurs are recognising that there is a more enlightened way to work. One that inspires and sustains them and enables their business to truly thrive. The Empowered Entrepreneur sets you firmly on the path to a thriving business. Through a powerful process, based on decades of experience, Elizabeth Cairns takes you on an inspiring and emancipating journey of professional mastery. You will explore the many facets of running a successful business in a way that helps you put your talents, passion, vitality and creativity at the heart of everything you do. By showing you how to make congruent, confident decisions for your work, curate your workload, manage your process, say no with grace and much more besides, this book will help you take back the power in your life and the control of your business. Supporting you to overcome procrastination, battle overwhelm, create space and manage your time are just some of the ways this book liberates you from what’s getting in your way, and shows you how to work with greater efficiency, and ease. This is business as it’s meant to be; inspired, creative, passionate, powerful and purposeful. Empowered. A dream team of creatives Writing The Empowered Entrepreneur was the easy part, but if I wanted it to be worthy of my discerning and style conscious audience I knew I needed to draft in the dream team to bring it to life. First in that team was Fiona Humberstone, The Brand Stylist, the only person I could imagine doing the creative direction justice. Her incredible vision, thorough understanding of my brand, and our shared love of inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs were just a few of the things that made Fiona as my choice of book designer and stylist a total no brainer. Fiona has done incredible work on pulling together the creative direction for the book and executing it into something beautiful and worthy of any entrepreneurial coffee table. I’m looking forward to sharing more about our process over on the blog. For the book to be the inspiring feast for the senses Fiona and I hoped it would be, we knew it needed to feature an abundance of beautiful photography. We knew it was important to invest in professional photography and a styled shoot, directed by Fiona and shot by the lovely Cathy Pyle gave us some stunning images to weave into the design. Cathy is so lovely to work with and brings a quiet calm both with her presence and her beautiful work. A cover image to step into Katie Spicer so kindly stepped out of maternity leave for us to shoot the cover and work her photographic mojo. With Fiona working her styling magic again, I’m so thrilled with what Katie has captured. We were delighted and grateful to include more of her beautiful work within the book too. Weaver of light and photographic magic Cecelina Tornberg creates beautiful wedding and event photography and is a utter joy to work with. I’m definitely happier behind the camera than in front of it, but Cecelina instantly puts me at ease and has an incredible eye for light and form. I was delighted when Fiona surprised me by including in the book some of the shots Cecelina had taken of me at The Brand Stylist Retreat in May. I’m so grateful to Cecelina for allowing her work to be part of this book. Annie Spratt - kindred spirit and wild adventurer I feel so lucky to know so many amazing photographers whose images I admire. There is one who’s work has captivated me for a long time and who’s aesthetic I can spot at 50 paces, her style is so distinctive. There’s something about the work of Annie Spratt that speaks to the wild woman in me and captures the essence of a place like no other. I am so grateful to be able to call Annie my friend and humbled to have her awesome work in my book. Beautiful Botanical Illustrations Gail Jones, completing the dream team. I commissioned the lovely and stunningly talented Gail Jones of Starkeys Lane to do a series of illustrations to feature in the book. Many of the illustrations are of the Bach Flower Essences, which, if you haven't come across them, are a wonderful tool for developing personal awareness and emotional healing. I have long been a fan of Gail's artwork and many of the remedies relate to key themes in the book, so it was natural that we would include them. Gail has produced exquisite work and I'm so delighted. Ordering your signed copy Thank you so much for your interest in The Empowered Entrepreneur. You can order your signed copy of the book via the link below just let me know who you’d like it made out to in the posting details. I aim to post copies out by the next working day after order and they are sent royal mail first class. I really hope you enjoy the book. If you love it, i’d be so grateful if you would leave a review on Amazon.com. It really does support us indie authors. Thank you so much!

A cute, smart, educated girl in her early 20’s recently asked me how do you deal with “Players”? It’s an interesting question. She wanted to know how to capture the heart of a player. BAD IDEA. She also wanted to know how NOT to develop emotions thus getting motored over by a Playboy/Pick-Up Artist. My answer is as follows: RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! That would be the preferred strategy. If on the other hand, you feel compelled to interact with this sort of useless loser, DO NOT have sex of any kind with him. NO SEX. Do you get it?…NO SEX! The second you do, you will be relegated to his list of conquests and probably forgotten, oh, unless he is horny at 2:00 am in which case you will hear from him. Sounds familiar? After sex, he will drop you like a hot potato, completely disappear, and turn you into a “friend with benefits” (if you allow it, and you don’t have to). His other method would be to give you the bare minimum like a text or two once a week, heartlessly stringing you along, just in case his fresh bimbo well runs dry one night and he has to recycle. Rings the bell? He will act attentive only when he wants sex, and then predictably distant, mean or even cruel, immediately following. Go by the player’s actions, NOT his words. Don’t give him ANY kind of sex without a clear commitment of monogamy (which isn’t going to happen, btw). It’s that simple. STOP being a players’ doormat, ladies. No player has the patience to wait – that is how you distinguish him from a genuine man actually interested in a real relationship. No sex without monogamy will flat out prevent player inflicted heartbreak 99.9% of the time. Real men will wait as long as you need them to. Give the suspected player the “No Sex” litmus test. If he passes, and I’m talking at least a month or two (trust me, he won’t last a week), proceed with caution. If he fails, good riddance to bad rubbish. Move on and be thankful you were spared the anguish he inflicts upon every woman who has the misfortune of getting involved with him. Leave a Reply Powered by Facebook Comments

Tuesday, December 21, 2010 I had the van out in the driveway with one of the big doors open. I was clearing it out and shifting things about. It was nice out and I was in no big hurry so at one point the van was just sitting in the drive unattended. Nate raced by to pick up a package and out of the corner of his eye he saw a brownish flurry of motion by the van followed by a clunk. When he came back he peered into the van and saw a little bird keeled over on his seat. The poor thing was still breathing but on its side. With a stick Nate gently righted the bird and then returned indoors to report that there was a bird on his seat. ARK. Again I went into voice mail, but the Audubon Society's page linking to ARK was very helpful. I gathered up a small towel and a large shoebox and went to the van to see what I could do for the little wood thrush. The bird was looking a little better, It was sitting up with it's black eyes wide open. However it was still very addled and it was even trying to escape. I gently placed the towel over the bird and oh so carefully scooped it into the box. I settled the towel around the bird, placed the lid on the box, and brought the box into the garage where it was a wee bit warmer. An hour or so later an ARK volunteer called back and instructed me to just place the opened box under a bush (is there were no cats present) and let the poor thing sort itself out. And so I did. The bird was very polite and waited for me to fetch my camera before flitting out of the box. It went through the bush and landed on the other side. It stood there for quite some time, most likely getting its bearings and dealing with a wicked headache. I was able to approach it and again it allowed me to take a few pictures. We all left the little ting again and an hour later it flew off. A very satisfactory ending. Monday, December 20, 2010 Sunday, December 19, 2010 I have no idea what inspired this contract she wrote up or if she really expected anyone one to sign, but I find it hilarious. Jake thought it was funny too and offered to sign it under some sort of random name. Rebecca didn't go along with that idea, but she did see the absurdity of the whole thing. You have to admit that it's all very straight forward and there is even a monetary penalty if you fail to live up to the contract. I think that the fine is the best part of the whole thing. Friday, December 17, 2010 Jake and Rebecca needed new winter boots, Nate needed a new pair of gloves, and Max- well he just went along for the ride because he's a bit young to be left home alone. It took three stores to find two pairs of acceptable winter boots. It's always been a challenge to find snow gear down here in the Virginia, but it was particularly difficult due to the recent winter snow event that resulted in the shelves being bare. The first store was a complete bust boot wise, but I did score on some crazy cheap wrapping paper and Nate found some gloves he liked. He also found a dozen other things he wanted. Max wanted to go to the bathroom and then needed water. We then shuffled outside and headed to the next store which was conveniently located next door. At the second store Rebecca found a pair she really, really liked. The store was down to one box and miracle of miracles it was her size. As she slid the boots on she declared them to be sooooo comfortable. Yay! One pair found, another to go. Meanwhile Nate found more stuff he wanted. I herded everbody outside and into the car and at some point Rebecca scraped her knee. A short car ride across two parking lots we arrived at store three. Rebecca was issued a band-aid and we all went inside. After extensive searching we found the one pair of boots in Jake's size (9 wide for those keeping score) and he actually liked them. Then Nate wanted more shoes and Max was again dying of thirst. At this point I was mentally done with the whole thing and just wanted to get out. After I paid for the boots I literally said "Now that you have touched everything in the store it is time to leave." So it may have been more efficient to take all four shopping, but I won't be doing that again for a long time. Thursday, December 16, 2010 Our school system threw in the towel last night, but only after every other school district declared a snow day. For a few hours last night I had a very sad twelve year old mooning about the house until the word came that school was off. The snow took its own sweet time getting here. When it did finally arrive, oh boy did the roads get greasy fast. I was out at 11 to pick up a few things and it was not particularly fun. At least all the other drivers recognized the treacherous conditions and we all kept he speed well below the speed limit. Once I got back home, that was it for the day. No more last minute dashes to the store. As for the kids, they enjoyed their day off in grand style. Plenty of Wii, the annual checking out of the snow gear (snow pants were good, but we need two pairs of boots), and an epic snow battle throughout the yard and into the woods. The only way it could get better would be if they could get tomorrow off . With a bit of sleet that appeared at the end of the storm and the freezing temperatures the roads tomorrow morning the roads will be horrific. The school district has, wisely decided to cancel school on Friday. Wednesday, December 15, 2010 Now that marching season (Who knew there was an official marching season?) is over, the symphonic band goes into full gear. During the school year they have been learning various pieces of music in band class. Last Thursday the 9th, the Symphonic Band (of which Jake is a member) along with the Wind Symphony jointly performed for the 2010 Holiday Concert. The Symphonic Band and the Wind Symphony played three pieces of music apiece. Unfortunately my camera's batteries gave up the ghost very early on in the concert. I was only able to record just part of the first piece, "Christmas of the Toreador," performed by Jake's band. I thought they sounded great. My camera, however, did a poor job capturing the richness of he band's sound. Even my entourage of Nate, Max and Rebecca found the concert to be pretty good. Rebecca particularly enjoined Carol of the Bells, the third and final selection of Symphonic. What made the whole concert really amazing was that the schools bad director had just gone on maternity leave about a month ago. She was able to attend the concert with he wee babe, but purely as a member of the audience. Her substitute very ably picked of the reins and kept the band going during her absence. I can't wait for the next concert when the band director is back. It should be fantastic. Tuesday, December 14, 2010 It had been raining heavily all weekend and in the wee hours of the morning the temperature dropped and the rain quickly turned to snow. The branches have are almost artistically frosted with snow and the flakes lay thickly on the deck and lawn, much to our dogs annoyance. The kids, however, were delighted. But the roads had remained clear and school was still on. It didn't even rate a two hour delay. The next big surprise has been the temperature. Normally It will be well above freezing during the day and come late afternoon the snow will be pretty much gone. Not so this time, the mercury has stubornly refused to go above freezing and the nights have been dipping down to the upper teens. It feels more like New England than the Mid-Atlantic. Monday, December 13, 2010 Sunday, December 12, 2010 So instead, we arranged for me to come back another time sans children. It's been over 18 years since I've last been on a horse, so I was just a wee bit apprehensive. I knew we were going to start out slow and the mare I would be riding was quiet and well mannered, but I knew I was going to hurt. It was just a question of how much. When I used to ride I was fairly decent and was at the point where I really used my legs. I remembered the last time I went on hiatus (it was only 7 years that time) my legs felt like jelly and I literally staggered away. Now I was 20 years older and certainly less fit. I sent a half hour in the ring alone with the my steed getting a feel for her and remembering how to put it all together. Then we were off for an almost hour long trail ride. I'm proud to say I was not dumped, I did not fall off, and I was invited back again. As for for how I felt post ride- pretty good. I did not have jelly legs and it took about half an hour for my calves to decide I was an evil, evil person. Fortunately two ibuprofens did the trick and I felt fine after a day and a half. When I went back last Friday I had my own boots and helmet. After such a successful first outing I was willing to get my own gear. Amazingly it went even better. We did a bit more cantering and attempted a couple of jumps. My calves had gotten over their pique from the previous time and I did not need any sort of pain relief. It's nice to know that I'm not nearly as decrepit as I feared and I get to do something that I really enjoy doing. Friday, December 10, 2010 The book meme has been floating around on the internets for some time. Basically it's list of 100 books and you get to check those you have read. If I counted right I have read 32 of the 100 books, well above the challenge statement: " We believe most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here." Which ones have you read? Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 6 The Bible Various 7 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte 8 1984 George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 11 Little Women Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare William Shakespeare 15 Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong Sebastian Faulk 18 Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch George Elio 21 Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald 23 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 24 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 25 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky 26 Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 27 Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 28 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 29 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 30 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 31 Chronicles of Narnia CS Lewis 32 Emma Jane Austen 33 Persuasion Jane Austen 34 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe CS Lewis 35 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini 36 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres 37 Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden 38 Winnie the Pooh AA Milne 39 Animal Farm George Orwell 40 The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown 41 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez 42 A Prayer for Owen Meaney John Irving 43 The Woman in White Wilkie Collins 44 Anne of Green Gables LM Montgomery 45 Far From The Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy 46 The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood 47 Lord of the Flies William Golding 48 Atonement Ian McEwan 49 Life of Pi Yann Martel 50 Dune Frank Herbert 51 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons 52 Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen 53 A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth 54 The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafon 55 A Tale Of Two Cities Charles Dickens 56 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 57 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon 58 Love In The Time Of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez 59 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 60 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 61 The Secret History Donna Tartt 62 The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold 63 Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas 64 On The Road Jack Kerouac 65 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy 66 Bridget Jones’s Diary Helen Fielding 67 Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie 68 Moby Dick Herman Melville 69 Oliver Twist Charles Dickens 70 Dracula Bram Stoker 71 The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett 72 Notes From A Small Island Bill Bryson 73 Ulysses James Joyce 74 The Inferno Dante 75 Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransom 76 Germinal Emile Zol 77 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackera 78 Possession AS Byatt 79 A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens 80 Cloud Atlas David Mitchel 81 The Color Purple Alice Walker 82 The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro 83 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 84 A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry 85 Charlotte’s Web EB White 86 The Five People You Meet In Heaven Mitch Albom 87 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 88 The Faraway Tree Collection Enid Blyton 89 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 90 The Little Prince Antoine De Saint-Exupery 91 The Wasp Factory Iain Banks 92 Watership Down Richard Adams 93 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole 94 A Town Like Alice Nevil Shute 95 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 96 Hamlet William Shakespeare 97 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl 98 Les Miserables Victor Hugo 9Bleak House Charles Dickens 100 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh Thursday, December 09, 2010 After I took this picture of Rebecca and Nate lighting the menorahs my camera promptly announced that its card was full and shut down. And I was perfectly fine with that. I knew I had he picture I wanted and I was in no hurry to clear out the card for more pictures. Sometimes getting the shot you want is easy. Larry took this picture of Max while we were at a friend's house. This is the same friend that I mentioned before with all the horses. Max climbed up on the fence to wait for his turn on the pony. I was pretty amazed that he was interested in riding. He was quite adamant at home that he was NOT going to do any sort of riding. He was going to go along and check out the place and that was it. But... after watching Rebecca and, most importantly, Nate have fun riding the very well mannered pony, Max decided to give it a shot. After a few laps around the ring Max was eager to go up to a trot. When his turn was up he reluctantly slid off the pony's back. With drums, however, he never experienced any sort of uncertainty. He wanted to play drums and was very happy when we found him a teacher. Max started lessons last spring with Josh, the son of a friend of ours. Josh and Max really hit it off and during the beginning of the video below Josh tells how much he likes Max. The performance lasted about a half hour with our family, including Grandma and Grandpa, in attendance. Max did a great job and had a terrific time. If you last to the the end of the video you can see when Josh and Max had a little jam session. Wednesday, December 08, 2010 With three menorahs in action you almost didn't need to have the lights on. It was a beautiful sight to behold. Tuesday, December 07, 2010 Last night was the sixth night of Hanukkah. Three of my crew got to light them. It looks like we'll have to get another menorah so that everybody will get to light one. Since it is my birthday I'm being brief, Weezie's is calling my name. Monday, December 06, 2010 Originally uploaded by The ground was too warm for any sort of significant or lasting coverage, but it was pretty while it lasted. Grandma asked the kids if any of them had been dreaming of a white Hanukkah. Sadly by the end of the day Sunday it was all gone. We all ate to nearly bursting, listen to the Rabbi's daughter sing and a few of us even danced. It was a lovely way to spend the fifth night of Hanukkah. Sunday, December 05, 2010 However, that morning I also went horse back riding for the first time in oh... 18 years. It was a lot of fun and I'm proud to say I lasted an hour and did not fall off the horse. Unfortunately my calves made it very plain to me that I was a very bad person and it took a big dose of ibuprofen to get them to quite down (Yay, better living through chemistry!) So I was just plain wiped out at the end of the day. It's a minor miracle that I even took pictures. But... I did take pictures and this is our bicycle chain menorah. I found it at a funky little store in Careytown called Ten Thousand Villages last year. It's simplicity called out to me. Coupled with my renewed interest in biking , I couldn't resist it. Weezie's and the 7:15 show at the Byrd Theater. The food, as always, was fabulous. The movie, The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hool, was less so. It wasn't a bad movie (the CGI was impressive), but it really butchered the books. At least we had Bob and the mighty Wurlitzer and only paid two bucks a head. So as you can see we have been a bit busy with even more to post later. Friday, December 03, 2010 I almost forgot to post this. Essentially I remembered while lighting the candles for tonight before the candles for Shabbat. I had a great big duh moment as I was laying out the candles and looking for the camera. At least I took the pictures! Thursday, December 02, 2010 Wednesday, December 01, 2010 The day before the grand festival of food known as Thanksgiving, we visited a friend in a neighboring county. She has invited us a few times and enticed with the fact that she has many horses and one very patient pony. It was a beautiful day Wednesday and the kids had the day off from school. So we loaded up the van to go see and ride the horses. Rebecca was ecstatic. She loves horses and this would be her first time really riding a pony. She has been you on a pony before, but the pony rides at the county fair don't quite count. We groomed and saddled the pony, just using a bareback pad- I wanted my children to really feel the pony and not mess around with stirrups. After a few laps around the ring with me at the pony's head I let her go solo. She even got to ride at a trot for a fair bit. I proud to say she did a fine job and had a nice seat even at a trot. All those years of having her sit up straight and tall at the piano has paid off in unexpected ways. As for her piano playing, well that's the real reason she's the artist this week. The weekend before Thanksgiving was Rebecca's Fall Recital. She did a nice job with her piece, Night Owl by Rollin. Unfortunately I was a little slow off the mark in taping and missed the opening bit of the piece. However, poor camera work aside, you still get a good sense of the piece. I love her poise at the piano and the big grin on her face as she returns to her seat. Monday, November 29, 2010 Friday, November 26, 2010 The chocolate course came about because Meryl wanted to bring something for Thanksgiving the first time she came over a few years ago. I had the meal well in hand and anything else other than chocolate would be akin to bringing coals to Newcastle. It was a huge hit and is now a permanent part of our Thanksgiving. This year she went one better by bringing the centerpiece in the photo. It's a melted snowman made of fudge surrounded by a ring of maple sugar candy (melted snow) and an outer ring of chocolate sponge (mud). It's great fun and we are slowly chipping away at it. Thursday, November 25, 2010 Today's menu is as follows: Stuffing with and without Sausage Clover Leaf Rolls A Chocolate Course Served with a choice of cider, soda, and Les Heretiques red table wine I hope you all have a happy and very tasty Thanksgiving. Wednesday, November 24, 2010 We have a friend with numerous horses and she's been wanting us to come out and ride for some time. Today we were finally able to coordinate schedules. Rebecca was beside herself with excitement, the boys less so (in fact Jake the whole thing a miss and stayed home). I wasn't sure at first if Nate and Max would ride, but in the end I got all three up, ride a bit on their own and even go at a trot. The pony was incredibly good natured about three kids going on and off. It wasn't until the end that she would head to the gate, indicating that she was done and wanted to go to her stall. At some point I had given Nate a small pad of paper that was roughly 2 inches by 3 inches. I think it's original purpose was to collect friends' email addresses and phone numbers. However it he has long strayed from the pads original use. Just the other day he presented to me two slips of paper with sketches of essentially the interior of our house. The top drawing is of our living room with dog on the far right corner of the carpet (it's a bit easier to distinguish in the original sketch). Nate intended the picture to be a some what abstract study of the room. I see the abstract elements, but it is still very clearly the living room. The lower picture is a side view of the stairs leading up to the second floor. Again, he was going for a more abstract feel. Meanwhile I found this picture to be a dead-on representation. Nate's drawing has come a long way during the past 6 months. He took art the first quarter of the school year and it looks like he learned quite a bit. Tuesday, November 23, 2010 Jake was shocked at how late my lunch was and asked me why. So, I told him what I did between seeing he and his siblings off in the morning and picking him up from school. I walked the dogs. Goofed off on the computer for 20 minutes. Returned some dishes to a kind neighbor. Rescued my beloved chickadee cookie tin (sans cookies) from the high school. Drove to Meryl's and together we ran errands (it's far more fun to do boring stuff with a friend. The errands consisted of: Dropping off Jake's trumpet to be repaired. Treat shopping at the For Love of Chocolate with bonus purchase next door of a new camera bag (Dell keeps eating my camera bags). Getting wine for Thanksgiving at the wine and cheese store J. Emerson. More adult beverage shopping at Corks & Kegs. Hardcore veggie shopping (Hee- or rather Haricot vert shopping). A preemptive Costco run, I refuse to go there the Wednesday before Thanksgiving onto the Monday after. Around Thanksgiving Costco becomes an evil, evil place. And then a quick stop at Trader Joe's. Whew, Meryl and I packed in a whole lot of errands, but now we are done with Thanksgiving shopping and don't have to set foot in a store until next week. After I finished reeling off all my accomplishments Jake, clearing stunned by it all, told me I deserved to goof off for far more than 20 minutes and then asked if I do that every day. My answer was fortunately no. Monday, November 22, 2010 Sunday, November 21, 2010 The musicals bits all went well, except for the fact that the recital was too dang long (two hours vs the normal one hour- long story and I hope it's not repeated). Which brings us to the movie. It was glorious. Yes it's dark, but then the last book is dark. The characters stayed true to the book and only a few liberties were taken. The stopping point chosen was logical and left us pining for the second half. Mind you it's not short, clocking in at 2 1/2 hours. However the movie was well paced and edited, fully utilizing that extra half hour. You really don't mind the length of the movie. I can't wait for the second installment come this July. Friday, November 19, 2010 It is not great cinema, but it is a wonderful flick. It rips along with a great sense of humor and is just the right length. I don't want to say much more, because odds are I would end up spoiling it. Basically it's a boy meets girl, boy has to defeat exs of girl to win her type of movie. I didn't write about the movie earlier because I hadn't much to say. But, since then I have started poking around on the movie's website. The site is turning out to be a glorious time suck of Avatar creation and YouTube remixes. It's a nice way to wind down the week. Thursday, November 18, 2010 The dark red is Japanese Maple and the more washed out red and orange is my waaaay past peak Burning Bush (winged euonymus). Then down below there are bright splashes of red berries amongst the green leaves of my Heavenly Bamboo. Interestingly two of the above are considered invasive species and should have never been planted in the first place. Which is a pity with the Burning Bush. I've haven't had any problems with it and I'm fond of the bright red it produces in early fall. The Heavenly Bamboo, however, I could happily rip it all out if it weren't so well established and... well invasive. As for the bright orange pumpkins on the steps, they should have been tossed last weekend. They make for a pretty picture, but the insides are nightmarish to say the least. Wednesday, November 17, 2010 This picture is from a while back. She was home sick with her brother and was so cute cuddled up in bed I had to take a picture. It was just a touch of bronchitis, so apart from the cough she didn't seem at all ill, but she wasn't cleared for school. We just kept things on the quiet side and in no time at all she was back to school, both religious (aka Hebrew or Sunday school) and secular. She has been going to Sunday school, since Kindergarten. It's the third go around (you could even say fourth as well because of the whole twin thing) for our family so we pretty much know what to expect for each grade when it's Max and Rebecca's turn. Once a year there is special event called Gesher when the parents are requested to attend to school. There is a discussion group during the first have with the Rabbi, then students and parents come together with some sort of craft. During the third grade Gesher the students got to make their own mezuzah. Rebecca, being the girlie girl that she is, went for the pinkish white and fuchsia. She carefully molded it around a wooden cloths-peg and made the top and bottom nail holes. Once she was done constructing the holder it was taken back to the kitchen to be baked. It turned out rather well and, miracle of miracles, survived the ride home. All that was left for us to do was insert the blessings and affix it to her doorway. She was delighted when I finally did my half of the job yesterday. Tuesday, November 16, 2010 Anyhoodle, John doesn't wait for permission, he just helps himself whenever the mood strikes him. At least he has only been eating one pumpkin and has left it pretty much in place. At this point, two weeks plus post carving, not much is left. It looks like a small explosion of pumpkin pulp near the bottom of the steps. As for Dell, he now doesn't approve of John's wanton destruction of the pumpkins. After I took the picture above of John, Dell bounced down the steps and gave John the hairy eyeball and stood by the pumpkins. John's reaction was to casually stroll away, as though Dell had nothing to do with his moving off. I don't know if you can see it, but this picture captured the moment when Dell was standing in rigid disapproval next to the pumpkin. John, meanwhile, is halfway across the yard. I found the whole thing hilarious. Dell has such a sunny, happy go lucky demeanor 99% of the time. However my chewing him out over the pumpkin lid really made an impression on our goofy boy. He has appointed himself defender of the pumpkins. At least when I'm around. It wouldn't surprise me if he snuck in a few bites when I'm not present. Monday, November 15, 2010 Either way, sit back and enjoy. Sunday, November 14, 2010 I am a parent that will cheerfully and enthusiastically cater to whatever your birthday cake desires are. If you can envision it and clearly articulate what you want, I'll give it a shot. Nate's "The Horror of Cake War" cake was deemed epic by his friends. I will go along with an endless Nerf gun battle in the house as long as my bedroom, my husband's study and the dining room remain off limits. I can deal with the eleventy billion foam darts littered throughout the house. I will calmly walk through the fire fight and ignore the darts flying around me. To their credit not a single dart hit me. But I can't deal with loud voices at 2:00 am, every light turned on downstairs at 3:30 am, and bizarre questions about birthday presents at 4:00. The last bit resulted in my telling Nate that in all likelihood he was never having a sleepover again. The boys weren't particularly awful or ill-behaved (well except for the question bit at 4:00am and that was my own child), in fact the two guests are a lovely pair of polite and well mannered children. I'm just getting to old to deal with the random interruptions in my sleep and the endless noise. I treasure the peace and quiet that descends on this house every night at 10:00 pm. Friday, November 12, 2010 As per Nate's request I made him yet another war themed birthday cake and I really outdid myself this year. I carved out craters on the top and sides, made two tanks (one intact, the other broken and trapped in a crater, and had a rather bloody Cake Corp on top. The cake was a huge hit at the party. It was declared epic and all the boys liked the the red sparkly gel icing I applied generously to the downed soldiers. If you click on the picture it will take you to my Flickr page and the complete photo-set. Bloody and gruesome is what 11 to 12 year old boys loved to have on their birthday cakes. Thursday, November 11, 2010 My father served in WWII on a mine sweeper in the Pacific. This is one of the few photographs I have of him in uniform. He is on the front stoop with his Aunt and Uncle in his Navy uniform. He looks so young, he had just turned 26 years old if it's the later part of March. And this was years before he even met my mother. So once again thank you for all your sacrifices in keeping this nation safe and free. Wednesday, November 10, 2010 As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I have to employ a form of ambush photography to capture my eldest child. It's not so much camera shyness as it is my son having an uncontrollable urge to make odd faces when a camera is pointed in his direction. The four pictures before this one consisted of him hiding behind his DS whatever gobbledygook that follows, a strange twisted open mouth, a squinty eyed duck face and one blurry action shot. Then I just sat near him and waited and got this fairly decent picture of him. He's looking down which makes it seem as though his eyes are closed, but really they are open. The drawings in question are from Jake's technical drawing class in High School. I still can't get over the fact that I'm the mother of a high schooler. I'll always think of myself as riding heard on grade schoolers. Anyhoodle, he wanted to take Latin, but it did not fit in his schedule so he decided to take Basic Technical Drawing instead. He has been having a great time in class. It is right up his alley, minutely examining things and getting them down just right. So far he is finding the class to be an easy A, a nice respite with an all honors course load. The whole class seems to be fairly effortless for him with the exception of one extra credit assignment, a film reel. He hasn't quite sussed out the best way to draw it. As he put it, it's all circles within circles and some oddball shapes thrown in for good measure. He'll get sooner or later, I have no doubt about that. Tuesday, November 09, 2010 I have always viewed the word git to be a rather negative descriptor. The phrase "stupid git" springs to mind. I even went so far as to look up the word. According to the dictionary a git is a worthless or foolish person, British origin. So maybe I'm mistaken that it is part of the common lexicon. Possibly the result of watching far to much Monty Python in my formative years. Then again Larry, who had a far less Anglophilic upbringing (My family maybe 13th generation American but we still cling to the oddest aspects of our UK heritage. Seriously, how on earth have we remained English, Scottish and Welsh? My generation is the first one to really venture out in the gene pool.), agreed it was the oddest choice in business names. So what do y'all of you think of this? Monday, November 08, 2010 Sunday, November 07, 2010 He is very quick to learn and eager to play, far more so than he ever was with piano (but ah, the groundwork had been laid). If fact his teacher is greatly impressed by his progress each week. Unfortunately he only plays one recognizable tune, the classic coda from Black Sabbath's Iron Man. Which is not a bad song, but when you hear it over and over- day in and day out it gets a little tedious. I'm glad he is so enthusiastic to practice, I just wish there was a bit more variety. Friday, November 05, 2010 Alright then. I've never made oatmeal cookies before, but I'm willing to give it a go. I've never been a big fan of oatmeal cookies and for that I blame the ubiquitous raisin. Since I was making them and my friend had requested no raisins I had a good feeling about the cookies. I selected the The Best Cookie of 1900-1910 Oatmeal Drop Cookies from my Betty Crocker Cookie Book with of course various modifications by me. 1/2 cup shorteningThe cookies were scrumptious. Moist and chewy with a wonderful depth of flavor from the molasses and the chocolate. They were a big hit with the family and they are almost gone. I think the only reason any are left is that I made brownies a few days earlier. Oh and all the candy from Halloween too. I will definitely be making these again. 1 1/4 cup sugar 1/3 cup molasses 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp salt 1 tsp cinnamon 2 cups rolled oats 1 1/4 cup chocolate chips* (*original recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts and 1 cup raisins instead of the chocolate chips. I dislike both and my friend requested oatmeal chocolate chip) Heat oven to 400 F Mix shortening, sugar, eggs, and molasses thoroughly. Measure flour by dipping method or by sifting. Stir dry ingredients together; blend in. Stir in oats and chocolate chips (or raisins and nuts if you go that way). Drop dough by rounded teaspoonfuls about 2" apart on a lightly greased baking sheet (oops I forgot to do that and it really wasn't a problem). Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack and then enjoy! Thursday, November 04, 2010 Doesn't it look delicious? I thought so and took a picture of it when I made it way back in August. This was what dinner was supposed to look like tonight. We were having make your own pizza night. However our oven had different plans. It initially heated up to almost 450. Then, unbeknown to me, the bottom heating element gave up the ghost. I was happily watching the cheese brown unaware of the fact that the crust below really wasn't cooking. It wasn't until I started pulling pizzas from the oven that I discovered the true state of affairs. It was then a mad scramble to figure out how to cook the pizza without a fully functional oven. In the end I decided to place the metal pans directly on the cook top and finish off the pizzas that way. It was far from ideal, but it did work. The pizzas were a mess; cheese sliding off and a bit over done, the bottom of the crust a bit burnt in places. But, they were edible. So it looks like I'll be buying a new heating element tomorrow. Wednesday, November 03, 2010 Until now I've been leery of setting them all loose with knives. Jake has been carving a little bit for the past couple of years, Nate even less so. I had some metal cookie cutters that were designed for walloping into a pumpkin and knocking out a shape. The forms came in a variety of shapes and sizes, but were honestly a real pain to use. They would get stuck in the rind of the pumpkin and would inevitably get battered and squished. It was a good idea, but was lacking in execution ( the biggest drawback to the kit was the rubber mallet. It was easily the smelliest tool I have ever encountered). Going clockwise starting from the upper left we have Rebecca's very traditional one tooth pumpkin. It's such a happy looking face. I love how the eyes are just a little bit cockeyed, it adds to the overall charm. Next we have Max's flower, bat and moon. He always makes tiny detailed drawings and this pumpkin was no exception. He did a beautiful job drawing and craving his creation. On the lower right is Jake's grumpy old man. Like Rebecca's it is a bit more traditional. Jake's observation about it, after he was done carving, was that the pumpkin kind of looked like an old guy that would yell out Hey kids! Get off my Lawn!" So of course this was the pumpkin we put at the end of the driveway to bring in trick or treaters. Last up we have Nate's zombies. I apologize for the poor quality of the picture. I had a hard time setting up to take this pumpkin's picture. The carving, like Max's, is a tableau of zombies under a cresent moon and stars. He had a hard time carving the stars and ended up with a sort of triangular shape. I think he did a great job and the pumpkin looked great once it was lit up. All four had a great time drawing their designs on the pumpkins and then cutting them out. The best part for me, however, was that nobody sliced themselves with the knives. It was a sucess and I forsee more carving in the future. Tuesday, November 02, 2010 This year it's a bit washed out from the bright sunlight in my backyard. However, rain or bright sunshine I vote. It's my civic duty and I take it very seriously. Monday, November 01, 2010 Sunday, October 31, 2010 Friday, October 29, 2010 My plan is to hollow them out tomorrow after we are all done with soccer. I think I'll be willing to carve a few as well. We'll see how it goes. My main concern is the weather, as long as it doesn't rain I'll be happy. So far it like it will be cool and clear. Now I just have to find my jumbo bag of tea lights... Thursday, October 28, 2010 Theoretically the top cushion should be against the back of the dog couch, but John prefers to have it stacked top of the bottom cushion. He usually pulls it back down within an hour of my straightening it up into it's "official" position. So at this point I don't bother unless we have company. Nate noticed Dell in the dog couch the other day and took this picture. We both found to rather funny that Dell's head was the only thing you could see. Normally he and John will be on top of the cushions, each dog curled up in his respective spot. But not this time, Dell apparently wanted to be inside the cushions. And stay he did until something far more exciting (at least to Dell) happened in the house or outside.

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Choosing to write about religious topics is risky. All my writing book advisors go on about ‘finding your niche’ and being sure people want to read what you are writing…and of course, being contrary, I wrote the book and then wanted to publish it. It’s a bonus if people buy it, I told my self. But my self is a horrendous lying thing. Of course I want people to buy it and read it and like it or think about things. Even if it isn’t easily classified, if it doesn’t have a GENRE, really. Does everything need to have a genre? Apparently, if you want to be found. So why write about Blessed Mary if the book isn’t genre? Because of Elizabeth Warren. Or any of the many many other women who are overlooked, whose accomplishments are minimized, who feel like they have to shout to be heard (and then they are called strident). Women who cannot be seen even if they want to be. Women who are told they have no purpose except to make men happy and birth the next generation That happened to Mary. Here she was, the mother if this big important man, and her contribution was so minimized she barely existed until the Catholics used her image as advertising copy and trotted her out everywhere like a show pony, changing her completely as they did so. They used her as a friendlier contact point than a bleeding man on a cross. She was the perfect mother figure, a loving presence for all the church. Then the church men started playing with her. (I refuse to call them church fathers.) They needed to make her unusually pure. Never mind the ‘why’ — what about the how? The church men were puzzled. Oh, right, she must have been born without that original sin thing – that’s how she gave birth without any pain. (Say what? Given that men were also telling every other woman that their births had to be painful because of Eve and the apple (a set-up if ever I heard one), this all seemed a bit strange.) But wait – how could she have been born without original sin? Well, her parents must have been unusually holy. And their parents before them, and so on, like some backward-dated Ancestry file. Never mind that previous documents assigned the line of David to Joseph. “We can change that!” the church men said. “While we are at it, let’s make her ever-virgin, unsullied by man. Because women who have sex are dirty. Men who have sex are dirty, too, but they have urges that must be met.” Despite being the mother of THAT guy, she only gets a mention at birth and at his death. Oh yes, except she is brought up to ‘fail’ him by asking him to make the water into wine at a friend’s wedding. Apparently, this indicates that she doubted his mission. I’d argue that this would have proved that she thought he had unusual powers, but of course, she must have known that given the angel, etc, etc. That’s a problem, too. How did a baby form in her unsullied womb? Lots of ideas were trotted around, none of them particularly convincing, until people just gave up and said it had happened. The bible doesn’t say much. That hasn’t kept people from discussing how, though, and mostly making the pregnancy seem like a total out of body experience for Mary. This resulted in ridiculous discussions like one I had in my Mariology class, about THAT guy’s DNA. “Of course, he must only have a half set of chromosomes!” one woman opined, forgetting the need for a double set to make that baby grow at all normally. Or let his beard grow. I can find no mention of Mary’s parenting of THAT guy. But surely she had a huge role in that? Perhaps she was the source of so many of his ideas about mercy and wealth and kindness? What if Mary was the actual founder of the religion we all call Christianity, and if THAT guy had to take the reins because women weren’t even allowed to speak then? You see? Once you start looking at Mary’s story, questions arise. Why are the church men so mean to her, so determined to wipe her out of the picture, while still using her as a meme? As I dug into books about Mary, I found myself feeling frustrated on her behalf. I wanted her to be given fair coverage, for her and the women who followed her. I tried to present a story about Mary, done with respect and care. Oh, and let her have a little fun along the way. I’d like to hear from you if you think if I reached that goal. Find my book on Amazon.

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AHHH!!! I. loved. this. book!!! If you know me, then you know I’m a massive Lauren Layne fan. Her books are just contemporary romance heaven and I always look forward to all her releases. Cuff Me was my most anticipated read of hers, and it didn’t disappoint at all. In fact, Cuff Me is my favorite of the New York’s Finest series and so far my FAVORITE LL book ever! You know those series where you’re just WAITING for a certain couple to get their book? There’s all this buildup for them and you have all these expectations that you hope will be met? Well, Cuff Me was that book for me. I’d been dying to read Vincent and Jill’s story ever since meeting them in Frisk Me, and Lauren Layne gave me everything I wanted and more with this book. The romance is slow, but it’s absolutely filled with sexual tension. This is a bit of the hate-to-love-you trope, a bit of opposites-attract and friends-to-lovers. LL did a brilliant job blending all these tropes together. I wholeheartedly adored Cuff Me – it’s sweet, sexy, funny, and all-around an irresistible read. Their relationship had always been both horribly complicated and wonderfully simple. Those two elements canceled each other out so that when it came right down to it, Jill and Vincent were beyond definition. They simply were. Vincent Moretti and Jill Henley are partners and homicide detectives for the NYPD. There’s a bit of love/hate going on, and a healthy dose of lust too – and while it’s obvious to everyone how in love with each other Jill and Vin are, these two are absolutely clueless about how the other feels. But no matter what they feel, they’ve always had each others’ backs. That is, until Jill blindsides Vin by coming back home after a trip… engaged. Jill has loved Vin since forever – and even more than just her partner, he’s family to her. But it’s been six years since they were first partnered together, and Jill just isn’t sure anymore that Vin could reciprocate her feelings – so she jumps into an engagement with another man, all the while still loving Vin. Vin has always been the quiet, shy one ever since he was a boy, so he’s not adept at expressing his feelings, but he knows he has to try in order to win Jill back. And when he finds out that Jill is engaged to another man, it awakens this jealous, possessive, alpha side of him that is seriously the hottest thing ever. And when Vin is determined to do something, whether it’s trying to solve a murder, or in this case, win over the woman in his heart, there’s nothing that can stop him. Except maybe his own fears of loving and being loved, but that’s what Jill and his family are there for, to knock some sense into him. 😉 “My brothers said that saying it would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. They were wrong. It was the easiest. Because loving you is easy.” I adored Jill so much. She’s just so happy and light compared to Vin’s broody and dark, and while she doesn’t make the best decision getting engaged to a man she doesn’t love, it does do what she’s always wanted: make Vin realize his feelings for her. And Vin, while frustrating, is so sweet and adoring of Jill – even though he struggles with showing her that, you can’t help but love him for it. These two make such a heart-warming couple that my heart melted every time they were together in the book. Lauren Layne has once again written a brilliantly sexy and romantic read. I loved Cuff Me! If you love some men-in-uniform, you definitely need to get your hands on the Moretti brothers, especially Vin. Now I can’t help but hope that LL will write another book for the fourth Moretti brother, who we get to know a lot better in Cuff Me! Quotes are taken from the arc and are subject to change in the final version. Reading Order: New York’s Finest series #1 ~ Frisk Me: My Review • Ebook • Paperback • Audible • Goodreads #2 ~ Steal Me: My Review • Ebook • Paperback • Audible • Goodreads #3 ~ Cuff Me: Ebook • Paperback • Audible • Goodreads (March 29, 2016)

Creating a fairer Britain The Equality Act came into force on 1 October 10. Some of the information on this page may be out of date. If an employee’s position is made redundant before her ‘qualifying week’ (the 15th week before the expected week of childbirth) she will not qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) but may be able to claim Maternity Allowance from JobCentre Plus. If she is made redundant in or after the qualifying week and she meets the qualifying conditions for SMP, she is entitled to receive SMP for the full 39 week period. An employee who is made redundant during her pregnancy will be entitled to any redundancy and/or notice pay that she qualifies for. It is unlawful to select a woman for redundancy because she is pregnant. She may have a claim for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination, irrespective of her length of service. If an employee’s position is made redundant during Ordinary Maternity Leave or Additional Maternity Leave, she is entitled to be offered a suitable alternative vacancy, where one is available. This includes a vacancy with an associated employer or with a successor to the original employer. The new contract must be offered before the end of the original contract and it must take effect immediately on the ending of the original contract. The new contract must be such that: It is important to note that an employee on maternity leave has a right to be offered any suitable alternative vacancies that exist. She should be offered it before other employees and does not have to attend interviews or selection procedures. This special protection is provided for a woman on maternity leave as she may be about to give birth, may have a small baby to look after or may have been absent from the workplace for some time. If you offer the employee a suitable alternative vacancy and she unreasonably refuses it, she may forfeit her right to a redundancy payment. The employee must be consulted where there is a potential redundancy situation and a fair procedure (taking into account any applicable statutory dispute resolution procedure) must be followed, notwithstanding the employee’s absence on maternity leave. It is strongly recommended, if an employee’s position is to be made redundant, that you seek more detailed information and speaks with Acas. An employee must not be selected for redundancy for a reason connected to her pregnancy, the birth of her child or maternity leave. If you do not establish a fair reason for the employee’s dismissal, you may face an unfair dismissal and sex discrimination claim, irrespective of the employee’s length of service. If an employee is to be dismissed by reason of redundancy during pregnancy or maternity leave, she should receive redundancy payment in the normal way. This means statutory redundancy pay and any applicable contractual redundancy pay. Any time spent by the employee on maternity leave, whether Ordinary Maternity Leave or Additional Maternity Leave, should be counted as continuous service when assessing her length of service for the purpose of calculating her Statutory Redundancy Payment. To calculate the amount of Statutory Redundancy Pay employers can contact the BERR Redundancy Payments Helpline on 0845 145 0004 or see the redundancy payments calculator on the Business Link website. An employee who is dismissed by reason of redundancy during pregnancy or maternity leave is entitled to be given notice if she has been in her job for at least one month. The notice period will depend on the contract of employment. Employees are entitled to a minimum statutory notice period of one week’s notice after one month’s service and after two years’ service, a week’s notice for each year of employment, up to a maximum of 12 weeks. If the contract of employment provides for notice of at least a week more than the statutory minimum notice period, the statutory provisions do not apply. An employee is entitled to receive contractual notice pay during pregnancy and may be entitled to receive it during maternity leave, depending on the terms of the contract. It may be unlawful to refuse to pay notice pay during a woman’s paid maternity leave (i.e. the 39 week SMP period) and possibly throughout maternity leave. You should seek further advice from Acas. If the employee is entitled to receive notice pay under the statutory provisions, she is entitled to receive it during pregnancy and maternity leave. You may offset any payments of SMP against statutory notice pay. The employee must also be paid any outstanding holiday pay. An employee who has qualified for SMP should continue to be paid SMP for the full 39 week period even if she is made redundant and you will be reimbursed by HM Revenue and Customs. If an employee is dismissed during maternity leave (including if she is dismissed by reason of redundancy), she must be provided with a written statement of the reasons for her dismissal, whether or not she requests such a statement. An employee must not be dismissed because she has given birth. She must also not be dismissed because she has taken maternity leave, or because she has availed herself of any of the benefits of Ordinary Maternity Leave. If dismissed for such a reason, an employee may have an unfair dismissal claim. This applies irrespective of the employee’s length of service. The employee should be paid her full Statutory Maternity Pay entitlement once she has qualified for it. She should continue to be paid Statutory Maternity Pay even if dismissed.

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Sexy Bachelor Pad: Designing for the Single Male by Tisha Leung The bold motto—"You bring her home. We'll make sure she stays."— drives the unabashedly masculine interior design firm Sexy Bachelor Pad. Aimed exclusively at single men who have reached the pinnacle of success but continue to come home to a futon from college and a cardboard box for a coffee table, the Sexy Bachelor Pad specializes in turning living spaces into, well, love nests. âBachelors in NYC know that Ikea furniture won't do if they ever want to bring home the softer of the two sexes, but they're busy and have no interest in traipsing through furniture stores, nor do they care about choosing between deep azure or military gray,â says designer Kimberlee Paige Hanson. After a consultation on your wants and needs, Hanson outfits pads with the essentials—from custom or store-bought dinnerware and furniture to any major or minor renovations, like fresh coats of paint or built-in shelving. Believing that even a little bit of romantic effort goes a long way in impressing a woman, Hanson says by adding tasteful decorations, a woman will "be more comfortable, relaxed and more apt to stay for a nightcap." To set up an appointment, visit the Sexy Bachelor Pad website.

Woman waives hearing in Easter stabbing The West Virginia woman accused of stabbing her former boyfriend’s new girlfriend Easter morning waived her case to court Wednesday. Kristin Marie Schnelle, 19, of McMechen, W.Va., was charged by Canonsburg police with attempted homicide, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and simple assault for allegedly stabbing Aubrey Buehner, 21, of Martins Ferry, Ohio. Schnelle reportedly went to the home of her former boyfriend, Robert Cramer II, 32, of 211 McShane Ave., about 7 a.m. March 31. The two had broken up after dating for about two years. The 19-year-old reportedly had seen images of Cramer with Buehner on Facebook. Canonsburg police said Schnelle reportedly had intended to kill the new girlfriend and then kill herself. When police arrived at Cramer’s home, they found Buehner seated at a kitchen table being treated by Cramer’s mother. Police said they went downstairs and found Cramer restraining Schnelle. When Cramer released her, police said she grabbed an open bottle of bleach and tried to drink it before officers knocked it away. Cramer told police he and Buehner were sleeping when Schnelle came in and started stabbing his girlfriend with a kitchen knife. Schnelle was able to enter the home using her own set of keys, police said. Buehner was taken to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh for treatment. Police said that inside Scnelle’s car, they found a note she wrote to her mother asking for forgiveness, as well as a receipt for the bleach she purchased earlier that morning. Schnelle, who had been scheduled for a preliminary hearing before District Judge David Mark, remains in the the Washington County jail on $25,000 bond.

Well, it’s February y’all! I’ve seen fried chicken on sale in our honor and the other day, a white dude proudly told me that he knows the whole first stanza of “We Shall Overcome,” to which I gave him a hesitant thumbs-up. All signs point to our four-week time to shine and, because 2012 is a leap year, we get a bonus day. Hot diz-am! I fully intend to make the most of it. I love Harriet Tubman, I appreciate Frederick Douglass, I’m a Tuskegee Airmen groupie, but there is so much more to Black history than them, the Emancipation Proclamation and sports trivia. Out of most of the facts and tidbits pertaining to this fine stretch of year reserved just for us, however, that’s what it pretty much boils down to. You know, I feel like kicking over a crate of kittens every time I see that stupid Ancestry.com commercial where the man is so tentative about exploring his history because he can kinda guess his roots as an African-American. His granddaddy was born a slave, he says—insert his dramatic pause here—but died a business man. And that made his research all worth his while. Here me booing? Because I don’t think there’s any part of our history worth being ashamed of. It all makes up the story of us, sad, heartbreaking and infuriating as some of it is. But it’s made us who we are. And so have these incidents, people and random nuggets about Black-dom. 1. Cathay Williams was the one and only female Buffalo Soldier, posing as a man named William Cathay to enlist in the 38th infantry in 1866. She served for two years before a surgeon stumbled on the fact that she was a woman and saw to it that she was discharged. And, true to sexist convention, she was repeatedly denied military benefits or a pension. 2. Both Condoleezza Rice and Martin Luther King, Jr. skipped two grades and started college when they were just 15 years old. (What were you doing when you were 15, ya slacker?!) She studied political science at the University of Denver; he majored in sociology at Morehouse. 3. Journalist, activist and sistergirl-in-my-head Ida Wells-Barnett refused to give up her railcar seat for a white man in 1884 and bit a conductor on the hand when he tried to force her out of it. He called for backup and she was eventually dragged off the train. She sued the railroad and initially won, but the decision was overturned. The whole experience fueled her passion for justice and journalism. 4. In 2008, Jamaican wonderman Usain Bolt became the first man to ever set three world records in a single Olympic games. Loves! 5. The media made the Black Panthers notorious for their Afros, dark get-ups and willingness to defend themselves, but their Ten Point manifesto for change launched programs that benefited Black communities nationwide, like free dental care, breakfast for low-income children, even drama classes. 6. Lincoln University in Pennsylvania is the first institution of higher education founded for African-Americans. (And don’t let nobody tell you any different—hail hail Lincoln!) It paved the way for the 104 other historically Black colleges, which have produced distinguished alums like Thurgood Marshall, Spike Leeand the almighty Oprah. 7. Black ingenuity helped devise creative—and effective—plans to escape enslavement. In 1848, husband-and-wife team William and Ellen Craft made it to the North and eventually England, when she dressed as a white man and he posed as one of her slaves. A year later, Henry “Box” Brown literally mailed himself to freedom in a shipping box during a 27-hour trip from Richmond to Philadelphia. He couldn’t keep him story to himself, however, and he ended up ticking off Frederick Douglass, who believed that other men and women could’ve escaped the same way if Henry had shut his yap. He eventually went abroad, married a white chick and was never heard from again. 8. Liberia was founded and colonized by U.S. expatriates, one of two sovereign states in the world founded by ex-slaves and marginalized Blacks. Sierra Leone is the other, but that was the handiwork of the British. 9. Jesse Jackson does more than make up words: he negotiated the release of Lt. Robert O. Goodman, Jr., a Black pilot who had been shot down over Syria and taken hostage in 1983. 10. Remember when Will Smith was The Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff was, well, Jazzy Jeff? Together, they won the first-ever Grammy for Best Rap Performance, but they boycotted the awards because the category was barred from television. 11. The hair brush, lawn mower, cellphone, refrigerator and—thank you, sweet baby Jesus—the air conditioner were all the fruits of African-American inventors’ creative laboring. Every time I walk inside on a sweltering hot day, I’m happy to thank a brother for meeting the need. 12. Who knew? Baseball legend Jackie Robinson had an older brother, Matthew, who was also a star athlete in his own right. He won a silver medal in the 200-yard dash in the 1936 Olympics—coming in second to Jesse Owens. 13. Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black major-party presidential candidate survived three assassination attempts during her 1972 campaign. If Kanye was around to make “Stronger,” that could’ve easily been her campaign theme song. 14. Eatonville, Florida, the childhood home of writer and cultural anthropologist (and my all-time favorite author!) Zora Neale Hurston, is also the first town in the country to be incorporated by Black folks.

Teeth slowly sank into the flesh of a lower lip, suppressing the sigh from becoming audible as he watched the gentle sway of Holly's rear while she made her way down the aisle of cubicles. The black material of her skirt made it difficult, but he could just barely make out the soft outline of hidden flesh. Not that Steve needed much of a reminder, he'd taken every chance he could to gaze upon Holly since he'd come to the company two years ago. A slight shake of his head and Steve's attention returned to the glowing screen in front of him. An AutoCad drawing stared back at him and rotated as he took his time going over the piece. Not the most glamorous job in the world, but it paid the student loan bills and maybe next year he'd get his professional engineers license. Till then, well no real complaints except for the lack of nooky situation and that couldn't be helped with his hours so he banished the thought. A few more clicks and the printer came to life, made the seemingly requisite number of shifts and adjustments before quickly spitting out a small stack of paperwork. A quick shuffle through to ensure each sheet printed clearly and he rose out his chair and made his way out of the cubicle. Down the aisles of cubicles he walked, steps quickening in anticipation of seeing her again. It had taken a few months before Steve admitted to himself that he had a major crush on Holly, but each time he'd had the opportunity to ask her out Steve had felt his mouth go dry. Holly was just so different than the usual type of woman he'd dated; for starters she was older than he was, thirty-one which made her seven years his superior. She was the resident math whiz for the company, with a master's degree from the University of Michigan. A bit of a geek, a sonic screwdriver sat in one of the desk drawers and would be brought out to playfully zap at the computer whenever it did something she didn't agree with. Steve felt a little smile tug on his face as he saw the shock of red hair, tied up in a bun, just over the top of the monitor. "Hey Holly, here's the latest drawings and figures on the cup holder design." He laid the paperwork down on an empty spot of her desk and stole the opportunity to glance down her blouse. Perhaps not the brightest idea but he couldn't resist. She didn't show much skin, but he enjoyed what he saw. Holly held her pose for a moment or two longer than she normally would have, taking the time to suppress the tiny curl of lips in a smile. She knew he was looking, Steve always did and he probably never realized that when he did he would swell just enough that she could see the tip of his cock press against his slacks. Never enough to give an outline, just enough for her to know where it was laying and she'd known seen it often enough to be able to know at a glance when he was wearing boxers and when he was wearing briefs. Today, it was boxers and she briefly mused about how he would react if he knew that right now she didn't have anything on under her skirt. "Thanks Steve, I'll get these back to you shortly." Azure eyes glanced over the black wire rim of her glasses to look at his face. She watched him turn around and walk back towards his desk, gait just so changed to hide his arousal. As he went out of sight she shifted her hips a bit, grateful for the desk having a panel in front as it hid her movements. She could feel a little bit of her juices slip down and around her puckered rear. This was enough, she was tired of waiting for him to make the first move, and tonight would be the night. As everyone in the office packed up for the night Holly was in the woman's bathroom making sure her makeup was fresh. She took a deep breath and gave herself one more look-over in the mirror, not perfect but the face that stared back at her was as good as she figured it would get. Auburn hair had been released from the bun and a few run seconds with a comb had brought back most of its natural bounce. Hands briefly cupped her breasts through her clothing, a touch of a sag that couldn't be helped from age but still a full C cup. Hands slid down her waist, denting in pleasingly, and came to rest upon full hips. She sighed for a moment, since puberty she'd had wide hips, nothing to be done about it though she did like her arse and obviously Steve did as well. At the thought of the earlier moment she gave a little squirm and glanced at her watch. Five minutes after the hour, she drew in a breath; it was now or never and ran out the door towards his desk. "Hey Steve, do you have a minute?" He glanced up from putting a folder into his laptop bag to see Holly looking down at him. "Ummm sure, what's up?" Yeah, not the smoothest but hey he was caught off guard and well he was trying to figure out if her perfume had somehow gotten stronger or if it was his imagination. "Well, I need to talk to you about those drawings you handed me earlier. I know it's late, but I think it's important. To make it up, why don't we discuss it over dinner at Houlihans? My treat." Steve stared at her for a moment, was she asking him out? Well any chance to get to spend more time with her and hey it was better than his intentions of watching SportsCenter and eating leftovers. "Sure, just let me finish packing up here and I'll be ready to go. Want me to follow or meet there?" "Great. Follow me when you're done. I'm really sorry to keep you working late." She grinned a little to herself, hopefully though he wouldn't be thinking about work much later in the evening. The host seated them at the table and gave them the menus. She watched as he undid the cloth napkin and placed it in his lap, both pleased at his manners and yet disappointed as it would be just that much harder to enjoy a sneak peek. She ordered a Riesling when the waiter appeared and then got down to business. She had made a few notes and plenty of things to discuss in regards to the work, planning to buy herself time to get a glass or two of wine down and loosen herself up. As dinner arrived they wrapped up discussion about the project and let the conversation flow towards more personal topics. Chat went on about work goals, personal goals, and touched on past relationships. Holly made sure to keep her alcohol consumption in check, careful to not appear this was any more than a work related dinner. When she finished her dinner, she took a breath and held it in with eyes closed. Her eyes slowly opened and met his, "Steve, would you like to get coffee at my place after this?" Poor Steve had been in the midst of a bite when she asked him, resulting in a cough. Had he heard her right, was she indeed asking him back to her place? He trembled a little inside and struggled to smooth his voice, managing to simply tell her, "Sure." His mind, however, had reverted to all sorts of different thoughts which resulted in his pants suddenly feeling much tighter than they had before. How he was going to get through the rest of the evening without her noticing was going to be a challenge indeed. It didn't help matters that every time he tried to think of a way, the image of her scrumptious rear entered his head. So concentrated was he on trying to appear calm that Steve never noticed Holly's lustful glance towards his tented pants and the ensuing light bite of her lower lip. Heck, it was problematic for him to make the drive but yet next thing he knew she was pulling into the driveway of a modest house. It seemed a little large for a single person, more family sized but maybe she was just planning for the future he thought. Into her home he followed and sat upon the couch as directed. Hands fell to his lap as he surveyed the living room while listening to her fiddle around the kitchen presumably making coffee. He slowly managed to will his cock to deflate, at least enough so that it wasn't obvious. When she returned with coffee, he graciously took the offered mug, the first sip revealing it was spiked with Baileys. He looked over at her, realizing that another button of her blouse was now undone and he could just see the dark green of her bra. The warmth of the Baileys helped to relax the tension in his shoulders, but nothing would have prepared him for what next came forth from her lips, "So would you like to see the ass you seem to love staring at without a skirt covering it?" His jaw just dropped and well, his pants became very tight again, mouth becoming dry and words failing him. Instead, she just smiled at him, "I'll take that as a yes..." and undid her skirt, letting it fall to the floor then carefully stepping out of it before sauntering over to him and kneeling before him. She wasn't exactly sure what had come over her, this was much bolder than she had originally envisioned it and yet it felt right. She looked up at him, eyes watching his while a hand slid up his khaki pant covered leg and gently caressed the throbbing shaft beneath it. A soft groan escaped her lips as she finally felt it, even if it was still clothed. Emboldened, her other hand went to his zipper and slid it down, then undid belt and button. Her breaths came at a quickened pace as she could clearly see the outline in his underwear, the head and shaft clear to her now. Fingers curled in the band and slowly she pulled the last article of clothing down, nostrils filling with his scent as eyes drank in each inch of his shaft. So engrossed with watching she was, the tip hit her chin as it was released from its restraint. When she realized what had hit her a low moan was released and her hand slid over to wrap fingers around the shaft. He wasn't huge by any means but fit her hand comfortably and slowly she began to stroke the shaft, pulling foreskin down to reveal the head. "Oh Steve...it's gorgeous." And to her it was perfect, with a thickness enough that she knew it would stretch her, a slight bend in the middle, and a head that begged for her attention. No longer could she wait, her head bent over and lips wrapped around the shaft just above her fingers content just to hold him in her mouth. The taste was slightly salty and yet pleasing, softly she suckled with her tongue bathing the head lovingly. Free hand traveled up his legs to find and cup his balls, gently rolling them around in her fingers. One by one she undid the fingers around his shaft, replacing them with her lips as her mouth slid down until finally her nose was pressed against his body and her mouth was filled with throbbing cock. Gently she held him there, until she felt fingers find her hair and the back of her head. Slowly at first she began to bob her head along the shaft, taking her time and milking the feeling of him gliding in and out of her mouth. Her tongue pressed against the bottom of the shaft with each movement upwards and flicked the tip each time only the head was in her mouth. She paid attention to each of the little moans and groans that he uttered and as the urgency began to rise she stopped going down and held only the head of his cock while fingers again wrapped around the shaft and began to stroke him, faster than her mouth could. She turned eyes up and watched his facial expressions, smiling as she watched the ecstasy she had wrought. Her lips released his cock only long enough to utter "Cum in my mouth," then replaced them around the shaft. Moments later she felt him swell oh so slightly and then her mouth filled with his cum, trying her best to swallow it all but failing with some leaking out the corners of her mouth. Slowly she took her time to lick over the lost cum, cleaning his cock thoroughly and pleasantly noting it wasn't going soft. Steve felt like he was in a dream as he watched and felt Holly blow him, the woman he had lusted after for so long on her knees before him, it almost would not have felt real and yet it was. He relaxed into the sofa, sliding an arm around her waist as she came up to sit next to him, making sure his hand got to cup one of her ass cheeks, giving it a pleasant grope. He just smiled at her for a minute or two, relaxing in the post orgasmic bliss. As he regained the ability to move his free arm came up to brush a strand of hair from her face and he leaned in for that first kiss, tongue slipping between her lips to meet hers and uncaring that he could taste his own cum. Slowly he broke the kiss and just looked at her, smiling. "That was better than I could have ever imagined." She blushed furiously at the comment, "Well, I do have a little experience. I hope you don't mind I was so brazen." Even though she really doubted he minded, it just seemed the polite thing to say. "Ummm, I'll only mind if you say this is a one-time only thing." Fingers began to wander up the inside of her thigh, index finger caressing the puckered skin of her rear hole. "I'm getting too old for one-time only deals..." She squealed at the presence of the finger at her rear entrance, then ground a bit against it. "Love my ass that much dear?" "And then some!" He grinned as it was his turn to slip to a kneeling position, lips coming to kiss from the top of the red landing strip of hair, down towards a drenched pussy and while very tempted to remain there, on to their real target. He watched her for any disapproval as lips met her arse, then slowly he traced his tongue over the flesh. Her only response was to moan in anticipation and thrust hips at him. Grinning a little to himself he stuck his thumb in his mouth, soaking it wet with saliva, then gently pressed against her puckered hole till it began to slowly slip into her, pushing until he was in up to his first knuckle. Steve watched her face, resting the side of his head on one of her thighs as he slowly finger-fucked her rear. He took his time, savoring finally getting to do what he had dreamed of doing for the last couple of years. Her fingers entangled in his hair, she gently pulled his face towards her hoarsely whispering "Eat me...please." Tongue darted out to caress over puffy outer lips, taking its time to trace over the outside before caressing the tender slit. He slid his tongue up to flick over her clit, grinning as she moaned. The hand with its thumb in her rear twisted just slightly so he could push two fingers into her moist slit and rub the tips of fingers against his thumb with her gently pinched between then. Her clit he worked with tongue and soft suction, and fingers steadily increasing their rhythm within tight holes, working them faster as her panting grew till her body shook and shuddered with orgasm, coating his fingers with her slick cum. Then gently he backed off, slowly slipping fingers out of her and giving her pussy one last kiss before rising and heading to the bathroom to rinse off his hands. Holly laid back into the couch, taking deep breaths as her heart slowed back to its normal pace. She smiled as the water in the sink began to run and licked her lips. It was a very good start to the night indeed. She rose from the couch and made her way to join him in the bathroom, sliding up behind him and reaching around to take a firm grasp of his still hard cock. "Mmmmm, I could get used to this. Already ready for another round lover? Which hole would you like to invade next?" She leaned up on tip toes to flick her tongue against his ear and whisper "Would you like to fuck my tight ass? Fill it with cum and claim me as yours?" She giggled at his wide eyed nod and led him by the cock towards her bedroom; putting a hand on his chest she gently pushed him onto his back on the bed. Holly opened the drawer to a nightstand and pulled out a bottle of lube. Straddling his chest, she leaned over and began to coat his cock in the slippery liquid, hand slowly stroking and admiring it. She then rose to her knees and moved forwards till she was right above the shaft and guided him to her tight hold before settling down, gasping as she felt the head slip into her. A moan of delight escaped both their lips as she lowered her ass, taking him in until her cheeks rested against him. For a minute or two she sat there, savoring the feeling of being full of his throbbing meat, then gently she began to rock, first just an inch at the time and slowly increasing the length of the stroke until she was just barely keeping the tip in and thrusting down hard. Wildly she bounced on him, fucking herself hard with each stroke. Through two complete orgasms she rode him this way, then lifted herself up, turned around and settled back down, taking him deep again and immediately fucking his cock as hard as she could. Her body dripped with sweat as she slammed herself full of him over and over again watching the pleasure wrought on his face till at last he grabbed her ass cheeks and pulled her close to him, hips thrusting upwards as he began to pump her rear full of cum. As their orgasms subsided she collapsed on his chest, both breathing hard against the other. Her hand came up to run fingers through his hair while watching him drift off in post orgasm slumber. She allowed herself just enough time to slip off his member, then curled up against his body, head resting on his shoulder before slipping into blissful slumber, content in how right it felt.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (www.incnow.tv) - A Notre Dame linebacker's heartbreak that became a headline of the 2012 college football season has been uncovered a hoax. Te'o inspired a nation, football fans and not, when he led his Fightin' Irish to a huge road victory at Michigan State days after losing his grandmother and girlfriend. His grandmother, Annette Santiago, 72, died in the evening of Tues., Sept. 11. Six hours later, Lennay Kekua was reported dead of cancer. Wednesday, the world learned the girlfriend never existed; her death never happened. "Someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti," the University of Notre Dame said in a release. "And then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia." Deadspin broke the story Wednesday. Beyond the confusion of the story and the shock of the details, the role Te'o had in the hoax has been a major question. "Manti was the victim of the hoax, and will carry that for a while," Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame vice president & athletic director, said at a press conference Wednesday night. "This was a very elaborate, sophisticated hoax perpetrated for reasons we can't fully understand." Swarbrick says Te'o learned of the hoax in a call at the ESPN Home Depot College Awards show on Dec. 6. from the woman who had pretended to be his girlfriend. The familiar voice with the familiar number saying she was in fact alive. Te'o would keep that phone call a secret until Dec. 26, Swarbrick says; eventually notifying Irish coaching staff about the call. From there, the university launched an investigation, hiring a private security firm. The investigation yielded a Cat Fish-like hoax, Swarbrick says, where people create fake dating profiles to scam unsuspecting potential mates. "I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online," Te'o says in a statement released Wednesday night. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online." Swarbrick says Te'o planned to come out with the details of the hoax in the days to come; until Deadspin ran the story first. Deadspin says it tracked down a young woman in Torrence, Calif., whose photos were used by a former high school classmate to perpetuate the hoax. Deadspin did not identify the woman, but did identify as the classmate as Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a member of a famous Samoan family with long roots in college and professional football. An identified friend of Tuiasosopo's says he is "80 percent sure" Te'o was in on the hoax. Te'o also maintains he was a victim in this saga. "To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating," Te'o's statement read. "I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been." "The single-most trusting human being I've ever met will never be able to trust in the same way again in his life," a choked-up Swarbrick said of Te'o. "That's an incredible tragedy." Te'o won a slew of defensive awards at the end of the season, and looks to be a high pick in the upcoming NFL Draft. What are your thoughts CLICK HERE to leave us a "QUESTION OF THE DAY” comment. © Copyright 2016, A Quincy Media broadcasting station. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

MIAMI (CBS4) — They’re everywhere! On the fashion runways, in the stores, on the streets–women and their high heels! There’s no doubt about it, women love to wear high heels. There’s just something about them. They make us feel sexy. But unfortunately, the more time we spend in our heels can lead to time spent in this orthopedic boot, and these aren’t too sexy! “The number one cause of high heel problems is probably pain in the bottom of the foot,” Dr. Kevin Berkowitz told CBS4’s Lisa Petrillo. Berkowitz, with Miami Beach Foot & Ankle Surgery, is now seeing women, mostly between 30 and 55, who’ve messed up the mechanics of their feet and ankles because they lived their lives in high heels. “It’s not just the height, it’s the narrow nature of the heel now,” explained Dr. Berkowitz. “The higher you go the more stretch there is to the ball of the foot. If you put your foot in that position…in the ballet stance…you’re just going to have compression and pain.” Berkowitz said it’s simple: As a woman squeezes her foot into an unrealistically narrow toe box, with astronomical heights, the soft tissues such as ligaments and tendons begin to stretch and tear, even rupture, and the mechanics of the ankle are altered. After time, hammertoes and bunions occur. Even knee and back pain can often be attributed to high heels. “At the end of the day it was like this pressure pounding like throbbing pain,” said Maria Duenas, who has had to have foot surgery. Duenas has been wearing high heels since she was a young teen because she said she wanted to be tall. The result? Bunion surgery two-and-a-half years ago. Mabel Lezcano, 38, put her first pair of sky-high stilettos on at age 15. “Really bad pain,” Lezcano told Petrillo. “Especially to walk and do regular things.” “Did you have trouble buying new shoes because of the bunions,” asked Petrillo. “Oh, definitely,” she responded. Dr. Berkowitz operated on both women. He showed Petrillo Mabel’s x-ray before surgery. It showed her foot deformed due to bunions and hammer toes. “This is where the fifth metatarcil starts to splay outward and then the shoe puts pressure on both sides in addition to putting pressure on the toe,” explained Berkowitz. Then Berkowitz showed Petrillo Mabel’s X-ray after her bunion was removed and hammertoe corrected. Although Berkowitz told us bunions are mostly genetic, he said they are exacerbated by the choice of shoes like today’s super stilettos. “My advice to women is don’t wear your fabulous shoes to Publix,” advised Berkowitz. Another foot pain factor is the amount of time spent in high heels. “If you’re sitting at a desk with your heel on and you’re working at a desk, that’s not terrible. But if you’re on your feet all day, running around doing things and then you’re going to a function after work and you’re in your heels eight to 12 hours a day over the course of time, your feet are going to suffer,” insisted Berkowitz. He advises women to change things up. Wear a two-inch pump one day and four-inch heels at night, flats or walking shoes the next day. When Petrillo pulled a few of her own shoes out of a bag for his assessment, “The five-inch thin stiletto or five-inch wedge?” she asked Berkowitz. “The better shoe is this shoe. The wedge wins all the time,” he declared. It took Mabel and Maria about six to 12 weeks of recovery before they were able to wear comfortable shoes, and about eight-months before they were back in heels again. Petrillo asked Maria, “In the end was it worth it for you? Having the surgery? Wearing the heels? Going through the whole thing?” “Oh yeah,” responded Maria with a grin. “Yeah!” “You’re not saying to women don’t wear high heels,” Petrillo quizzed Berkowitz. “No, I would never say that,” he told her. “That’s like telling a woman she doesn’t look good in that dress!” A tip for parents: Dr. Berkowitz says he does not recommend girls under 16 wear high heels for long periods of time at all. This is because their bones are still developing and forcing the toes into an abnormal position during these growth years will lead to foot problems later on, and at a much younger age.

Sort: Category . Published . Updated . Title . Words . Chapters . Reviews . Status . by Maeven reviews Sam Westlane is the new kid in the famous all boys Crestan High School for the rich and the spoiled ... There's only one problem. Sam is a girl. Fiction: Romance - Rated: T - English - Romance/Humor - Chapters: 30 - Words: 114,525 - Reviews: 7239 - Favs: 6,221 - Follows: 930 - Updated: 1/5/2009 - Published: 9/5/2003 - Complete Heart of the Desert by oreos reviews As war threatens the wealthy and exotic country of Sirabia, Aysa struggles with her own personal wars with a brother who wants her dead and 2 men who would claim her heart Fiction: Romance - Rated: T - English - Romance/Adventure - Chapters: 1 - Words: 5,059 - Reviews: 81 - Favs: 24 - Follows: 8 - Updated: 7/19/2008 - Published: 4/10/2004 Days of Rain by Horizon Passage reviews A selfish king kidnaps a naive princess and forces her to marry his youngest son. Little did he know the pairing was fulfilling not only their destiny, but the destiny of the planet. Please read and review. Chapter 16 is up, and will be updated again soon Fiction: Romance - Rated: T - English - Fantasy/Angst - Chapters: 16 - Words: 20,657 - Reviews: 112 - Favs: 24 - Follows: 24 - Updated: 6/29/2007 - Published: 11/27/2004 The Guardian Angel by Little Miss Angel reviews [COMPLETE] Eric is half naked when he walks into his room to find Aurora sitting on his bed. What's he supposed to say when she tells him that she's his guardian angel? He's destined for great things, but what happens when forbidden feelings develop? Fiction: Romance - Rated: T - English - Fantasy/Romance - Chapters: 1 - Words: 2,114 - Reviews: 491 - Favs: 350 - Follows: 63 - Updated: 2/2/2007 - Published: 8/7/2006 - Complete The Lost Princess by kristy23 reviews A desperate Queen has given birth to a girl. The maid has given birth to a boy. A secret exchange changes the lives of the children forever. What happens years later when that girl learns what happened? Will she demand her rights? Will anyone believe her? Fiction: Historical - Rated: T - English - Romance/Drama - Chapters: 13 - Words: 36,008 - Reviews: 320 - Favs: 156 - Follows: 129 - Updated: 10/31/2006 - Published: 6/14/2006 by Vae Victus reviews More than anything Willamina wanted to feel the sea beneath her legs and the only thing that was stopping her was her sex, so she took matters into her own hands. Now she has she has to deal with her Captain, a man whom terrifies her more than anything. Fiction: Historical - Rated: M - English - Romance/Drama - Chapters: 1 - Words: 1,359 - Reviews: 4 - Favs: 3 - Follows: 4 - Published: 8/22/2006 Reason and Romance by Myrika reviews Adrian Blake is tired of looking for that perfect romance, but when she meets Alex Montgomery, she forgets all reason. And yet she can't forget he's her new stepbrother. //REMOVED// Fiction: Romance - Rated: M - English - Romance - Chapters: 29 - Words: 4,293 - Reviews: 4342 - Favs: 1,551 - Follows: 134 - Updated: 8/15/2006 - Published: 12/15/2005 - Complete AGAINST ALL ODDS by Heidi Mackenzie reviews Mid 1400s. Chá (pronounced Shay) is a mistreated servant girl. Jakob is the son of a king. Their lives have never crossed paths, but when they do, they fall hopelessly in love. FINISHED! Please R&R! Fiction: Romance - Rated: M - English - Romance/Angst - Chapters: 31 - Words: 60,974 - Reviews: 490 - Favs: 188 - Follows: 13 - Updated: 11/11/2005 - Published: 7/19/2003 by Nocturnal silhouette reviews The enchantress, a seductive goddess, an alluring night maiden. And the man who loves her. ONE SHOT Fiction: Romance - Rated: M - English - Romance - Chapters: 1 - Words: 3,429 - Reviews: 10 - Favs: 64 - Follows: 8 - Published: 8/3/2005 - Complete Omundor's Daughters – Forbidden by KaiaLeigh reviews Clip: The instant one of his hands were free he snatched a hand full of my hair from the top of my head. I looked at him as he just sat there in silence and peered down at me with his icy blue eyes like I was nothing more than.sum in profile Fiction: Romance - Rated: T - English - Romance/Sci-Fi - Chapters: 18 - Words: 26,103 - Reviews: 137 - Favs: 42 - Follows: 4 - Updated: 7/10/2005 - Published: 5/22/2005 - Complete by Scribe Mozell reviews A modern woman unwittingly angers a Roman goddess and is thrown back in time and place. She must face the dangers and difficulties of life as a slave--complicated by a VERY interested master. Fiction: Romance - Rated: M - English - Fantasy/Drama - Chapters: 23 - Words: 57,753 - Reviews: 306 - Favs: 405 - Follows: 65 - Updated: 6/9/2003 - Published: 4/25/2003 Once and Future Queen by cOOkiMoNsteR626 reviews 1550 BC; a young princess is sent to marry the king of Knossos, Crete. It was the duty as a princess to wed and bear children. What she didn't expect was to fall completely in love with the king. Tho their fates were sealed, can love conquer all? COMPLETE Fiction: Romance - Rated: T - English - Romance/Drama - Chapters: 16 - Words: 57,862 - Reviews: 447 - Favs: 332 - Follows: 31 - Updated: 6/9/2003 - Published: 5/26/2003

© NMeM / Photographic Advertising / Science & Society. Man and woman reading by a fireside, 1950. In Small Town England, nearly all the names have been changed. For the highly charged section called ‘Lincolnshire Love Rectangle’, the names have been double-changed then put through a special filter of Enigma Code complexity, so that it’s unbreakable. That said, there will be forty-somethhing couples sitting down to relax in the evening, reading copies of the book, and the bloke will splutter “Lips like cherries, thighs like California redwoods, brought up in Lincolnshire – my God, Gladys, he’s writing about you.” Sometimes you just can’t disguise a character. None of the readers of Small Town England so far have picked up on the fact that the book is to a small extent an East Midlands reworking of Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy, with the 10 inch deep River Rase standing in for the majestic Merrimack, the Market Rasen Festival Hall for the Rex Ballroom and 50cc motorbikes instead of Model-T Fords. When I was seventeen and a frustrated want-away teenager in empty Lincolnshire, I felt a real connection with Jack Kerouac's work. I loved On the Road, with that wayward musical romantic prose energy (I even bought a Dexter Gordon live album to play while I re-read it). But it was the sublime read-it-in-an-hour-and-a-half Maggie Cassidy, with its heady mix of small town mysticism, indoor sprinting techniques, doomed love affairs and mammy's-boy sentimentality that really got me hooked. In later years I think I forgot why I'd liked him so much. Then about thirteen years ago I read Dharma Bums for the first time. No plot as such – blokes climb mountains, spout buddhist philosophy, act like arses after too much red wine – but this stuff really is sheer poetry and reading it I remembered the mad confused joy of being alive I'd had when I was a kid. In the last few years I've also attempted heroically obscure non-fiction versions of On The Road (Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?) and The Subterraneans (The Groundwater Diaries). Which means the next project might possibly be a reworking of Dharma Bums – in which I take off to a forest (Highgate Wood, perhaps, or maybe Finsbury Park) and get drunk for two or three months – OK, a couple of hours, tops, because I'd need to pick the kids up from school. This pic is from a short series I did for the Guardian Review a few years ago called Writers' Workshop. It tries to get to the true essence of Jack-ness.

Taurus Riley sings a song entitled, ” Pick up the Pieces” Like a woman who has been heart broken, afraid to open up her heart and love again, when a loyal love comes forward, she and her king man pick up the pieces. Two brothers, two countries have and do see the benefit of picking up the pieces and mending broken hearts, dreams, and families. Awo Ethiopian and Eritrean are brothers and sisters working out their differences, reconciling, after much trauma and war. Eritrea and Ethiopia to re-establish diplomatic ties – BBC News Ethiopia and Eritrea agree to normalise ties, reopen embassies YHWH’S rightful rulership is a sovereign leadership. As Eritrea and Ethiopia reconcile, YHWH look upon the two brothers reconciliation as future generations rise up. As Israel and Judah, Judaeo Christianity watch what is happening, in Ruach, Truth and Reality, follow and or lead. Ihit Ahkotee, Mary Rose

“Why Do You Need Two Wreaths?” Copyright 2013 by Lori-Ann Willey Copyright 2013 by Lori-Ann Willey I usually have a “Veteran Story” to relay after spending half or nearly all day at a Veteran’s hospital with Paul. Today was no different, though I thought we were going to leave without a story that touched my heart in one way or another. Today was Paul’s annual physical, and that means once a year, a full day of waiting in one waiting room after another is not only the general rule, but expected. Today was a “light” day with only eight appointments scheduled. After Paul’s last appointment with Judi, the RN of the SCI (Spinal Cord Injury) clinic, we gave hugs and once again thanked her for always being there for us, and not just us, but for the love and attention she gives all her disabled Veteran patients and families. Judi is an “Unsung Hero” of the SCI clinic, and a remarkable woman to say the least. A woman who dedicates herself to her patients come Hell or high water. Once, she had an opportunity to take an amazing job elsewhere, but she did not take the job, because as she told us, ‘I love all these guys. I know them better than anyone does! I couldn’t leave.’ As we exited the elevator on the ground level, I found myself disappointed that I had not yet heard a Veteran’s story. Of all the waiting rooms we sat in, not one Veteran opened up. I do not know if it was because it was early in the morning, or just a somber day of reflection. I will never know, but I do know that I felt that I was the one missing out. The exit was just up ahead, when we came to an intersection in the hallway. Our hallway was to merge into a larger hallway. We stopped and waited for a few people to stroll on by, and as the last man walked past, I chuckled out to him, “Watch out. He might take you out!” I was referring to Paul and his wheelchair, but speaking to the man walking. He turned and chuckled as he murmured something I could not hear or understand. We turned the corner and continued down the hallway behind the man, when he stopped and spoke. He was going to let us go past him. We smiled and the second he spoke, we stopped to listen to his words. He spoke with a smile. He was an older stout man I’d guess to be in his lower 70’s, and like some people when they strike up a conversation, he kind of started mid thought so it took me a couple of sentences to piece together his topic. This is what he told us: He once stood in an area where someone was handing out holiday wreaths. He did not indicate whether they were free, sold, or given after a donation for a cause. As he stood, he saw a man in a wheelchair. He noticed that people were stepping in front of him as if he did not exist, yet the Veteran never said a word and never pushed his way through, instead, he sat and patiently waited for his opportunity to approach the wreath giver. A young Marine in uniform worked his way to the front of the line and asked for two wreaths. The wreath giver asked, “Why do you need two wreaths?” The Marine looked up at him, held his pointer finger up in front of him, and said, “Watch. You’ll see.” To this, the Marine turned around, walked a few steps back toward the man in the wheelchair, and handed him a wreath. The older storyteller was now leaning his back against the wall beside us. He shook his head as he told us the story, and said, “Some people just don’t understand what it is like. They look at you and then they look beyond. I always let them go first. They have earned that rite.” Part of me understood the meaning of his story, while another part of me could not help but ponder another thought. The man spoke in the past tense, and given this man’s age, I wondered if this story took place back in the 1960’s when there was a lot of protests about the Vietnam War, where the Veteran’s who served to protect us were not welcomed back on American soil by many simply because they did not support the war. Maybe that was the key point the gentle man did not speak of, but did he have to? Respect is respect, and courtesy is courtesy. Remember to thank a Veteran.

Have you been struggling with how to talk to your tween about sex? Me, too. At what age did you have “the talk”? I mean we’ve talked about puberty. In fact, we’ve talked puberty to death. It’s old news. They both know so much about the inner workings of the female reproductive system that they could probably teach a class. But we’ve not quite made the leap to …you put the penis in the vagina and do that thang. I’ve been mulling this idea over for years, waiting for the right moment. I just haven’t been ready to see the innocence disappear from her eyes. I told my tween that she and I would have “the talk” before she turns 12. In a culture where Teen Mom is a show that makes celebrities, I want my daughter to know babies are a lot or work and where those babies come from. She wants nothing to do with that conversation. Boys are not even on her radar yet. She is still pretty happy with unicorns, slumber parties and playing with dolls but I don’t want her getting misinformation about sex from other kids. I promised myself I’d talk to my tween about sex before she was 12 and now, I have less than a month, people. Fool that I am, I made plans. The universe laughed at me and then life intervened. Now, I’m binge-reading all the articles on how to talk to your tween about sex because a teachable moment has arisen. No, before any of you have a stroke, it has nothing to do with her and sex. It’s more of a collateral damage situation. But how to talk to your tween about sex is not an easy thing to figure out. It has to be the perfect balance of honesty, openness and availability. The conversation has to be had with every child and no nervous giggling or embarrassment is allowed on the parents part. We have to be a source of information and comfort. They have to believe we know what we’re talking about and not be afraid to ask questions. Last Tuesday was Valentine’s Day, I’m sure you know where this is going, and let’s just say the Big Guy and I were feeling particularly amorous. Him and all his damn romantic gestures. Anyways, apparently, we actually made some noise. We usually use our inside voices because, you know, KIDS! (TMI, I’m sorry.) My 11-year-old had the misfortune of getting up to pee at the wrong time and now, we all need therapy. It’s all giving me flashbacks to the time when she was a toddler and she caught us “wrestling”. If these kids would JUST STAY IN THEIR BEDS. (Sidebar, just say no to co-sleeping this is what got us to where we are today. I jest, sorta.) The thing is the tween is very mature in many ways but very immature in other ways. She’s at that age where she’s beginning to look like a young woman but her brain is not quite there yet. She’s caught somewhere between working her eye roll and still coming in for snuggles and mama cuddles on the regular. Either way, you’ve got to figure out how to talk to your tween about sex sooner or later. Anyways, to be clear, I was not howling at the moon or anything like that but when you are a kid and you hear anything coming from your parents’ bedroom other than snoring, you are instantly disgusted. We had no idea any of this took place until the following morning. We thought they were asleep. All I know was that she got up on Wednesday morning particularly annoyed for no particular reason, as far as I was aware. I just took it for regular tween behavior. Honestly, one minute she’s being all tweeny and the next she is playing American Girl dolls with her little sister. I can’t keep up. She is a fantastic kid. She’s just a bit moody these days. I get it. I’ve been there. I am sympathetic. But after school, I asked her point blank how her day was. Her answer was, “It would have been fine if I had gotten more than 3 hours of sleep last night!” I volleyed back with my standard, “Well if you went to sleep at your bedtime instead of staying up messing around on your tablet or playing Barbies, you wouldn’t be so exhausted and grouchy.” To which she responded, “No, mom I only got 3-hours of sleep because of you and dad!” And with that, her lip curled and I could see the disgust. Suddenly, I felt like I was in that commercial back in the 70’s where the kid does the really shitty behavior, I think it was drugs or something, and says, “I learned it from you, dad!” It was that bam! You are to blame. My next question, the one I wish I had never asked, “What is that supposed to mean? How is this our fault?” I was a little annoyed because I am not, in fact, to blame for everything. The answer I didn’t want to hear, “Well, I had to pee and when I got up I heard your “weird noises” coming from the bedroom AND my sleep pillow and FIFI were held hostage in there! How am I supposed to sleep without them and after hearing THAT!!!!!” There it was. Firstly, I was a little embarrassed that she heard anything so I did what any sane mom would do, I told her that it was her dad. My second thought was, “Oh no, we traumatized her!” I finally did it. I irrevocably damaged my kid. I have to start saving for the therapy. Then, I thought to myself, this “tween” who pushes me and pulls me back so much on a daily basis that I don’t know if I’m coming or going had purposely left her snuggle pillow and lovey in my room so that she could sneak in there in the middle of the night to sleep. Oh yeah, she still does that occasionally. I’m not complaining but she does bear some responsibility in all of this.I’m not going to lie. I was pretty embarrassed. I don’t get embarrassed but we were both red in the face. Then I sucked it up and said, “Hey, I know it was uncomfortable to hear whatever you heard but we’re married and we love each other. This is what people who are married and in love do to share physical intimacy. It’s completely natural!” Then I decided to add, “Besides, isn’t it better to hear “that” than your father and I screaming how much we hate each other behind those doors?” To which she agreed. Then she looked at her little sister, her voice went down near a whisper and she said, “But I didn’t want to hear you DOING.IT!” Then, I threw up in my mouth a little bit. My response, “Firstly, we never saying “doing it” ever again. It’s called “making love.”” Because hearing my 11-year-old say “doing it” in reference to her father and I, skeeved me out. Of course, hearing myself say, “making love” out loud was nearly as creepy. So we decided to just agree that when the bedroom door is shut, we’re probably together not sleeping. I told her if it really bothered her, I could buy her ear plugs. She was mortified but swiftly answered, Boundaries were set. If the bedroom door is shut, stay out. I considered getting one of those old license plates that said, “If the bedroom’s a rockin, don’t bother knockin” and hanging it on our door but I thought it was probably still too soon for that joke. We still have to have “the talk” but I’m pretty sure she knows what’s going on. I also feel like I need to add a disclaimer to our talk that when she has sex for the first time, what she heard will probably not be what will be happening because, you know, teenage boys are bumbling idiots. But what am I going to do, tell her to sleep with older men if she wants it to be worth her time? Nope, I’ll just let her suffer through crappy first-time sex like the rest of us besides, after all that eye rolling shade she’s been throwing my way lately, an awkward first time when she’s at college is just what the doctor ordered. Shhh, don’t tell me otherwise. College is my story and I’m sticking to it. Anyways, I’ve still got to have this talk but now, it feels super weird because I feel like she’s going to relate the entire thing to her father and me. And EWWWW!

Get to know Dr. Karen Bender, pediatric anesthesiologist at Arnold Palmer Hospital Knowing that your child needs surgery can be difficult for any parent. One of the most frightening aspects for parents is knowing that your child will be under anesthesia. How will my child respond to the anesthesia? Will he or she recover well? Will you keep my child safe? These are just a few of the many questions that parents have as they prepare their child for surgery. Our pediatric anesthesia team at Arnold Palmer Hospital is nothing short of extraordinary. Our team has a small window of time to assure patients and their families that they can be trusted, and that their child is in the best of hands. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Karen Bender, chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Orlando Health Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies, to help our community get to know her better, and bring awareness to the life-saving work of Dr. Bender and her team. Where did you grow up?I grew up just outside of Philadelphia in Camden, New Jersey, and then my family moved to Ft. Lauderdale when I was in high school. Where did you go to medical school?I went to undergraduate and medical school at the University of Florida (Go Gators!). What are your hobbies? What do you like to do when you aren’t in the hospital taking care of kids?I enjoy helping other people. I think of that as my life's work and my biggest hobby. I also am an avid reader and love learning. I have no athletic gifts – I’m pretty terrible at all sports, but I exercise regularly and love watching SEC football. Over the years, I’ve taught myself Spanish. I once chaperoned a trip for high school students at a language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico where I had the opportunity to study the language for three weeks. Since I now no longer need a translator, I am able to better communicate with Spanish-speaking families who have a child in need of surgery at the hospital. I also like to educate myself on various cultural differences and backgrounds, which helps me to better understand and respond to each patient's unique healthcare needs. I have raised three children - two are finished with college and in the workforce, and my youngest began college this year. How do you help other people outside of Arnold Palmer Hospital?I’ve had the opportunity to provide medical care to people in other countries who have limited access to healthcare resources for over 22 years. Because I’m also a board-certified pediatrician, I donate of a lot of time caring for kids, mostly in Mexico. I am also passionate about caring for women who come to the United States who are unable to speak English well, if at all. I teach English classes as a way to help give them a positive start in their new environment. What would your dream vacation be?Well, I do love to travel. When I get time off, I love to travel because I love history. I think that when you understand the past, you can better understand the present. I love art and architecture. Most of my family roots are in Russia, where I was able to visit about six years ago. I’ve been to Egypt, South Africa, Argentina, and most of Western Europe as well as many wonderful places in the United States. Out of all of the places you’ve been, where would you like to visit again?That’s a hard question for me to answer, because I love diversity. For example, when I was a kid and people asked what my favorite color was, I didn’t have a favorite. I just loved that when you look at the world, it’s full of color. I think of traveling like that. For me, I just want to go someplace new and experience something different. If you could meet anyone who would it be?There have been so many great people in our world that have created, developed, grown, and helped. In modern times, it would have to be Nelson Mandela. I would also love to meet the many other people who were quietly courageous, never gave up, never lost hope, and fought through circumstances that were seemingly against all odds. You know, people who led the world to change. Why did you choose Pediatric Anesthesiology?I love children. When I was in medical school, it was a time when there were not that many women in medicine. Because it was suggested that a woman going into the medical field would become a pediatrician or perhaps an obstetrician, I tried to stay away from those areas. I wanted to be different. But when I started my rotations, I realized it was just very natural to work with children. I like caring for the whole family and not just the disease, and I think pediatrics has that focus. It’s very rewarding, even through sad moments. I also like fast-paced things and critical care. Combining pediatrics with anesthesiology allows me to do both of these things. When a child comes in to pre-op, how do you treat them differently to preserve their childhood and ensure them that everything is going to be okay?I try to be sensitive to developmental stages. How is a child going to express anxiety? Fear? How is an adolescent going to react to the fears associated with surgery? Being aware of all of these things is what’s important. We often use smart phones and iPads to help distract the kids and make the experience more relaxing. How long have you worked at Arnold Palmer Hospital?I have been here 24 years. I started working here six months after it opened, and I have never wanted to leave. It is the most fantastic place to work. The team we have here is amazing. What do you enjoy the most about working here?I look forward to knowing that there is going to be a moment in every day where I know we have made a difference in someone else’s life. That is extremely rewarding. Has there been a patient who has made an impact in your life?There is one boy in particular who is special to me, who I took care of when he was first born. He is in high school now. No one thought he would survive due to his many challenging problems that required multiple surgeries to correct. His mom sends me a letter every year with a picture to tell me how he’s doing. He is now volunteering to help other children with special needs. To see him grow into a wonderful young man and give back to others is so rewarding. What is something that most patients and families wouldn’t know about you when they meet you?They probably have no idea how much I pay for hair services each year, given my hair is always under a cap! On a more serious note, I want to be remembered for always putting my patients first. Has being a mother yourself changed the way you care for kids?I think that when you parent children, you can walk in other people’s shoes and know what it feels like to be in a certain situation. My first child was born premature and had to have open-heart surgery, and ultimately had a lot of health problems. My daughter has a chronic autoimmune disease. Having gone through these things as a parent has helped me relate to families in a different way. It’s an emotional level experience that’s different. What piece of advice would you give a family whose child is undergoing surgery for the first time, and they don’t know what to expect?I think the hardest thing for a family whose child is undergoing surgery is the fear that comes with it. But the child can sense a parent’s fear, and can become more fearful because of this. I think it’s important for parents to find the strength to put their own fears and anxiety behind a wall so that they can be there for their child. But it can be hard to do this; especially the more complicated the case is. And also, don’t be afraid to ask questions!

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Each month we present three diverging opinions one on divisive issue. Here, Erik Carter, Debbie Millman,and Paula Scher take sides on whether we can (or should) separate great design work from a morally objectionable designer. Ready, set, debate. “We must set a precedent so that the design industry becomes more inclusive and diverse.” —Erik Carter, independent graphic designer and art director The industry needs to show people that bad behavior won’t be tolerated. We shouldn’t celebrate the work of a morally reprehensible designer; it sets a terrible example. It says that even if someone has done something awful to someone else, they’ll still be championed. When we discover that a designer has acted terribly, first they should be called out. Then, they should be historicized for what they are. And then, their work shouldn’t be promoted by the community. If someone you look up to or work with is outed for bad behavior, it’s your responsibility to stand by their victims and against their malignant viewpoints. If someone is outed today, we cannot invite them to design conferences, or write profiles about their work online. They need to have no opportunities for financial gain whatsoever, and no professional gain. Someone like Eric Gill should be discussed as he was: a type designer and a child molester. If it’s a choice between using Gill Sans or Johnston Sans, I’m more than happy to use the latter. There are more than enough good typefaces by decent humans to go around. Western graphic design has had a persistent diversity problem and if someone is rightfully called out for abusive behavior, then that’s an opportunity for a designer with an underrepresented voice in the community to be heard instead. The sexism and lack of diversity that is in design is not a problem that’s unique to our profession. It’s rooted in many things outside of design, but it is our job as designers to try and fix it. For the next generation it’s even more important to try and create a community that is more diverse and inclusive. And it is the responsibility of those currently working to stand up for victims and call out bad behavior. “It’s very difficult to reconcile the fact that we’ve been duped.” —Debbie Millman, writer, educator, artist, brand consultant, and host of the podcast Design Matters I’m conflicted by people whose work I adore when I’m also disgusted by their behavior. I’m crushed by Woody Allen, for example. Growing up, Woody Allen’s movies helped me become the person I am now. If you look back at interviews that were conducted with me at the start of my career, when people asked what my favorite movie was, I would always say Manhattan. Always. But I fell out of love with Woody Allen after he started a relationship with his stepdaughter while in a relationship with Mia Farrow. Now, the allegations that he sexually assaulted his daughter has made it impossible for me to see any new Woody Allen film. I don’t want to participate in s contributing to his prosperity, knowing the things that he’s done and been accused of. It’s also really hard for me to reconcile the fact that Elizabeth Moss is a Scientologist, and Scientologists have very specific points of view about women that I don’t agree with. But I loved her performance in The Handmaid’s Tale. The fact that she’s a Scientologist doesn’t take away from the excellence of Moss’ performance, but what it takes away from is my willingness to participate in her artwork. Discovering that someone is morally reprehensible really changes how I view the person, but whether or not their work is good work becomes hard for me to assess. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a fair thing to do. And as someone who has been perpetrated against in some really difficult and abusive ways, I’m saying this fully cognizant of the bad behaviour people are capable of. I wouldn’t commission or collaborate with a designer that I discovered had behaved badly. Why would anyone? I wouldn’t buy a typeface from them, or hire them to do work with me, or collaborate with them on Design Matters. If they wanted to come clean on Design Matters and talk about their regret and apologize, I might consider it. But I would not give them a forum to promote their work if I felt that their behavior was abusive. “Don’t confuse protest with value judgement.” —Paula Scher, graphic designer, partner at Pentagram Ezra Pound is a great poet, even though he was a fascist. Louis CK was a brilliant comedian, and I will miss him. Al Franken was a terrific senator who committed a misdemeanor, and I will miss him. We all know about Thomas Jefferson’s treatment of Sally Hemings; do we throw out all of his achievements? Repugnant human behavior has nothing to do with the judgement of art. The two are not aligned. If you want to boycott something in protest, that’s okay. But you can’t make a value judgement about the work that way. Art is art. I had an experience with Planned Parenthood recently. I was doing a mural for them that was theoretically about their history, but I couldn’t put up a picture of the founder, Margaret Sanger, because it turned out she was into eugenics. So the founder of Planned Parenthood, who essentially changed the power structure and shape of women’s lives forever, is written out of their own history. I mean, that’s sort of sick. To put her on the mural doesn’t mean you’re for her position—which is disgusting—but by leaving people out from history, you become part of this crazy dialogue that doesn’t accept the fact that human beings aren’t perfect. By this standard, we’d never be hanging up Pablo Picasso’s work. Wouldn’t that be a loss? I’ve only ever had problems with people—never their work. I knew a few designer-predators firsthand; they were terrific designers and their best work is still great. It’s always a bit confusing because you can admire them for their work while you also resent and hate them. But you can’t make a visual judgement about a typeface because the person who designed it is a predator. That’s insane. It’s pointless, actually. You could say that they shouldn’t get a royalty for it, but that’s another story. Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet was my client. On the one hand the notion of him is as completely offensive; and on the other hand, there are movies made about people like him. He was an artistic director who had a Machiavellian relationship with his ballerinas that’s like something out of literature. You can’t say you’re shocked when you discover he’s a predator, because that’s his expected role. This stuff is very confusing. I don’t think any woman should put up with bad behavior, but also you can’t change your judgment of artistic or literary or political contributions based on it. We have to look at the culture that something occurs in. It’s the culture that should change.

SLIDESHOW | Photography by Tommy Leonardi C’89 MERIT AWARDS | Photography by Stuart Watson Candice Bergen CW’67 Hon’92 | Creative Spirit Award 2017 You have been a photojournalist, a critically acclaimed writer, an accomplished model, an award-winning actress, and more. Your many talents make you a true Creative Spirit. You were born with an abundance of talent into a most unusual family. As the daughter of the radio star and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, you reluctantly shared your Beverly Hills childhood with your father’s famous puppet, Charlie McCarthy, referred to as your “wooden brother” in your 1984 memoir Knock Wood. No doubt this unique circumstance helped hone both your comedic talents and delicious sense of the absurd. From there it was on to Penn, which appealed to you, in part, you have said, for its lack of palm trees! We like to think that the time you spent here, studying literature and the arts, sowed the seeds of your professional life. As a Quaker, you soared from one creative pursuit to the next, starring in plays by Tennessee Williams and Jean Giraudoux with the Pennsylvania Players, and signing on as art and photography editor for Penn Comment. Captivated by photojournalism, and especially the pioneering work of Margaret Bourke-White, you roamed Philadelphia, Pentax in hand. Fortuitously, you fell in step with another camera-toting student, the photographer Mary Ellen Mark FA’62 ASC’64 Hon’94, who became a friend and inspiration. You left Penn to pursue what turned into a stellar career. It was not long before you posed for your first Vogue cover and made your film debut, at 19, in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, directed by Sidney Lumet. Subsequent roles led to critical acclaim; you were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globes awards for Starting Over (1979) and a BAFTA prize for the 1982 film Gandhi, in which, ironically enough, you played a young Bourke-White. But television is where you have made your biggest splash. Back in the 1970s, you were the first female host on Saturday Night Live; 30 years later, you played lawyer Shirley Schmidt for five seasons on Boston Legal. Between the two, you ruled the airwaves from 1988 to 1998 as the feisty, endearing investigative reporter Murphy Brown in the sitcom of the same name. It was the perfect showcase for your offbeat humor—and the role, you have said, that you loved the most. The world did, too, bestowing upon you five Emmys and two Golden Globes for your performance. During the show’s run, you also became a role model; your portrayal of a professional woman at the top of her field—a rarity on television of that era—inspired a generation of young women who were entering a workplace far different from the one their mothers had known. In 1992 your alma mater joined the world in recognizing your creative talents and many memorable performances with the “Golden Globe of the University of Pennsylvania”—the honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Busy as you are, you maintain an active philanthropic life. You have served as a trustee at Central Park Conservancy, the Norton Simon Museum of Art, and the Starlight Children’s Foundation. Your Candice Bergen Malle Foundation, founded in 2005, supports the environment and other causes. At Penn, you have established both endowed and term scholarships in your name. You keep charging forward, an unstoppable creative force. Your recent memoir, A Fine Romance, which touches on the death of your first husband, French film director Louis Malle, was warmly received by critics. More recently, a photo you posted on Instagram, of a designer bag you personalized for your daughter, Chloe Malle, led to the creation of a new enterprise, Bergenbags. Its startling motto, “From One Old Bag to Another,” sounds like pure Murphy Brown. Whatever creative pursuits you take on, you do so with great gusto and charm! For thrilling us with your energy and talents, and for remaining true to the Red and Blue through your success, Penn Alumni is delighted to present you with the Creative Spirit Award for 2017. Gilbert F. Casellas Esq. L’77 |Alumni Award of Merit 2017 You once explained to an audience at Penn that you had “volunteered for this university … from the moment I started law school.” The exceptional loyalty you have demonstrated since graduating from Penn Law prove your words are true. It was your personal connection that brought Lin-Manuel Miranda to Penn as the speaker for the 2016 Commencement—certainly, a memorable contribution. But more enduring is how avidly and successfully you help advance Penn’s core values. “Diversity is about representation,” you once said. “Inclusion is about making that mix work.” In that regard, you are a master chef, helping Penn find the right balance. You believe that diversity is integral to a university’s “special obligations to society” to impart knowledge, and you work tirelessly to ensure that Penn is meeting its responsibility. Indeed, President Gutmann has credited you with suggesting “Inclusion” as one of the three pillars of the Penn Compact 2020. Since 2013, you have been cochair of the James Brister Society, which aims “to improve the quality of the campus experience for students, faculty, and administrators of color,” and were key to its revitalization. You helped the Society reaffirm its priorities, energize and expand its membership base, and ensure that the University is providing the resources and attentive support that help students and faculty excel. In addition, you were a founding member of the Association of Latino Alumni and focused on multicultural outreach as a member of the Penn Alumni Board of Directors. Thanks to your efforts, our campus is becoming more welcoming and inclusive every day. As you ascended from a legal clerk to your current role as chair of the management consulting and investment firm OMNITRU, you undertook a wide array of leadership positions. Your service on diversity-related committees throughout the corporate world, your selection as chair of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Bill Clinton, and an appointment by President Barack Obama to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission speak to your own “special obligation to society.” These responsibilities make your vigorous participation in campus life all the more impressive. A stalwart alumni volunteer since 1989, you ramped up your engagement by joining the Board of Overseers of the School of Social Policy & Practice, serving as its chair in 1996—the same year you were named a term trustee. You made your presence felt on the Trustees’ Executive, Academic Policy, and Budget and Finance Committees and chaired the Neighborhood Initiatives Committee. You became an overseer for Penn Nursing in 2003, and three years later, you were named a charter trustee. In this role, you chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity while maintaining your role on several other committees, including Honorary Degrees & Awards and Student Life. Your extensive service earned your selection as an emeritus trustee in 2016. In an impassioned speech to the Puerto Rican Undergraduate Students Association, you urged students to take an active role as alumni. There are few better models than you. Your gifts to Penn have been generous, strategically targeted, and personally meaningful—the ideal philanthropic combination—including support for financial aid, diversity initiatives, annual giving, and the Penn Nursing Center for Global Women’s Health. From your days as a law student, to being a Penn parent as Marisa C’08 graced campus, and now as an exemplary alumni leader, your legacy is extensive. Yet, we know you are not nearly finished yet. For your steadfast dedication to reshaping our campus for the better, Penn Alumni is honored to award you the Alumni Award of Merit for 2017. Kyle S. Kozloff W’90 | Alumni Award of Merit 2017 The Alumni Weekend Parade of Classes is a joyous affair in which Quakers of all ages—many carrying festive banners and flags—march down Locust Walk to the exultant strains of the Penn Band. For the past 14 years, their steps have been enhanced by your own witty commentary as emcee, which is sprinkled with fun facts about passing marchers and classes. Sporting a red and blue Penn blazer, with a smile on your face and a microphone in your hand, you have become almost as iconic as the event itself. “Many of us can’t imagine the parade without you,” President Amy Gutmann has pointed out. Indeed, we can’t. While you came by your wit and exuberance naturally, it was surely honed further during your undergraduate years at Wharton, when you were an active member of Mask and Wig, Penn’s famously zany all-male comedy group. After graduating with a degree in strategic management, you soon deployed both wit and business acumen on behalf of your alma mater. As president of the Class of 1990 for the past 17 years—and a notably charismatic and hardworking one—you have been particularly effective at drumming up excitement for reunions and keeping your class engaged in the years in between. You chaired the reunion committees for your class’s last three reunions. Two years ago, for your 25th, your witty and creative emails helped boost both attendance and giving—and contributed to the event’s ultimate success. And success is indeed the word. In the parlance of the film industry in your hometown of Los Angeles, the gathering was a blockbuster. Nearly 800 classmates showed up, breaking attendance records for a 25th reunion and fundraising $4 million for the University, beating the average number for the previous eight years. In true Hollywood fashion, your class aced the awards season, walking away that year with both the David N. Tyre Award for Excellence in Class Communications and the Class of 1917 Award for the most successful reunion fundraising. Your family has been a loyal Red and Blue presence since the 1930s, when your grandfather, William Kozloff, graduated from Wharton with the Class of 1938. Subsequently, some 35 members of your extended family, including your father, Dr. Stephen R. Kozloff C’62, and sister, Rebecca Kozloff Collins C’92, have earned Penn degrees. Given the abundance of familial Red and Blue, it seems only natural that you are active in alumni causes. You served as the vice president for alumni programming for the Penn Alumni Board of Directors and chaired the committee of the same name. A longtime member of the Alumni Class Leadership Council (ACLC), you currently serve as cochair of special programs, overseeing both the Penn Reunion Leadership Conference (PRLC) and the events that bring your fellow class presidents together. You have also reached across classes, especially to your “shoulder” classes—those who shared your college years—to develop friendships and plan events that rekindle old ties, such as mini-reunions on Homecoming Weekend. Your leadership extends well beyond campus to your home in Los Angeles, where you serve as the de facto “mayor” of the local Penn community. You happily welcome visiting Quakers into your home, interview prospective students, serve on host committees for University events in your hometown, and cochair the Southern California Regional Advisory Board (SCRAB), which offers programs that bring together the many members of the Penn community in the L.A. area. Ideally, we would call out our appreciation for everything you do for the Red and Blue in a style that echoes your own—with a microphone in hand, as the entire Penn community passes by. Instead, we’ll do the next best thing by awarding you the Alumni Award of Merit for 2017, which comes with our warmest thanks for your dedicated service to your alma mater and your beloved Class of 1990, together with your inimitable contributions to one of Penn’s best-loved traditions, the Alumni Weekend Parade of Classes. Egbert L. J. Perry CE’76 WG’78 GCE’79 | Alumni Award of Merit 2017 “Opportunity presents itself,” you once said, explaining that it is by “stepping into it” that one becomes a leader. We at Penn have witnessed these words in action firsthand. For more than 40 years, you have “stepped into” opportunities at the University, over and over again. As cofounder, chairman, and CEO of The Integral Group, an Atlanta-based national real estate advisory, investment management, and community development firm, and as chairman and a director of the Federal National Mortgage Association, you bring an exceptional level of acumen and leadership to your work at Penn. Appointed a University trustee in 1996, your extensive expertise in real estate and community development was a boon for us as you chaired the Facilities & Campus Planning Committee and participated on the External Affairs and Neighborhood Initiatives Committees. Additionally, your commitment to inclusion showed in your tenure on the trustees’ Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity, including a period as its chair. Named a charter trustee in 2006, you served on the board’s Executive and Nominating Committees; a decade later, in 2016, you were appointed to emeritus trustee, an honor befitting your steadfast commitment and contributions to the University. Your tenure as a trustee tells only part of the story. You have also been active at Penn Engineering, serving on its board of overseers for a dozen years, beginning in 1996—six years after your induction to the School’s Gallery of Distinguished Alumni. And for more than a decade—and counting—you have deftly deployed your knowledge of urban communities and housing as chair of the Advisory Board of the Penn Institute for Urban Research (IUR). In fact, you were instrumental in shaping the Institute, which is now recognized as a model of how a Penn institute should function. Of course, you found even more ways to “step into it.” You had a hand in shaping Penn’s future as a member of the committee that brought President Amy Gutmann to Penn in 2004. Your dedication to fostering diversity is evident in your work with Wharton’s AAMBA/Whitney M. Young Committee and, since 2002, with your support of the James Brister Society, which aims to improve the quality of campus life for students, faculty, and administrators of color. As members of the Penn Club of Atlanta, you and your wife, A. Renee Perry W’77, also host popular receptions for alumni in your area. What is even more impressive is that you did all this while raising two future Quakers—Ashley Rian Smith Esq. C’05 and Aleria Perry WG’19—and leading a successful professional life. In addition to your history of loyal service, in 2006, you and Renee established the Percival and Margaret Perry Endowed Scholarship at Penn Engineering—a wonderful honor to your parents and a testament to your commitment to increasing access to a Penn education. You also provide significant support for the IUR, advancing its mission of urban research, education, and civic engagement. And as a former gift chair and current member of the Class of 1976 Gift Committee, you encourage others to give back to Penn, enhancing the culture of giving within our community and expanding your personal impact many times over. Time and time again, you demonstrate what a true leader looks like, and we are proud to call you one of our own. For exemplifying how opportunity and action add up to impact, and for “stepping into” leadership so effectively in service of the University, Penn Alumni is honored to award you the Alumni Award of Merit for 2017. Alice Way Waddington Ed’49 | Alumni Award of Merit 2017 At the time you entered Penn, trolleys clanged down Woodland Avenue, while the popular automobiles of the day—Buicks, Lincoln Zephyrs, and Fords—cruised along Locust Walk. You joined Alpha Xi Delta, played clarinet and tenor sax in a dance band, and sang in the chorus under future Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy—all while pursuing your studies at the Illman-Carter Unit for Kindergarten-Primary Teachers, part of Penn’s School of Education. If such images seem static, recalling sepia-toned vintage photographs, you are quite the opposite—fast-moving and firmly rooted in the present. As a longtime volunteer, for both the Alumni Class Leadership Council (ACLC) and the Class of ’49, you have become legendary for your energy and your spirited commitment to the school. As a fellow alumnus so aptly noted, you are “Pennergetic.” You are also a gifted multitasker, an ability that served you well when, after college, you helped to run your family’s dairy distribution business while raising four children. You soon turned your attention to your alma mater, becoming an intrinsic part of University life in the process. With your positive attitude and wonderfully infectious smile, you have lit up countless Penn-related events, from scholarship celebrations to reunions, in the many years since. Where some people’s efforts flag with the passing years, yours seem only to have grown. As class president, a position you have held for more than a decade, you became known for your thoughtful, inclusive leadership style. You have been a longtime member of the Class of 1949 Reunion Gift Committee. And as copresident (with George Wills) of both the 60th and 65th Reunion Committees for your class, you worked in partnership with Alumni Relations and Development staff to develop activities designed to appeal to your classmates, including a mural arts tour of the city. Your efforts helped deliver a stunning turnout for your 65th reunion. At your last reunion luncheon, held, appropriately enough, in the Class of 1949 Auditorium in Houston Hall, Wharton Professor Christopher Maxwell spoke on the benefits of positive thinking. Not that you need any guidance on the subject—you seem always to be wonderfully, contagiously upbeat. While you have long energized alumni of your generation, you have inspired younger alumni, too, providing guidance and mentorship. A model volunteer for the University as well as your class, you have served as a member of the Homecoming Host Committee, the Alumni Class Leadership Council, the Penn Alumni Council, and so much more. In short, you are a living example of what a lifetime of engagement with your alma mater looks like. “The more you give of yourself and your time” to Penn, you once wrote, “the more you will get back.” It would be hard to imagine anyone who has given more. No wonder you have been described as a “quintessential alumna.” With gratitude for your cheerful demeanor, dedicated service, and unfailing “Pennergy,” Penn Alumni is delighted to bestow upon you the Alumni Award of Merit for 2017. Sue Dreier Wishnow C’86 | Alumni Award of Merit 2017 It was evident early on that you had a special place in your heart for Penn. As a student, you joined the Kite and Key Society, sharing your love for Penn exuberantly with visitors during walking tours of campus. That same energy, enthusiasm, and infectious Penn pride has persisted for 30 wonderful years and counting, both in the US and abroad. You have a rare gift for communication, one you effectively use to connect with fellow alumni all over the world. As copresident of the Class of 1986 for the past 10 years, you have kept the University within arm’s reach for even the most far-flung classmates. When you and copresident David C. Blatte W’86 recognized the need to keep your classmates engaged all through the five-year reunion cycle, you acted quickly, decisively, and with phenomenal success. Impressive showings at Alumni Weekend even in non-reunion years prove that there is no “off year” for the Class of 1986. With a fun, informative e-newsletter—In the Mix with ’86!—and an active Facebook group, you spur yearlong engagement among your fellow “86ers,” inviting them to Engaging Minds events, Mask and Wig shows, Penn Athletics games, and more. The results speak for themselves. As cochair for the 25th reunion, outreach chair for the 30th reunion, and a longtime member of the Gift Committee, you led the way to record-breaking fundraising years, earning the Class Award of Merit—twice!—in the process. For your 30th reunion, the Class of 1986 earned the top spot for total giving to the University; raising $28.5 million for The Penn Fund, the class set the record for a 30th reunion and was the fourth largest for any reunion class. You work for all alumni, too, assuming key roles on the Penn Alumni Council and the Alumni Class Leadership Council. As a member of the Penn Alumni Board of Directors for a decade, beginning in 2003, you were a part of several committees as well the Global Alumni Network International Advisory Board. The international emphasis is fitting; you served on the board of the Penn Club of the United Kingdom, and as a member of the Penn Alumni Interview Program, you interviewed prospective Quakers in both Toronto and London, where you chaired the program for six years. When you relocated to the Garden State, you naturally kept up the momentum by becoming an active member of the Penn Club of Metro NJ. As vice president for membership, you developed a clever online system that made it easier than ever to be part of the club. And you expanded the club’s membership by promoting fun events, from a concert by the Penn Keynotes to a widely attended yPenn event featuring the charismatic professor Peter Decherney. You lead by example in supporting The Penn Fund, and your shining influence raises the bar for excellence and alumni engagement. In gratitude for all you have done for Penn—locally, globally, and personally—and in anticipation of what you will accomplish next, Penn Alumni is delighted to award you the Alumni Award of Merit for 2017. Louis Hornick III C’02 | Young Alumni Award 2017 You are a joyful steward of meaningful traditions. From the steins that hang from the walls of the Mask and Wig clubhouse to the songs of Irving Berlin to the red and blue flags of Homecoming, you take infectious delight in the cherished institutions that connect the generations. Your dedication is evident in all you do for your alma mater, for your century-old family business, and for the storied musical troupe whose mission you have made your own: “Justice to the stage; credit to the University.” As an undergraduate you earned the 2002 Penn Alumni Student Award of Merit for your service to the Sphinx Senior Society; your fraternity, Phi Kappa Sigma; the Provost’s Alcohol Rapid Response Team; and, especially, to Mask and Wig as its secretary-treasurer. Mask and Wig—that creative, boisterous brotherhood on Quince Street—became your passion during your tenure at Penn, and your talents came alive on its stage. But your enthusiasm didn’t end there: after graduation, as the old chestnut goes, the song may have ended, but the melody has remained the same. As a member of the Mask and Wig Board of Governors since 2003, you have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to build relationships between undergraduates and the club’s most senior alumni. Not even a distance of thousands of miles dimmed your commitment; when you lived in Los Angeles, you would fly cross-country so as not to miss a meeting. You have chaired both the House Committee and the Tour Committee, which brings the jubilant spectacle of Mask and Wig performances to regional clubs all over the country—a treat for both student cast members and alumni audiences, who delight in their shared bond. Your dedication to Penn hasn’t stopped there. Currently you serve on the Executive Committee of the Alumni Class Leadership Council, but well before that you were the very first to hold the position of “young alumnus” on the Penn Alumni Board of Directors. You have contributed to the success of each of the reunions for the Class of 2002, chairing the record-breaking 15th reunion. You have also been a member of the Homecoming Host Committee and the Penn Alumni Council. Your alma mater is never far from your mind. When you produced an Irving Berlin musical in Los Angeles, naturally you invited the local Penn Club to attend, and your theatrical production company is called, of course, Quince Street Productions. You have been a welcoming presence at just about every Penn gala, retreat, and conference from Philly to New York. You have also become a familiar face to legions of undergraduates and alumni alike, as well as to prospective students, for whom you serve as a Penn Alumni Interviewer. Little wonder you see yourself as a link in an unbroken chain. You’re fourth-generation Penn on both your maternal and paternal sides, a proud lineage now immortalized on the Founder’s Gate of the Generational Bridge on Locust Walk. Your very nickname, Tripp, stands as a reminder of those who came before you—back to your great-grandfather who, in 1918, founded the textile company that has been run by your family ever since. Including, now, by you. Alongside your father, you’ve taken on the leadership of LHSC Inc. as its executive vice president. Under your watch the company opened a factory in South Carolina, bringing overseas jobs back to America’s grateful textile belt and ushering your great-grandfather’s legacy into a new era. You recognize the value of connecting past, present, and future—and remain firmly committed to working together with your fellow Quakers to ensure that our own sacred institution will continue to flourish. For your unique ability to bridge generations of Penn alumni, and your tireless commitment to keeping Mask & Wig as vibrant and fresh as it has been since 1889, Penn Alumni is pleased to present you with the 2017 Young Alumni Award. Rohit Singh C’02 W’02 | Young Alumni Award of Merit 2017 When you decided to become more active at Penn as an alumnus, you may have taken your inspiration from President John F. Kennedy: you asked not what your alma mater could do for you but what you could do for your alma mater. Since your graduation, your savvy and enthusiastic engagement have made you a valued friend to the University. As a member of the Kite and Key Society and a Wharton Undergraduate Tour Guide, you forged ties to Penn that would eventually become a lifetime bond. You spent a memorable semester in Lyon, France, as part of the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business and graduated summa cum laude in 2002, with degrees in economics and international studies. From there, you began an impressive career, with an uncommon level of focus, acumen, and vision leading to rapid advancement at the world’s top financial services companies. Those same traits have been evident since you began increasing your involvement at Penn. Always willing to lend your talents where Penn needed them most, you started by joining the Penn Alumni Interview Program, participating in a pilot program to offer Skype interviews to students from all over the world. This was only the beginning of your rise as one of Penn’s strongest champions, and like any good champion, you rallied your peers to join you. You encouraged their philanthropy as co-gift chair for the Class of 2002 Gift Committee, and as a member of host committees for School of Arts and Sciences and Engaging Minds events, you helped inspire the sort of personal involvement that reinforces lifelong bonds. Your passions are always aligned with purposes that strengthen the University. As the first Huntsman alumnus to serve on the program’s advisory board, your valuable input and astute analysis of engagement numbers revealed a need to better connect with our Huntsman alumni. That’s when you saw another way to make an impact—you became the founding chair of the Huntsman Alumni Council, where your special insight helps us better reach this group of worldly Quakers. What’s more, the Singh Family Endowed Scholarship supports an international Huntsman student, increasing the diversity of our campus while also helping a student in need. As the son of a university professor, you developed an affinity for libraries early in life, so becoming involved with the Penn Libraries was a natural fit. The Orrery Society Council was a perfect match, and your enthusiasm made your appointment as cochair an easy choice. By establishing the Singh Family Fund for South Asian Studies, you have helped the University acquire scholarly materials that strengthen research in this field—a testament to both your undergraduate membership in the South Asia Society and the significance of this area of study to your family. And as an ex-officio member of the board of overseers, you continue to stand among the Libraries’ most active and dedicated supporters. On top of all this, you have proven yourself a trusted mentor and advisor for young alumni. Whether leading corporate on-campus recruiting efforts at Penn or sharing your views on impactful volunteerism, your indefatigable Penn pride is palpable in all you do. Anyone who believes the adage “Youth is wasted on the young” surely is unaware of the energy, enthusiasm, and experience you have offered to Penn in such a short time. For making Penn’s priorities your own, and in anticipation of your bright future as a leader, Penn Alumni is delighted to award you the Young Alumni Award for 2017.

Politics postsTuesday May 21, 2013 If I were the I.R.S., I would be investigating Tea Party claims, too. From Jeffrey Toobin's post, “The Real I.R.S. Scandal,” on the New Yorker site: It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates. I don't get why this isn't the story. On the other hand, this may be a boon: a call to visit your local Tea Party office if you're ever in need of social welfare. I'm sure, as a social welfare organization, they'd be willing to help. White House Correspondents Dinner: Obama with an Edge I'm generally not a fan of this thing, at least not since Stephen Colbert skewered both George W. Bush and the press corps back in ... was it 2006? ... but Pres. Obama rocked it tonight with an edge. My favorite line: I know Republicans are still sorting out what happened in 2012, but one thing they all agree on is they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities. And look, call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with. (Laughter.) Hello? Think of me as a trial run, you know? See how it goes. My second-favorite came after this joke about the edifice Obama is building next to the George W. Bush Presidential Library: That's good. But this is the one that stuck in it in there. It's not the easy joke. It's the sharp joke that follows the easy joke: I'm also hard at work on plans for the Obama Library. And some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace but I'd rather keep it in the United States. (Laughter.) Did anybody not see that joke coming? Show of hands? Only Gallup? Maybe Dick Morris? I wish they'd cut to Nate Silver at that point. If he was there. I haven't even gotten into the whole Daniel Day-Lewis starring in Steven Spielberg's “Obama,” or the beautifully serious way with which he ended it, but the whole thing made me think, once again, I'm glad I'm living in a country where Barack Hussein Obama is my president. Here's the whole deal: Remaining Stationary is the New Freedom Did you see this story the other day? With the Senate set to debate gun control this month, a National Rifle Association task force released a 225-page report on Tuesday that called for armed police officers, security guards or staff members in every American school, and urged states to loosen gun restrictions to allow trained teachers and administrators to carry weapons. The report is fodder for Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. But the second graf became fodder for me: Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who led the task force, unveiled the report at a packed news conference with unusually heavy security, including a bomb-sniffing yellow Labrador retriever. A dozen officers in plain clothes and uniforms stood watch as he spoke; one warned photographers to “remain stationary” during the event. (Italics mine.) It immediately sparked this idea for a Tom Toles-like editorial cartoon: - Panel 1: Show the news conference, use Hutchison's quote, and have one of the armed security officers telling the photographers: “Remain stationary.” Include: “*Actual quote.” Photogs look scared. - Panel 2: Similar scene in our new, NRA-approved schools, where an armed guard tells students: “Remain stationary.” Students and teacher look scared. - Panel 3: Similar scene at mall. Armed guards telling shoppers, “Remain stationary.” Shoppers look scared. - Panel 4: Then in Congress during arm-control legislation debate. NRA to Congress: “Remain stationary.” - Panel 5: Then in front of the thousands who have died because of gun violence since Newtown. NRA to the dead: “Remain stationary.” - Denouement: Little Oliphant or Toles figure at bottom with hands raised before NRA guard. Oliphant figure says: “Remaining stationary is the new freedom.” Guns guns guns. Henny Penny, When the Sky Fell: 'No End in Sight' and the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion Yesterday, the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, pissed me off more than I'd anticipated. I think what set me off was this piece by Alex Pareene on Joe Scarborough, and the realization that the bastards got away with it, got away with calling us names, too, and now blame us for flag-waving our way into war when I was sickened by it all. Pareene dissects Scarborough well but you almost want a body blow. I remember seeing MSNBC at the time, and the American flag waving behind triumphant music and the Bush administration's chosen phrase, OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, up front, and thinking, “This is a cable news show?” I was naive at the time. I'm so much older than that now. I remember a few years later, in 2005 or '06, arguing with a conservative friend about Iraq, and he trotted out the usual right-wing line about whether I would put Saddam back in place if I could. I gave him a look. I said: Would I put him back in place? Does that mean we get back all of the American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, and all of the Iraqis killed and wounded in Iraq? We get back the money we spent, and the prestige we lost, and the focus we lost, and we're able to spend that money and put that focus elsewhere? On our more immediate concerns and enemies? Is that what you're asking me? Would I make that trade? In a fucking second. How did you celebrate the 10th? I got drunk and watched “No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson's 2007 documentary, which is the best thing I've seen on our early involvement there. It's about all of the fuckups that led to present-day Iraq, which we no longer pay attention to. What gets me each time I watch this? It's not the lies and misrepresentations that led us into war. It's not the fact that we spent a few months, rather than years, prepping for a post-war Iraq. It's not that we didn't send the troop levels the miltary wanted but sent the troop levels Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought we needed (SPOILER ALERT: he was wrong), and it's not the fact that ORHA, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the organization designed to stabilize Iraq, reported to Rumsfeld and not, say, Secretary of State Colin Powell. We could have gotten away with all of those fuckups. But then the Bushies disbanded Jay Garner's ORHA and replaced it, and him, with L. Paul Bremer's CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Bremer ordered de-Ba'athification and the disbanding of the Iraqi military. And that was that. A few quotes from last night's viewing, which I subsequently drunk-tweeted (see what you're missing by not following me on Twitter?): - “We're a platoon of Marines. We could certainly stop looting if that's our assigned task.” — Lt. Seth Moulton. - “It was just henny penny the sky is falling.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on media reports about the postwar looting in Baghdad. - “My goodness, were there that many vases?” --Donald Rumsfield, implying that U.S. media reports on looting were greatly exaggerated; followed by laughter from the press corp. - “Whether you were Sunni or Shiite, you were outraged about the looting.” --Nir Rosen, Iraqui journalist. - “And what followed was this pervasive sense of lawlessness that Iraq never recovered from. Guys with guns took over.” - “The Iraqi army was essentially standing there, waiting. They were waiting for an overture. ... No one did that.” - “I thought we had just created a problem. We had a lot of out-of-work soldiers.” - “I don't do quagmires.” --Donald Rumsfeld. If you're looking for a gift for Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc., 10th anniversaries are traditionally associated with tin. Bremer (left), taking over from Garner (right). Email to Jake: March 9, 2003 I sent this email to a group of friends on March 9, 2003: Anyone been reading about the celebrity commercial wars? Martin Sheen & Co.? Liberal media articles mocking liberals. “Those know-nothing celebrities know nothing” is the gist. I've yet to hear much about the conservative response, led by former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, who, in his commerical (which I haven't seen), says the following in support of a possible war with Iraq: When people ask, “What has Saddam done to us?” I ask, “What had the 9-11 hijackers done to us before 9-11?” So true! We're all guilty until proven invaded. Jake responded. Same day: The conservatives, whose recent ascendance was led by a B-movie actor turned president, have no business complaining about “know nothing celebrities.” Same for the liberal media complaining about fellow liberals. The reason the actors are making such noise about the war has a lot to do with the shameful absence of noise coming from the democrats in Congress. My senator Hillary Clinton, for her part, went out of her way last week to reaffirm her support of Bush's war plans. And the fact that the media themselves accept the myth of the liberal media only tilts their coverage further to the right. According to polls, a majority of Americans believe Saddam was a 9/11 co-conspirator. No evidence has been produced, but who needs evidence when a steady barrage of slanted coverage will do? Apologies that we were all so, so right, and the others were all so, so wrong. Email to Elin: March 2003 I sent this to my friend Elin in 2003.... How goes the war on your front? Here it's the same. The majority still favor Pres. Bush but Americans tend to rally round the president, any president, in times like these - even when we create times like these. Things will change if the war goes on too long, we create too many enemies (as we're doing), and the U.S. economy stagnates. Came across an appropriate JFK quote this morning from 1961: “The United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient... We are only six percent of the world's population; we can't impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind.” Meanwhile the latest New Yorker magazine brings articles on our television coverage of the war (bordering on propaganda), W.'s lack of humility in his person or rhetoric, how the U.S. diplomatic community is viewing the war (scary line from a moderate on what's wrong with Europe: “What they're doing is listening to their public opinion, rather than leading it.”), and an article on the documents relating to Iraq's supposed nuclear program which helped pave the way for this war - even though, it turns out, they were forged. Not good. Most of my friends are against the war but then they're my friends. Sarah Palin, Big Gulp, and Freedom in America Apparently Sarah Palin showed up at CPAC today and talked guns and gun racks, and took swipes at both Mitt Romney and Pres. Obama, and then, for the coup de grace, and displaying all of her wit, brought out a Big Gulp and took a sip. The use of right-wing food props immediately reminded me of Greg Stillson, the politician on a road to the presidency (and nuclear destruction) in Stephen King's 1979 novel, “The Dead Zone,” who, with a U.S. decal on his hard hat, threw hot dogs to the enthusastic crowds at his rallies: “Hot dogs for every man, woman and child in America! And when you put Greg Stillson in the House of Representatives, you gonna say HOT DOG! SOMEONE GIVES A RIP AT LAST!” I'm not the first to make the Palin/Stillson connection, either. “Around my house,” Mr. King told Salon.com in 2008, “we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, 'That's Greg Stillson as a woman.'” The 32-oz. Big Gulp, in case you missed it, is a swipe at NYC's Mayor Bloomberg, who has attempted to limit, in restaurants and theaters, and for health reasons, the size of sugary drinks to 16 ounces or less. Jon Stewart among others has objected. I believe Stewart used the same prop as Palin. Is this the first thing the two have ever agreed on? Expect a mash-up. Besides, didn't a judge strike down the Mayor's initiative earlier this week? But Palin wasn't going to give up a good prop when she had one. Here's the bigger point. Yesterday, before a movie at Regal Cinemas in downtown Seattle, I got unaccountably thirsty and went to the refreshment stand to buy a soda. I just wanted a little, not much. Me: What's the smallest soda you have? Underpaid Regal employee: 32 ounces. That's the small. But the employee was nice enough to sell me the kids' size, which is a mere 16 ounces. Which is still about twice what I wanted. But that's freedom in America. You have the freedom to buy whatever the corporation is selling—for whatever reason it wants to sell it that way—without interference from the government. Moynihan's 1967 Warning to Democrats Now Applies to Republicans I've long contended that the radicalism of the left during the 1960s is now the province of the radical right. Whereas the left used to attack the judicial system (as unfair) and the education system (as creating “citizens” rather than “individuals”), the right now attacks both for different reasons. Judges are activists, teachers are de-incentivized unionized members. To give two examples. I thought of this shift again while reading Rick Perlstein's “Nixonland” yesterday afternoon. On pg. 395, Perlstein quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat but beloved by Nixon and the right, in a speech that became known as “The Politics of Stability.” This is what Moynihan said in 1967: Liberals [must] see more clearly that their interest is in the stability of the social order, and that given the threats to that stability, it is necessary to make more effective alliances with politcal conservatives who share that concern, and who recognize that unyielding rigidity is just as much a threat to the continuity of things as is an anarchic desire for change. All you have to do is underline these words: Liberals [must] see more clearly that their interest is in the stability of the social order, and that given the threats to that stability, it is necessary to make more effective alliances with politcal conservatives who share that concern, and who recognize that unyielding rigidity is just as much a threat to the continuity of things as is an anarchic desire for change. The far right [must] see more clearly that their interest is in the stability of the social order, and that given the threats to that stability, it is necessary to make more effective alliances with politcal moderates who share that concern, and who recognize that unyielding rigidity is just as much a threat to the continuity of things as is an anarchic desire for change. See: Fiscal Cliff, Sequestration, Obamacare, pretty much anything that's been debated in Congress since Jan. 2009. Eric Cantor and the Tea Party practice the politics of instability. America Held Hostage I seem to get my best reading done now at 2 AM when I wake up and can't get back to sleep. That's my silver linings playbook. Last night, this morning, I read the following in Rick Perlstein's “Nixonland.” It's about the gathering of power and paranoia by both Nixon and Kissinger during the first 100 days of their time in the White House in 1969: Senator McGovern, with a former college professor's faith in the power of reason and dialogue, had gone to the White House to meet Henry Kissinger and suggest a plan [to end the war in Vietnam]: since our involvement was a disaster and a mistake, couldn't Nixon just say that his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson had comitted troops in good faith, but events had shown that commitment was no longer consistent with the national interest? Kissinger allowed that the war was a mistake. But he said America couldn't pull out because the right wing would go crazy: “We couldn't govern the country.” And that, America, is why you can't have nice things. Because the right wing would go crazy. When Romney was the Most Honest Man in the Race I'm in the middle of Rick Perlstein's epic tome, “Nixonland,” about how the U.S. went from a Democratic landslide in 1964 to a Republican landslide in 1972. Think race riots, open housing, left-wing idiots and right-wing wish-fulfillment fantasies. I don't agree with everything here. I think Perlstein's a bit harsh on RFK. He includes some odd asides, such as declaring the song “She's Leaving Home,” from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album's “most beautiful moment.” Overall, the book merely strengthens, rather than challenges, my opinion of what went wrong with politics in this country in my lifetime. But it's giving me ammunition. Some of the most eye-opening moments, particularly when compared with the recent 2012 election, contrast George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan and a media darling, with Richard Nixon, a media joke and a stealth campaigner, who would, of course, trounce Romney before the '68 race even began. Romney's fault, according to Perlstein? He was too damned forthright, too earnest—especially about Vietnam. He grappled with it honestly. Which would make what he said sound absurd, since everyone else was in denial or lying. [Romney's] forthright honesty was his calling card, his contrast with the wheeler-dealer LBJ and the used-car salesman Nixon, what made him, along with that strong, square chin and silvering hair and popularity with Democrats, look like a contender. But honesty was a dull blade to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon—who was simply willing to lie. It doesn't take a genius to realize the lesson young Mitt took from this. Quote of the Day “Last year's [58% voter] turnout was right in the middle of the 17 elections presented in this chart—better than eight, but worse than eight. ... The friendly and civic-minded people of Minnesota always have the nation's highest turnout, and this year an admirable 75.7 percent of them came to the polls. At the other end, four states came in below 50 percent: Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Hawaii, bringing up the rear at 44 percent.” -- Paul Waldman, “Voter Turnout in 2012: Meh,” on The American Prospect site. Yay Minnesota! Of the four states who don't show up, meanwhile, three are deep red and one is deep blue (Hawaii). Waldman explores, or at least links to, an explanation for HI. Apparently we know the explanation in TX, OK and WV. Obama on the 'Us vs. Them' of Immgration Reform: 'A lot of folks forget that most of us used to be them' Pres. Obama on immigration reform: What My $3,000 Helped Buy “We have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.” “For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America's prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.” “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.” Not to mention the freedom to roll your eyes. The Way the Right-Wing Has Always Supported Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are a few lines from Rick Perlstein's book, “Nixonland,” which I read yesterday, and which are particularly appropriate today—both MLK Day and the second inauguration of Barack Obama. They're reminders of how much, and how little, things have changed: “It is my firm belief, and of all my neighbors, that King should be taken into custody ... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hiter.” “When greedy Mr. Hitler started taking over other countries, people at first thought 'give him a little more, then he will be satisfied' ... Give greedy Mr. King a little more freedom then he will stop. Isn't that what we are told today?” --Constituent letters to U.S. Senator Paul Douglas (D-IL), during the battle for opening house in the summer of 1966; from “Nixonland,” pp. 122 and 123 These days, of course, everyone evokes Dr. King for their own cause, even, absurdly, the NRA. That's how things have changed. At the same time, every prominent black leader, particularly those known for non-violence and compromise, are still being compared to Hitler. That's the way we're hearing the same damned shit. Back in the day, Steve Kaplan, editor-in-chief at “Minnesota Law & Politics,” used to include a section in the year-end “Turkeys” issue called “Who's Being Compared to Hitler This Year?” It's the comparison that's always absurd and never goes out of style. Martin Luther King, Jr. after his march for open housing in Chicago was disrupted by violence. He said he'd never seen hatred—not in Alabama or Mississippi—like the hatred he saw in Chicago. How Grover Norquist is like Abbie Hoffman I'm reading Rick Perlstein's “Nixonland,” the second volume of his three(?)-volume history on the rise and ascendancy of the far right in the United States and the unmaking of the American consensus. I'm at the summer of 1966. Chicago. Daley and King. In its broadest sense, America fractured, and remains fractured, over the role of, and our faith in, government. But it's not an either/or proposition. Both sides have their contradictions. The left believes government can do well domestically (social safety net) but fucks up internationally (Vietnam, Iraq). The right believes government can do well internationally (Cold War, nation building) but fucks up domestically (welfare state). All of this is fairly obvious but I didn't really see it with any kind of clarity until this morning. I grew up in the '60s and '70s with the left distrustful of government and came of age with the right distrustful of government, and I thought it was the same thing. It's not. It's really about where you want to spend the money. It's also about which side gets extreme and when. In the 1960s, it was the left, and its embodiments included Abbie Hoffman. Today it's the right, and its emodiments include Grover Norquist. Again, all fairly obvious. I apologize for even bringing it up. Idiot of the Day, Month, Year: Wayne La Pierre “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” --The NRA's Wayne La Pierre during a press conference, his first since Newtown, in which he suggested we prevent future school massacres by employing armed guards at every school in the country. A transcript, and a video of his talk, is available here. Rebuttal from Andrew Sullivan's readers, including a reminder that Columbine had armed guards, not to mention the cost of what La Pierre is suggesting, is available here. My thoughts? La Pierre is bad for the NRA, which is bad for America. So are all the fools ascribing cultural factors, such as violence in movies and violence in video games, to the various massacres in this country. Because aren't such movies and video games sold and watched and played all over the world? So why the problems here? Is it in our nature? Is America unexceptional? As for the supposed lack of God in our culture, isn't Europe more Godless? Isn't that what these same folks say? So why so much murder here? Why not there? Let's face it: we have a bit of a gun problem. It's fucking obvious. Do we blame the 2nd amendment? I was in a discussion about this on Facebook the other day, with people who supported the invidual rights interpretation of the amendment (“the right of the people to keep and bear arms”) rather than the collectivist rights interpretation (“A well regulated militia,” etc.). Here's the version of the amendment as passed by Congress: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Here's the version as ratified by the States: We lost two commas and a capital “A,” but both versions contain 27 words. Thirteen of those tend to be ignored by Wayne La Pierre and the NRA. But why ignore them? Seriously. What is the above really saying? It's saying, “Because X, therefore Y.” But X is no longer true. We have a regular army and a National Guard. A well regulated militia is no longer necessary for the security of a free state. And if X is no longer true, Y is no longer therefore. I know. The U.S. Supreme Court doesn't agree with me. But it used to. For most of its history. As for La Pierre's quote above about good guys and bad guys with guns? It's the product of Hollywood stupidity. Stupid liberal Hollywood. Wayne La Pierre of the NRA gave a post-Newtown press conference today (top), which was interrupted by a different message than the one he was bringing (bottom). Our Country, Our Song In November 2004 my sister wrote a page-one story for The Wall Street Journal about a group of motorcyclists that lobbied state legislatures to turn back helmet laws. They wanted the wind in their hair when they rode, and they rode around the country, lobbying state legislatures, to make it so. Among other things, they argued that helmets were actually less safe in low-impact crashes, but their evidence on this was suspect and anecdotal. Scientific studies proved the opposite. No matter. They were successful. By the time of the article, several legislatures had already rescinded their state's mandatory motorcycle helmet laws. In the back-and-forth email exchange with my sister, I wrote the following: I just like the unspoken critique of our system in your article: if one side lobbies and the other doesn't, then the first side wins. Even if they're lobbying about something that's kind of insane. I first heard about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the same way I first heard about the massacre at the movie theater in Aurora, Col., last July: through a posting on Facebook. Same person, I think. Same story, really. I think her post on Aurora even referenced the sameness of it all. Oh crap, this again. Her post yesterday was more charged and horrified. Because it was children in an elementary school. Kids who would never get older than 5 or 6 or 8. Parents who were told their kids were never coming back from school that day. In the middle of your workday, doing this thing that seems important but isn't, that doesn't matter in the long run—which describes the workday of almost everyone in the world except teachers—you try to touch some aspect of that horrible reality so you don't feel like such an uncaring asshole. It's hard, though. It's impossible, really. There are screens in the way. We're experiencing this through computer screens and TV screens, and some part of us can't get through these screens and some part of us doesn't want to. It's safer where we are, in unreality, sympathizing and empathizing, rather than where they are, where the awful thing has happened. This week's awful thing. So instead we simply feel stunned, numb, guilty, angry. Certainly angry. This is our country, this is our song. We're singing it again. Why? That's what we eventually get to, after all the lit candles and consoling quotes and angry tweets. Why? We know why. It's in the above. If one side lobbies and the other doesn't, then the first side wins. Even if they're lobbying about something that's kind of insane. I'm complicit. I cared about gun control enough that in the 1990s I read Osha Gray Davidon's book “Under Fire: The Nra and the Battle for Gun Control,” which detailed the history of the NRA, and its dramatic shift from a gun-safety group (since the 19th century) to a gun-lobbying organization (beginning in 1978). I read Jill Lepore's article, “Battleground America,” in the New Yorker last year and recommended it to everybody. I saw Michael Moore's documentary. But politics is triage and gun control kept slipping down my list of important issues of the day. We first had to fight George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and al Qaeda and Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers before we got to Wayne LaPierre. We've got to push back against the idiotic thing that Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Richard Mourdock or Todd Akin said that day—and if not them someone else. In the modern age, in the 24-hour news cycle, there's always an idiot flapping their gums and being filmed and broadcast and going viral. You could say that is the essence of the 24-hour news cycle. That's what keeps it going. And keeps us distracted. This election cycle I actually said the following to a friend: “I don't really care much about gun control right now.” And I didn't. Not with everything else going on. Not if taking that stand prevented everything else that needed to happen from happening. But if one side lobbies and the other doesn't, the first side wins. That's all it comes down to. We need to have more people who care passionately about this issue, who are willing to put up money and time, than the other side. It's like same-sex marriage: you fight and you fight and you fight and then suddenly the wave crests with you, not against you. Maybe that will happen with gun control someday. Maybe that's beginning to happen now. I like what Adam Gopnik wrote on the New Yorker site last night. The whole thing is good but this part in particular: So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available. The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made. FURTHER READING. Feel free to suggest your own in the comments field. I'll add to it periodically: - “Battleground America: One Nation, Under the Gun” by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, April 23, 2012 - “Newtown and the Madness of Guns” by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, December 14, 2012 - Pres. Obama's statement, December 14, 2012 - “In Public Conversation on Guns, a Rhetorical Shift” by Nate Silver in The New York Times, December 14, 2012 - “Nancy Lanza's Guns” by Ben Stocking on the Obamanator site, December 16, 2012 - “How Popular is Gun Control?” by Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish, December 17, 2012 - “Obama in Newtown: Ready to Act on Guns?” by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker, December 17, 2012 What Does the GOP Stand For? The other day I went to Five Spot at the top of Queen Anne for lunch with a friend. I hadn't been there in a while but I always liked their various themes: Caribbean food this month, Portlandia food the next. For November? There was, of course, an election theme, with super-pork sandwiches and Super Pac entrees, and various election-themed artwork around the restaurant, including, my personal favorite, this painting of a to-do list (“MARRIAGE EQUALITY: HA HA HA HA”) and a list of “To Actually Do” (“Cry, Obstruct, Pander, Cry”), from the desk of John Boehner: I also noticed we were sitting beneath the Republican elephant, which is, in a sense, where all of us have been sitting for the past 30 years. The Republican elephant never forgets and the Democrat donkey is stubborn. Old metaphors. Republicans have recently been worrying about the growing minority population in the U.S., since they can no longer win presidential elections by demonizing minorities, but their concerns should go deeper. The GOP used to be good at, or at least known for, the following: - fiscal responsibility - a strong military They're no longer accountable since they live in their own world; they balloon deficits via tax cuts for the rich while Dems are more likely to balance the budget; and they start unnecessary wars with false information and are unable to capture or kill our enemies, the people who truly attack us, leaving that mess for the Dems to clean up. Then they disparage the way the Dems clean it up. What does the GOP currently stand for besides tax cuts for the rich and various petty hatreds of the weak and vulnerable? My view vis a vis the GOP: 1981-present. Bill O'Reilly's Real Nightmare This came my way via Facebook, which is apparently still good for things beside copyright hoaxes. Every panel I was like, “Yes .. Yes ... YES!” Ruben Bolling has turned me into Molly Bloom. Pundit Shaming: Laura Ingraham I came across this the other day. I think I started on YouTube with Louis CK and somehow wound up with Christopher Hitchens (R.I.P.) in 2008 defending then-candidate Barack Obama against Laura Ingraham on FOX-News. Here's the exchange that pricked up my ears: Hitchens: The losers in this are not me, it's the MoveOn.org types. They're campaigning for someone who says if necessary he'll go straight across the border into Pakistan to root these guys out. And McCain has attacked Obama, saying, “How can you be so militant?” Ingraham: That's bravado. That's campaign bravado, though. The “bravado” she's talking about is Obama's militant stance toward Pakistan, which she favors, rather than McCain's objection to said stance. Later, when Hitchens says Obama is evolving toward his position, Ingraham interrupts again: He's in a campaign. That's a big bet, though, is it not? That's a big bet on the War on Terror you're making. A bet that paid off. Then she goes on to defend Sarah Palin. Fun! The above starts at 2:00: Any correction from Ms. Ingraham after the killing of Osama bin Laden? Any mea culpa? A sense of humility somewhere? Someone alert the pundit-shaming tumblr, which should be the busiest site on the Web. Why Obama Won; Why Romney Lost Why Did Obama win? - “...the truth is that there are reasons why Obama is a phenomenon, and one of them is that his political intelligence is so keen that he knows when unreality best serves his ends.” — Adam Gopnik, “Obama's Political Intelligence,” in The New Yorker - “...the country is changing. And this may be the last election in which anyone but a fool tries to play — on a national level, at least — the cards of racial exclusion, of immigrant fear, of the patronization of women and hegemony over their bodies, of self-righteous discrimination against homosexuals. ... Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling.” — David Simon, “Barack Obama and the Death of Normal” on “The Audacity of Despair.” - “The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation that makes the investments we need to strengthen and grow the middle class. A nation with a fair tax system, and affordable and excellent education for all its citizens. A nation that believes that we’re most prosperous when we recognize that we are all in it together.” — Joel Benenson, “Obama Won on Values, Not Demographics,” in The New York Times. Why Did Romney lose? - “In the final analysis, Mitt Romney lost simply because he ran a campaign that insulted large swaths of the American people.” --Kyle Curtis, “Mitt Romney Lost Because He Ran an Insulting Campaign,” on Blue Oregon. - “The GOP's most reliable supporters remain white, married couples who identify themselves as Christians , a group that continues its sharp decline in numbers.” — Joshua Holland, “What Propelled Obama to Victory?” on AlterNet. - “Mitt Romney lost because of the Republican brand and Republican policies. There are other reasons, of course, like Mitt being unlovable to anyone not named Ann Romney, but nothing trumps the idea that 2/3rds of America thinks the other 1/3 is a frightening conglomerate of Bible-thumpers, xenophobes, and vaginophobes. (Not a word, but should be.)” --Bill Mahr, “Why the Republicans Lost,” on HBO.com. - “Mitt Romney says he is a numbers guy, but in the end he got the numbers wrong. His campaign was adamant that public polls in the swing states were mistaken. They claimed the pollsters were over-estimating the number of Democrats who would turn out on Election Day. Romney’s campaign was certain that minorities would not show up for Obama in 2012 the way they did in 2008.” --John Dickerson, “Why Romney Never Saw It Coming,” on Slate. - “There is an attitude of contempt, derision and disrespect that permeates Republican politics and Republican and conservative media. There are attitudes that permeate Republican politics and Republican media that are outside of traditional Republicanism and outside of American discourse. Democrats are demonized and liberals are hated and alternate opinion is often treated as though it does not exist, and even worse, treated as though it is unpatriotic.” — Brent Budowski, “Why Obama Won,” on The Hill. Who still doesn't get it? At all? - “A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division.” --Mary Matalin, “Mendacity and Malice Won,” on the National Review site. Mary Matalin is just one of many, of course, who still don't get it. Look for their comments, past and future, on the new, crowd-pleasing (or at least Erik-pleasing) pundit-shaming tumblr. Obama addresses campaign supporters in Chicago. My Election Day: November 6, 2012 For the past three weekends, whenever I was helping with Pres. Obama's Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts in Seattle and Washington state, either by knocking on doors or making phone calls, I'd write the following on my script: This isn't about you. It was just a reminder in case an irate or harried or impatient person got me down. You're not doing this for you, Erik. This isn't about you. Let it go. It's also an echo of something Pres. Obama has himself said over and over again: “This is not about me; this is about you.” He said it at his 2008 convention speech and in his 2012 convention speech. He said it while stumping for a jobs bill in Raleigh, N.C., in 2011. He said it while trying to unblock judicial nominees in 2012 and during the health case battles of 2009. “This is not about me; this is about you.” According to his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” it was his college friend Regina who first said it. And she said it to him: “Let me tell you something, Mr. Obama. It’s not just about you. It’s never just about you. It’s about people who need your help. Children who are depending on you. They’re not interested in your irony or your sophistication or your ego getting bruised. And neither am I.” It's a helpful thing, not having it be about you. It allows you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's a freeing message. For example, in mid-October, when the election seemed to be slipping away from us, and again yesterday, when it felt better, I went door-to-door in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, in the Pike-Pine corridor, getting out the vote. I'm not an extrovert. I don't gain energy from interactions. But you do it anyway. Because it's not about you. Most of the residences I was assigned were security buildings with intercoms, often old, so there was little face-to-face contact. One building was an assisted living and Alzheimer's facility, at which I didn't stay long. The people I talked to were too confused. It felt wrong. At a security building on Pike, the intercom was waist high, so I got down on one knee, then both knees, as I buzzed the voters on my sheet. It felt like I was literally begging for votes. Please, come out and vote. I was on my knees on the dirty Pike sidewalk. But it wasn't about me. Building managers were helpful. They wouldn't let me roam their buildings but at least they told me who had moved. The last manager I spoke with ran an apartment building across from Sitka and Spruce, and we talked a good 10 minutes, about the same-sex marraige amendment, Referendum 74, and about how she had supported Hillary in 2008, and hadn't even voted for Obama back then because she was still pissed that Hillary didn't win. Not this time. This time it was Barack all the way. She's got her fingers crossed for Hillary in 2016. Afterwards I walked past all the thin, fashionable ladies shopping at the ritzy downtown department stores at noon on a weekday, returned my sheets to the Democratic Headquarters on 2nd and Cherry, then returned home to get ready for a party. I was nervous but not too nervous. I had Nate Silver on my side. Ward was the first guest to arrive. Throughout the night, he kept urging us to change the channel to FOX. He wanted to see the bastards squirm. We did once or twice but missed their biggest meltdowns: Karl Rove arguing over Ohio; Megyn Kelly fact-checking her own stats people. It was over quickly. Not as quickly as in 2008, it seemed, but all of a sudden. MSNBC just declared. We didn't even see the graphic for Obama winning Ohio; just ”Barack Obama re-elected 44th President of the United States.“ Which state did they declare for him? we wondered. They weren't saying. So we did math: 18 meant Ohio. So it was Ohio. So it was over. Except on FOX-News and in the Romney camp, which waited a bit. Rove wanted a replay of 2000 and Florida. I'm sure the thinking went: Surely we've suppressed enough votes in Ohio to make a difference; to screw up the exit polls. Surely, if there's a God in heaven, we did that. The nice thing? It wouldn't have mattered anyway. It turned out that Obama got Ohio but didn't need it. He got Virginia but didn't need it. It looks like he'll get Florida but doesn't need it. All the pundits today, so wrong yesterday, are wrong again today. They're saying that in the end the auto bailout won the day; that Obama saved Detroit and so Detroit saved Obama back. Maybe. But he would've won Michigan anyway and he didn't need Ohio. Because he got Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado. And that was enough. We knew that going in. If the popular vote holds, and it looks like it will, Barack Obama will be only the third Democrat to win the U.S. presidency twice with clear majorities. The others? FDR (four times) and Andrew Jackson (twice). That's it. Clinton never did it (third-party candidates), Carter once, LBJ once, JFK never, Truman never, Wilson never. Just: Obama, FDR and Andrew Jackson. That's the company he now keeps. This was my first Twitter election, my first Facebook election, and, smartphones in hand, we kept trading comments and information from our Twitter feeds. We drank a lot, ate too much, laughed a lot. It wasn't just the Obama victory. It was same-sex marriage referendums in Maine and Maryland and Washington state that passed. It was pot legalizaton initiatives in Colorado and Washington state that passed. It felt like, at long last, after 30+ years, the world, or at least the United States, was finally turning our way. On Facebook I wrote something intelligent like, ”YES!!!!!!!!!!!!" Everyone knew what that meant. One friend, who had been hugely involved in GOTV efforts in 2008, and who knew of my donations and GOTV efforts this year, wrote: I raise my beer to you Erik for all your hard work and donations. You helped make it happen. It was a nice thought but felt so beside the point. Because it wasn't about me. Not even a little bit. Our friend Erika's view of our TV, election night. James Baldwin's Message to Bill O'Reilly Fifty years ago, at the end of his book-length essay “The Fire Next Time,” which became a best-seller the year I was born, James Baldwin wrote the following: “The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . . . It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” Bill O'Reilly and FOX-News still haven't gotten the message: Have there been more veiled, racist comments in a 60-second span? Let's count them off: - “It's a changing country and it's not a traditional America anymore.” - “There is 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. Who want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it. ” - “The white establishment is now the minority.” - “You're going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel they are entitled to things, and which candidate between the two is going to give them things. As always with FOX-News, this stuff is full of half-truths. It is a changing country but it always is. It's not a traditional America but what does that mean? Are we losing core values or surface values? O'Reilly is implying the former but I know the latter. Because in a certain sense, no president is more traditionally American in his rhetoric and in his beliefs than Pres. Obama. He just doesn't look like the other 43. Fifty percent of the people want things. (Like health insurance. We're greedy that way.) Then O'Reilly ties this 50 percent to Hispanics, blacks and women. It's the welfare argument all over again. It's Reagan's politics of resentment all over again. There are welfare queens (read: minorities) who want stuff (read: your tax dollars). Meanwhile, hard-working white people do things the honorable way: by selling insurance on bundled sercurities that were created from subprime mortgage loans, which poor and working-class owners were guaranteed to default on. It's interesting that O'Reilly calls it ”the white establishment,“ that he owns up to it. ”White“ certainly isn't a minority, so he must be talking ”white“ and ”conservative“ and maybe ”rich.“ In which case: yes, yes, and yes. And thank God. There are so many lessons you can draw from yesterday's election. For example: ”Continually mentioning rape in a positive way tends to be a losing strategy.“ You can go to literature, too, with this paraphrase of e.e. cummings' Olaf, glad and big, whose warmest heart recoiled at war: ”There is some shit we will not eat.“ Then there's Baldwin, above, paraphrased: America is white no longer, and it will never be again. To O'Reilly, this spells America's doom. To the rest of us, the opposite. It's the very reason our country is exceptional. ”It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today." --James Baldwin, 1963 Status Updates from the 2012 Election - “Does anybody else spend a silly amount of time trying to fill in the ovals perfectly? I have an irrational fear that that any white speck will discount my vote.” --Ross P., Minneapolis - “I almost got into a fist fight with a Republican poll watcher who's trying to intimidate minority voters.” --Ben S., Seattle, getting out the vote in Newton, Florida - “'If Romney wins, I worry less about any policies his administration may enact (although I worry a lot about those, too) than I do about the long-term implications of the fact that it will have been proven that you can just straight-up fucking lie your way to the Presidency. That's not good for anyone.' Seen on metafilter. Totally agree.” --Roger L., Clinton, WA - “Barack is going to take every single swing state, with the possible exception of North Carolina.” --Ben S., Seattle - “Mitt and his minions waged a dirty, dishonest campaign — perhaps the most dishonest in history — and now the proverbial chickens have come home to roost.” --Ben, S., Seattle - “YES!!!!! 4 more years!!!!” — Karen T., Minneapolis - “Oh. Thank. God.” — David G., Seattle - “This was to be the Republicans’ night. They had the most money—more than a billion dollars. The anemic economy was an albatross around Obama’s neck. The public hated Obamacare. The President fumbled the first debate. Romney was surging. Benghazi proved that Obama’s foreign policy was unraveling. The Democrats were defending the vast majority of the open Senate seats. The spectre of gay marriage was rousing the religious right. The jockeying for positions in the Romney cabinet had begun. ... Then we had an election.” — Kim F., Seattle - “When I was living with my ex- in Virginia from 1990-1995, we went to a wedding in the chambers of Chief Judge Abner Mikva. We talked with him about gay rights, and he said 'The bigots know that they are fighting a battle that they will lose, and we have to remember that we are fighting a battle that we will win. Don't lose hope. It may not happen in my lifetime, but it inevitably will in yours because this is America, and we're better than hatred.'” --Chris N., Seattle - “Thanks, America.” — Andy E., Nanoi, Viet Nam THE MORNING AFTER - “In Minnesota the Republicans took the State House and Senate for the first time in ages in 2010. Result? A state shutdown, a Senate leader demoted for conduct unbecoming, her bulldog of an illicit paramour threatening to sue the state about his subsequent firing (another white male filing for gender discrimination), an ill-advised Governor's race recount request, and a financial bankrupting of their party. And cynically put voter ID and anti-gay referenda on the ballot to increase turnout. Well, that worked, but it turned out the wrong people. Referenda defeated; House and Senate back in Dem hands. Don't let the Capitol door slam you in the ass on your way out. Doorknobs.” — Joe G., Minneapolis - “election's over. time to unblock a bunch of fb friends.” --Brenda B., Seattle 270 to Win: Vote I leaned heavily on Nate Silver this past month. While the right-wing had their narratives of 'Mittmentum,' and Gallup was claiming a national six-point Romney advantage, Silver gave Romney, on Oct. 12, only a 38.9% chance of winning the electoral college. And that was his best showing. Since then, downhill. This morning's numbers give Romney a 9.1% chance of winning the electoral college. But that's still a chance. At some point, maybe this evening, all the possibilities and probabilities will be reality. We want that reality to be good. So get out there and vote. Why do I follow Silver? Why do I believe him? Because he got every state right in the 2008 election except for Indiana, which went for Obama. He also predicted the correct outcome of every Senate race that year. In 2010, he predicted 34 of the 36 Senate races correctly, missing only Colorado and Nevada, both of which went Democrat. So: 1) he's usually right, and 2) hardly leans left in his prediction model. Plus he's a sabremetrician. He's a Jamesian. He's a baseball guy. If he were a football guy, no chance. According to both Silver and this great interactive feature on the NY Times site, there are nine potential swing states, with 95 electoral votes: New Hampshire (4), Nevada (6), Iowa (6), Colorado (9), Wisconsin (10), Virginia (13) North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), and Florida (29). With the states Obama's presumed to win, including Pennsylvania, he starts with 236 electoral votes. These are Silver's probabilities for each of these states (sans North Carolina, which I didn't bother to track) over the last week and a half: |Oct 26||Oct 28||Oct 29||Oct 30||Oct 31||Nov. 1||Nov. 4||Nov. 6| And here are Obama's electoral college chances. It's 270 to win, kids: |Oct 26||Oct 28||Oct 29||Oct 30||Oct 31||Nov. 1||Nov. 4||Nov. 6| A lot of it falls upon Ohio again. There's a kind of “As goes Ohio, so goes the nation” tendency even as the state has shed electoral votes as it's shed population. No Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio, and, since 1900, only two Democrats have: FDR (once) and JFK (in 1960). But Obama can still win without winning Ohio. He can still win without winning Ohio and Florida. And Virginia. He just needs Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire. I'm nervous, of course. But I'm less nervous than I was a week ago; and a week ago I was less nervous than I was two weeks ago. Back to that first debate. I'm expending my nervous energy by helping get out the vote in First Hill, Seattle. My neighborhood. Washington state is a mail-in only state now, which is a bit of a bummer. I like the community act of voting. I like the civic-ness of it. I like talking to the old ladies at the church or school. I like talking to people in line. But at this point it's GOTV. Gotta be postmarked today, kids. So if you haven't mailed it in yet, bring it to the post office. Watch them postmark it. Or bring it to a drop box. Here's a list of ballot drop boxes in King County. Final thought. For the longest time I've heard from right-wing blabbermouths about how Obama's supporters are less enthusiastic than they once were. How he's got an enthusiasm gap, whlie all the right-wingers are crazy, yes crazy, for Mitt. Here. Here's how I've demonstated my lack of enthusiasm: I've given him $3,000 and the last three weekends of my life in GOTV efforts. Plus this morning. Let's do this. Hans von Spakovsky and the Voter-Fraud Myth “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector. The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 A.M. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.” --Notice that Teresa Sharp, 53, received from The Hamilton County Board of Elections, as recounted in the article ”The Voter-Fraud Myth: The man who has stoked fear about imposters at the polls“ by Jane Mayer, in the Oct. 29 issue of The New Yorker. Mayer's piece is scary and worth reading. The Voter ID laws are the new Jim Crow. They target African-Americans and the elderly without saying they target African-Americans and elderly. Meanwhile, the man behind this targeting, Republican lawyer Hans von Spakovsky of Atlanta, Ga., can't cite much evidence of voter fraud given his almost preternatural interest in the subject. A recent study by the Pew Center found that more than 1.8 million dead people were registered to vote, and 2.5 million people were registered to vote in more than one state (I might be one of those, since I voted in Minnesota in 2006 and in Washington state since 2008), but von Spakovsky has no idea how many of these cases led to actual voter fraud. He cites a 2000 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which, in the previous two decades, 5400 dead people were recorded as voting; but he doesn't cite the limp follow-up in which the Georgia Secretary of State's office indicated that most of these were clerical errors. ”Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical,“ Mayer writes. So from 1.8 million potential cases of voter fraud to 5400 actual cases of voter fraud in Georgia to ... zero actual cases of voter fraud in Georgia. Later von Spakovsky gives Mayer the names of two experts who would confirm the peril of voter fraud: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Neither did. The opposite. “I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem,” Pastor said. Yet since 2011, pushed by von Spakovsky and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-sponsored, right-wing organization, 37 states have enacted or proposed some form of voter ID law. Other quotes from the piece: - “This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.” — Pres. Bill Clinton - “[Von Spakovsky] is trying to create a cure where there is no sickness.” — Rep. John Lewis, (D-GA) - “You can't steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D. won't stop that.” — Robert Brandon, president of the Fair Elections Legal Network - “It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. It's like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.” — Lorraine Minnite, Rutgers professor and author of “The Myth of Voter Fraud” - “I think they are trying to stop as many black people as they can from voting. I won't even know until Election Day if I got the right to vote. But if they tell me I can't vote—it is over. They are going to have to call the police.” — Teresa Sharp, citizen, Ohio Endorsement of the Day: Susan Eisenhower Endorses Barack Obama for Re-Election Four years ago, I left the Republican Party of which I was a lifelong member and became an independent. Not long after, I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election for president. ... Like many other voters who crossed party lines to vote for Barack Obama in the last election, I have watched the 2012 campaign carefully and listened closely to what the candidates have said. I believe that President Obama should be re-elected. Four years ago, Obama, a relatively inexperienced public servant, became the 44th President of the United States during one of the most difficult times our country has faced. The nation’s economy was on the brink of collapse. Our image overseas was tarnished, and our military was bogged down in two unpopular wars. I supported Obama then because I thought that he was unflappable. I saw him as a man with a keen intellect and a cool analytical head. ... In the last four years, and despite the global downturn, America has come back from the brink. ... According to the International Monetary Fund, today the United States is poised for 3 percent growth, which would make our economy the strongest of the other richest economies, including Canada and Germany. Other influential studies, cited in a recent column by Fareed Zakaria, show that debt in the U.S. financial sector, relative to GDP, has declined to levels not seen since before the 2000 bubble. And consumer confidence is now at its highest levels since September 2007. The housing market is also slowly coming back. ... [Obama] ended the war in Iraq, was the first Democratic president to ratify an arms control treaty with the Russian Federation, and rallied global leaders to put nuclear security at the top of the international agenda. The Obama Administration has also been responsible for decimating the top leadership of al-Qaeda and introducing biting sanctions on Iran. ... I am more confused than ever about what Mitt Romney stands for. I know little of his core beliefs, if he even has any. ... Given Romney’s shifting positions, he can only be judged by the people with whom he surrounds himself. Many of them espouse yesterday’s thinking on national defense and security, female/family reproductive rights, and the interplay of government and independent private enterprise. In this context, Barack Obama represents the future, not that past. His emphasis on education is an example of the importance he places on preparing rising generations to assume their places as innovators and entrepreneurs, workers and doers, and responsible citizens and leaders. He recognizes, as many of us do, that access to opportunities must be open to every American ... As I said in 2008 and will say again: “Unless we squarely face our challenges as Americans—together– we risk losing the priceless heritage bestowed on us by the sweat and the sacrifice of our forbearers. If we do not pull together, we could lose the America that has been an inspiration to the world.” Endorsement of the Day: The Stranger “This endorsement might seem like a no-brainer, but this shit is important, so let's go over it one more time. Electing Barack Obama to a second term goes beyond the standard Democratic boilerplate about how a Democratic president will nominate Democratic judges to the US Supreme Court—though that is vitally important, and is the reason we don't at all regret voting for John Fucking Kerry in 2004. ”The thing that's easy to forget in the middle of all this bullshit is that Obama has been a very good president. He saved us from a second Great Depression; he passed health care reform that future Democrats can utilize as a first step to a national health care system; he's made investments in science, transportation, and green energy that will pay off for decades; he supported gay marriage at just the right moment; and he's made dozens of advancements for equality and dignity (Lilly Ledbetter, DADT repeal, executive orders for humane immigration reform) that have changed millions of people's lives for the better. “Sure, there are issues—with presidents, there are always issues—where he's dropped the ball (drones, Gitmo, drones). Those are serious issues. But right now, President Obama needs our help. After all he's done for us, we owe him the opportunity to transform from a very good president into a truly great one in his second term.” --The Stranger Election Board, in its “Endorsements for the Nov. 6, 2012 General Election” Endorsement of the Day: The Chicago Tribune The Chicago Tribune was founded in 1847 and has endorsed a Democrat for president only twice: Barack Obama in 2008 and Barack Obama in 2012. From the endorsement that went out this week: Obama ... has been careful about projecting military power overseas. At home he has initiated, or agreed to, tax cuts to promote growth: investment tax credits, payroll tax cuts and extension of all the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. He proposes to reduce a corporate tax rate that everyone this side of far left agrees is a globally unfair hindrance for U.S. businesses. On questions of economics and limited government, the Chicago Tribune has forged principles that put us closer to the challenger in this race, Republican Mitt Romney. ... [Romney] has, though, been astonishingly willing to bend his views to the politics of the moment: on abortion, on immigration, on gun laws and, most famously, on health care. As a governor, his signature issue was the deal he cut with Democrats to extend health care — and a health insurance mandate — to all citizens. Romneycare was the Massachusetts model on which key elements of Obamacare were modeled. Yet Romney won’t acknowledge he is, in effect, the godfather of the national health care plan he vows to repeal. His proposals to achieve a balanced budget, and to begin reducing taxpayers’ huge debts, rest on questionable math and rosy assumptions. ... Romney’s fix on tax cuts, plus his guarantee to protect defense spending that genuinely could constrict, leaves him precious little room to maneuver [on the federal debt]. Remember, the next president needs to reach deals that slash debt by many trillions — without bankrupting Washington in the process. ... If a European debt meltdown doesn’t stoke another, pardon our repetition, global financial crisis, Obama’s next term would open to less economic tumult: Friday morning’s GDP reading confirms anew that U.S. economic growth has a fluttering heartbeat. Home prices are stabilizing, the stock market and consumer confidence have risen, and job growth has been steady if unspectacular. Bolstered by his steadiness in office, cognizant of the vast unfinished business before him, we endorse the re-election of Barack Obama. Getting Out the Vote I'll be helping with the get out of the vote campaign for Pres. Obama today and tomorrow, 3-6 pm, at Washington Democratic Headquarters in downtown Seattle. I've contributed money, now time. I urge you to do the same. Give what you can. We can't let bullshit win. Right now, despite Gallup, it's not. Obama's winning. Let's keep it so. Read your Nate Silver. In 2008 he got every state correct except for Indiana, which went for Obama. He also got every Senate race correct. In the 2010 midterms, he got 34 of the 36 Senate races correct. The ones he missed went Democrat. So his misses have favored Republicans. And he's got Pres. Obama winning both the popular and electoral vote. Endorsement of the Day: Colin Powell Signs on for 'Long Patrol with Pres. Obama' “When he took over, the country was in very very difficult straits. We were in the one of the worst recessions we had seen in recent times, close to a depression. The fiscal system was collapsing. Wall Street was in chaos, we had 800,000 jobs lost in that first month of the Obama administration and unemployment peaked a few months later at 10 percent. So we were in real trouble. The auto industry was collapsing, the housing was start[ing] to collapse and we were in very difficult straits. And I saw over the next several years, stabilization come back in the financial community, housing is now starting to pick up after four years, it's starting to pick up. Consumer confidence is rising. ... ”The president got us of one war, [is starting] to get us out of a second war and did not get us into any new wars. And finally I think that the actions he has taken with respect to protecting us from terrorism have been very very solid. And so, I think we ought to keep on the track that we are on. I've signed on for a long patrol with President Obama.“ --Gen. Colin Powell on why he's endorsing Pres. Barack Obama for a second term as President of the United States. ”The governor who was saying things at the debate on Monday night ... was saying things that were quite different from what he said earlier. I'm not quite sure which Gov. Romney we would be getting with respect to foreign policy. “One day he has a certain strong view about staying in Afghanistan but then on Monday night he agrees with the withdrawal. Same thing in Iraq. On almost every issue that was discussed on Monday night, Governor Romney agreed with the President with some nuances. But this is quite a different set of foreign policy views than he had earlier in the campaign. My concern ... is that sometimes I don't sense that he has thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have.” --Gen Colin Powell on why he's not endorsing Gov. Mitt Romney for POTUS. Former Mossad Chief for Obama, Warns Romney's Rhetoric Against U.S. Interests “What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. ... Obama does think there is still room for negotiations. It’s a very courageous thing to say in this atmosphere. In the end, this is what I think: Making foreign policy on Iran a serious issue in the US elections. What Romney has done, in itself, is a heavy blow to the ultimate interests of the United States and Israel.” 'One of the Most Successful Foreign Policies of Any Administration' From Robert Reich: I thought the third and last presidential debate was a clear win for the President. He displayed the authority of the nation’s Commander-in-Chief – calm, dignified, and confident. He was assertive without being shrill, clear without being condescending. He explained to a clueless Mitt Romney the way the world actually works. ... I kept wishing Obama would take more credit for one of the most successful foreign policies of any administration in decades: not only finding and killing Osama bin Laden but also ridding the world of Libya’s Gaddafi without getting drawn into a war, imposing extraordinary economic hardship on Iran, isolating Syria, and navigating the treacherous waters of Arab Spring. Obama pointed to these achievements, but I thought he could have knitted them together into an overall approach to world affairs that has been in sharp contrast to the swaggering, bombastic foreign policies of his predecessor. Like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney has a pronounced tendency to rush to judgment – to assert America’s military power too quickly, and to assume that we’ll be viewed as weak if we use diplomacy and seek the cooperation of other nations (including Russia and China) before making our moves. President Obama won tonight’s debate not only because he knows more about foreign policy than does Mitt Romney, but because Obama understands how to wield the soft as well as the hard power of America. He came off as more subtle and convincing than Romney – more authoritative – because, in reality, he is. Although tonight’s topic was foreign policy, I hope Americans understand it was also about every other major challenge we face. Mitt Romney is not only a cold warrior; he’s also a class warrior. And the two are closely related. Romney tries to disguise both within an amenable demeanor. But in both capacities, he’s a bully. Quote of the Day The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work. The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves. I'd Like to Apologize to All Women on Behalf of All Men Not for the usual reasons, either. From Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight blog: If only women voted, President Obama would be on track for a landslide re-election... If only men voted, Mr. Obama would be biding his time until a crushing defeat at the hands of Mitt Romney... The biggest gender gap to date in the exit polls came in 2000, when Al Gore won by 11 points among women, but George W. Bush won by 9 points among men — a 20-point difference. The numbers this year look very close to that. I thought the polls would improve more after the second debate but they're not. Enough. Or they're just too volatile. Gallup, which is assuming 80% of the votes will come from whites, isn't helping. I participated in GOTV efforts for Obama on Capitol Hill (Seattle) on Saturday and there were fewer people participating than in 2008. Not surprising, but ... Do the rest really want Pres. Romney? I know I don't. You've got to fight these motherfuckers. The 2000 election map. Gaffes, Blunders, Walkbacks and Lies: A Week-by-Week Retrospective of the Year in Mitt It's been such a long year, for both Mitt Romney and us, that it's tough to remember all his gaffes, blunders, walkbacks and lies. Apparently he's having trouble remembering himself. Apparently so have many voters, those glorious undecideds, who gave him a 6-point boost after the first debate, where he repudiated much of what he'd said during the GOP primaries. He shook the Etch a Sketch and it worked. In 2004, John Kerry changed his position on one matter, the Iraq War, and was condemned for an entire election season, and beyond, for it. Mitt Romney flip-flops on everything and he's awarded the governorship of Massachusetts, the Republican nomination for president, and... ? So I used Google's “custom range” tool to search, week by week, for the various top stories on Mitt Romney, and came up with the compendium below. Caveat: “Dog on roof,” and “Corporations are people, my friend,” two favorites, are from 2011. Enjoy. Or grimace. - January 1-8: “Gingrich: Mitt Romney is a Liar” on CBS News. - January 8-14: “Where's Romney's tax return?” on FOX Business. - January 15-21: “Romney's Taxes: the offshore controversy” on CNN Money. - January 22-28: “Mitt Romney Made Nearly $22 Million in 2010, Paid Less Than 14% in Taxes” on ABC News. - January 29-February 4: “Mitt Romney: 'I'm Not Concerned with the Very Poor'” on Huffington Post - February 5-11: “Mitt Romney tells CPAC he was 'severely conservative governor'” in The Washington Post - February 12-18: “Romney: 'Michigan trees are the right height'” on YouTube: - February 19-25: “Another Romney Clunker? 'Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs actually'” on the Christian Science Monitor site. - February 26-March 3: “Romney: Limbaugh's 'Slut' line is 'not the language I'd use'” on The Hill. - March 4-10: “Romney in the South: 'I like grits, y'all'” on YouTube. - March 11-17: “Mitt Romney on Planned Parenthood: 'We're going to get rid of that'” on KSDK.com. - March 18-24: “Mitt Romney Platform 'Like an Etch a Sketch,' Top Spokesman Says” on Huffington Post. - March 25-31: “Can Romney Recover from Etch-a-Sketch Moment?” by National Journal Staff. - April 1-7: “The Facts vs. Mitt Romney” on the Washington Post site. - April 8-14: “Mitt Romney at NRA: Beware of Obama 'Unrestrained by the Demands of Re-Election'” on Huffington Post. - April 15-21: “Mitt Romney's years at Bain represent everything you hate about capitalism,” in the Village Voice. - April 22-28: “Mitt Romney Tells Otterbein University Students to Borrow Money from Their Parents to Start Business” on Huffington Post. - April 29-May5: “FOX News' Shep Smith reacts to Mitt Romney reacting to Newt Gingrich quitting” on YouTube. - May 6-12: “How Mitt Romney Bullied a Gay Student at Cranbook” on The New Yorker site. - May 13-19: “Mitt Romney: 'I stand by what I said, whatever it was” on YouTube highlight reel. - May 20-26: “Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney” in Rolling Stone. - May 27-June 2: “Romney to officially clinch Republican nomination Tuesday” in The Washington Post. - June 3-June 9: “Romney Mocks Obama for Wanting More Firemen, Policemen, Teachers” on Huffington Post. - June 10-16: “The Root of Mitt Romney's Comfort with Lying” in Time magazine. - June 17-23: “A Case of Romnesia: Mitt Romney's long history of misremembering his past” in Mother Jones. - June 24-30: “I Will Repeal Obamacare” on MittRomney.com. - July 1-7: “The Mystery of Romney's Exit from Bain” in Mother Jones. - July 8-14: “Romney stayed at Bain three years longer than he stated” in the Boston Globe. - July 15-21: “What Might Be Hiding in Romney's Tax Returns?” in US News and World Report. - July 22-28: “Mitt Romney Makes 'Disconcerting' Olympic Gaffe in London” in International Business Times - July 29-August 4: “Mitt Romney Palestinian comments 'racist and out of touch'” in the Daily Telegraph. - August 5-11: “Mitt Romney Would Pay 0.82 Percent in Taxes Under Paul Ryan's Plan” on The Atlantic site. - August 12-18: “Mitt Romney says he pays 13 percent in taxes. How low is that?” on the Christian Science Monitor site. - August 19-25: “Romney birth certificate joke sets off firestorm” on CBS News. - August 26-September 1: “Romney: 'Now is the Time to Restore the Promise of America'” on C-Span. - September 2-8: “Clint Eastwood bests Mitt Romney as RNC highlight: Poll” by Reuters. - September 9-15: “Mitt Romney's Response to Libya Murders was Un-American” on US News.com. - September 16-22: “Deciphering Mitt Romney's '47 Percent' Blunder” on Politico. - September 23-29: “Mitt Romney Lowers Debate Expectations” on ABC News. - September 30-October 6: “Mitt Romney is the Smartest Guy in the Room” on FOX News. - October 7-13: “Mitt Romney still mum on specifics of tax plan” in the LA Times. - October 14-20: “'Binders Full of Women': Mitt Romney's claim not even accurate” in the Boston Globe. You could almost sing a version of Billy Joel's “We Didn't Start the Fire” to Mitt's year: NASCAR owners, Cadillacs, He pays what in income tax Kid Rock, Y'all and grits, Michigan trees. Severely conservative governor Not concerned with the poor Bain exit, Paul Ryan, Benghazi. Etch a sketch, Eastwood's chair, You can't take him anywhere Brit Olympics disconcerting Homosexual student hurting Mitt keeps starting fires And he keeps them burning Instead of learning... Feel free to add your own stanza. I didn't even touch “47 percent” or “binders full of women.” “I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” Absent Fathers, Powerful Fathers Our two most recent Democratic presidents never knew their fathers. Clinton's father died before he was born while Obama met his father for one extended two-week meeting when he was 10. That was it. Both men were raised by single mothers, grandparents, and stepfathers. Neither came from wealth or power but they raised themselves up to positions of wealth and power. They represent the Horatio Alger aspects of the American dream, which, for most Americans, is just that (a dream), but which they, as leaders, have tried to keep open for as many as possible. Our most recent Republican president and the current Republican nominee are the scions of wealthy, powerful men. George Romney was the CEO of General Motors, the governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate; George H.W. Bush was a U.S. Representative, director of the CIA, ambassador to China, Vice President of the United States, and then the 41st President of the United States. Both scions had/have father issues. W. probably resented his father too much and Romney probably loved his father too much. Both tried to do what their fathers couldn't or didn't: topple Saddam; become president of the United States. In other words, the rhetoric that the right tends to use about success in America, bootstraps and all, is best represented by Democrats. The reality, that money and connections help immensely, is best represented by Republicans. I suppose Obama and Clinton, bootstraps guys, never bought bootstraps rhetoric because, in part, they saw the inequities of the world and knew the pain of absent fathers. That's why they are men of the people. Mitt Romney is a man of the LDS Church and the boardroom. He knew the pain of being the son of a man who might not be reelected governor of Michigan. From Nicholas Lemann's profile in the Oct. 1 New Yorker: [Romney] recalled watching his father on Election Night in 1964, when George was running for reëlection as governor of Michigan. Lyndon Johnson had won the Presidency by a landslide. “The numbers had come in, and in Michigan Johnson was way ahead of what our pollster, Walter DeVries, had estimated. And Walter DeVries came in. Our family was in a hotel room. He said, ‘George, you probably can’t win. Most likely you’ve lost tonight.’ And I, as a seventeen-year-old, was thinking about how embarrassing it would be to go to school and have your dad having lost as governor... Wow. Wow wow wow. Additional reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates on “The Burden of a Black President,” in which he compares Obama's first debate to Joe Louis' first fight with Max Schmeling. Lies, Damned Lies and Mitt Romney The Convention failed to move the needle, but some time in late September, a rise began, perhaps as Republicans came home and just decided they could like the guy. But then the big turning point is Romney's first debate, when he effectively undid in one night almost everything the Obama campaign had thrown at him since the spring. It was a new market; he had a new sales pitch; a new set of policies; a personality implant. And for many low-information voters, and others, that was enough. He worries what this will mean on election day, as do I. But more, I worry what this means about democracy, and whether we can have it. If you can win the presidency by repudiating many of your past positions in order to appeal to a rabid base, then repudiate those repudiations in order to appeal to the uninformed, undecided, middle-of-the-road voter, and you can prosper in this, what does that say about representative government? What does that say about success and who gets it? And how does that conform with typical right-wing rhetoric about success? None of this is exactly news to me. But for the past year I've assumed that most people were at least smart enough to sense the inauthenticity in Mitt Romney. Unfortunately, he had a good 90 minutes, Obama had a bad 90 minutes, and apparently that was enough for some of them. We'll see how the second debate numbers shake out. We'll see if enough people can see, as almost every conservative leader says in this video, what a pathetic and pathological liar Mitt Romney is. Not What We Do I first saw this on Andrew Sullivan's site (hello again, Sully!) but I remember the power of the moment during the debate last night. Romney's about to step into it in a manner described well by Paul Krugman: A large part of Romney’s campaign has been based on the false claim that Obama “apologized for America”. This supposed verbal weakness is supposed to trump the reality that Obama, you know, actually did get bin Laden. So naturally Romney tried to go after Obama [on the Benghazi issue] not for what he did or didn’t do, but for his supposed failure to talk tough enough. But then how did Romney get it so wrong? And if you read the transcript, by the way, Obama was clearly enjoying this — it seems as if he knew what was coming: MR. ROMNEY: I think it’s interesting the president just said something--which is that on the day after the attack, he went in the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror. You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror. It was not a spontaneous demonstration. PRESIDENT OBAMA: Please proceed. MR. ROMNEY: Is that what you’re saying? PRESIDENT OBAMA: Please proceed, Governor. MR. ROMNEY: I — I — I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror. PRESIDENT OBAMA: Get the transcript. MS. CROWLEY: It — he did in fact, sir. MR. ROMNEY: So let me — let me call it an act of terrorism — PRESIDENT OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy? (Laughter, applause.) MS. CROWLEY: He did call it an act of terror. Which left Romney looking stunned and angry ... and small. But even before that moment, which is all about Obama letting Romney hang himself in the politest manner possible (“Please proceed, Governor”), we got this moment, which is all about Obama's strength of character: I love the way he faces Romney. I love the look in his eye. I love his insistence on respect and seriousness in the disrespectful realm of political gamesmanship that Romney is playing. “That's not what we do” has an unasked follow-up: “So why are you doing it?” Obama makes Romney seem like a petulant child here. Man of the People, Mitt of the Sons Hey, candidates. You've just spent 90 minutes debating each other over the future of the country. Who do you hang with? Pres. Obama talked with and mingled with voters: Romney immediately surrounded himself with his sons, who seemed to close him off from the rest of the world: Via The Atlantic and their debate recap. The Second Debate: Romney Creates a Meme OK, I can read Andrew Sullivan again. I missed the first debate, stuck at work, but followed it via Sullivan's blog and Twitter, and, well, barely got any work done for all the panic I felt. I watched the VEEP debate and thought Joe stuck it and Paul Ryan was smooth and without answers to tough questions, which is the GOP way. Increase defense + cut taxes doesn't equal balanced budget, as they claim. It equals bullshit. It has for 30 years. I watched the second presidential debate and thought Romney did a good job for someone impersonating someone running for president. He doesn't seem as inauthentic as he did during the GOP debates, when he was awful, but he began to crumble near the end. He seemed a little sweatier, his voice a little reedier. He complained too much over little things. Obama was calm when he needed to be, forceful when he needed to be. He seemed presidential. I think Romney began to go off the rails with the answer to the question about women making 72% of what men in the same positions make: Obama's answer: I signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in January 2009. Romney's answer: I hired a woman once. Not even that. He tells a story about filling cabinet positions as governor of Massachusetts in which all the applicants were men. And I went to my staff and said, 'How come the people for all of these jobs are men? and they said, 'Well, these are the people who have the qualifications.' And I said, well, gosh, can’t we—can’t we find some—some women that are also qualified? That's some condenscending crap. Let's break it down to see what he's saying. - He only knows men. - The only qualified job applicants for his administration were men. - He decided to look for qualified women, because they were not anywhere around him. - Plus: He's not really answering the question. This leads to his already infamous “binders full of women” line: I brought us whole binders full of—of women. That meme went viral faster than anything I've ever seen. By the time the debate was over, it was all over the Internet. It's already a tumblr site. It's already a Facebook page with a quarter of a million 'likes.' My favorite so far: But in some ways, the meme actually misses the point. The bigger problem with his answer, which doesn't even answer the question, is that it implies that he, Mitt Romney, was a business leader for two decades, helped organize the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ran for governor of Massachusetts and won, and yet through all of these endeavors knew no women who would work well in positions of power. He had to search for them. Because apparently they're so passive, being women, and he's such a good guy, being Mitt. It implies a very cloistered and closed-off existence. Guess what? This horrible answer is actually a lie. A woman's group actually presented him with qualified candidates. They were proactive. He was passive. According to Think Progress' fact-check, this was just one of 31 times that Romney lied during the debate. We still have a long way to go. There's one more debate. Obama needs to do it again. He needs to kick ass again. We all need to help. I contributed $500 to his campaign last night, bringing me up to $2,000. Other than a car and a home, I don't think I've spent $2,000 on anything in my life. But at least I can breathe again. I can read Andrew Sullivan again. It was good seeing my president again. Why Obama Now Yes, I wish he'd said more of this during the debate. Doesn't mean I'm not voting for him. Seriously, America. Dude takes it on the chin—for you—for four years, and because he doesn't call out a blatant liar during a 90-minute debate, a guy who rewrites everything he fucking believes in, that means you're voting for the blatant liar? What are you—a woman in a Sam Peckinpah movie? I know. Obscure. But brutal. Facts Don't Speak for Themselves: Obama's Worrisome Conciliatory Nature This is worrisome. From David Remnick's piece, “Obama's Old Friends React to the Debate.” When Barack Obama was a student at Harvard Law School, he was never known as a particularly good debater. In class, if he thought that a fellow student had said something foolish, he showed no forensic bloodlust. He did not go out of his way to defeat someone in argument; instead he tried, always with a certain decorous courtesy, to try to persuade, to reframe his interlocutor’s view, to signal his understanding while disagreeing. Here's Laurence H. Tribe, a leading constitutional-law scholar and Obama’s mentor at Harvard: Barack Obama’s instincts and talents have never included going for an opponent’s jugular. That’s just not who he is or ever has been. And here's Will Burns, a Chicago alderman, who worked for Obama in '96 and 2000: The President has always been someone who takes the truth seriously and has a great faith in the American people and their ability to handle big ideas. He doesn’t patronize them. He uses the campaign as an educative process. He wants to win but also wants to be clear about his ideas. Finally Burns again: Romney stood there, with his hair and his jaw and his terrific angles—and he lied! About taxes, about Medicare. Obama pushed back on the five-trillion-dollar tax cut or the way Romney’s version of Medicare would destroy Medicare as we know it. And Romney just tilted his head and said, Oh, no, it won’t. At some point, you have to believe that the facts speak for themselves. That's the sad thing about facts: they don't speak for themselves. You have to speak for them. In a way that people will hear. The sadder fact about the electorate is that they don't want facts; they want wish fulfillment. You say you'll cut my taxes and the deficit won't grow? Yay! You say we can take down Saddam, who caused 9/11, with no cost to ourselves? Double yay! You say you'll give me a loan for this house I can't afford? Triple yay! At some point, the bill arrives. We respond to emotion: fear and reassurance. The GOP knows this. Everyone including me thought Obama's 2008 victory was about hope and change but it was really about fear and reassurance: our fear that an idiot president was destroying our economy. Huge institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. were crumbling to the ground like the twin towers on 9/11. What do we do? Hey, this guy seems smart and calm. Let's vote for him instead of the crazy old man, with the dippy girl, neither of whom is reassuring me at all. He's what? He's black? Whatever. He seems smart and calm. Obama '08! But for Obama to win this time, he needs to be more than calm and smart. He needs to call a liar a liar. For the good of the country. He can't be Ali holding back his punch as Foreman goes down, because, now, Romney isn't going down. He's going up. And if he goes up, we go down. Obama needs to do it. In the next debates. Every day on the campaign trail. He can even frame it within the context of who he is. “I'm not the type of person who...” “People who know me know I try to be diplomatic whenever possible...” Then add the “but.” Then throw the fucking punch already. Because Mitt Romney, rich bastard, dissembler and liar, hider of taxes and firer of people, needs to be decked with the truth. And brother? Make it sting. My Overwhelming Conviction about Pres. Obama's DNC Speech I disagreed with many people who were immediately disappointed with Pres. Obama's acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. I loved it. I thought it was straightforward and honest and at times uplifting. It was uplifting enough that it lifted me up from my couch and over to my computer where I donated another $500 to the Obama campaign. But the line of the speech wasn't an uplifting one—except in the sense that it was beautiful. It wasn't even Obama's. It came from Abraham Lincoln. Here's what Pres. Obama said: While I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.' God, that's beautiful. You don't even have to believe in God to know the feeling. We've all felt it. We can only imagine how a president in a time of crisis must feel it. The quote comes from Noah Brooks writing in Harper's Weekly three months after Lincoln's assassination. Brooks was a journalist for the Sacramento Union, and, particularly because he didn't indicate the circumstances under which Lincoln said the line, some doubt whether Lincoln said it at all. If he didn't then Brooks is less hack than great writer, because it's a great line worthy of repeating. It's one of our most fundamental and human images, isn't it? Man on his knees in times of crisis and despair. As soon as Pres. Obama said it, as soon as I began to play it over in my mind, I thought of two similar lines, one humorous, one spiritual. This is the humorous version. It's from Saul Bellow's “Herzog”: On the knees of your soul? Might as well be useful. Scrub the floor. The other, more spiritual line, comes from U2's “Mysterious Ways”: To touch is to heal - to hurt is to steal If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel We are driven down by the weight of the world; but in accepting our failings we are raised up. It's the low place we go to find hope. Pres. Obama greeting tourists at the Lincoln Memorial in 2011. White House Photo. Quote of the Day “Now, the fact that a lot of Americans are still opposed not simply to the presidency of Barack Obama but to the idea of the presidency of Barack Obama is not something that Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, or in fact any Democratic speechmaker will talk about at the convention. But it's indisputable, and it accounts for the almost fantastic nature of what many Americans think of both the president and the First Lady. To be sure, they're politically vulnerable on merit; but they're also vulnerable because even, after their four years in office, a weirdly unvarying percentage of America does not accept them as Americans. It is prejudice, pure and simple, and it manifests itself less in polling results than it does in a political discourse warped by whispers and suspicions kept sub rosa. ”And so it was hard to say what Michelle Obama had to do on Tuesday night, because so much of what she had to do tonight was something outside the realm of polite speech. Republican commentators spoke almost winsomely of Ann Romney's need to humanize Mitt Romney; but no Democratic commentator could speak of the necessity of 'Americanizing' Barack Obama without indulging the worst instincts of the American electorate. So what Michelle Obama did, quite simply, was engage the best. I sat with the Ohio delegation as she spoke, and I watched from close up as she went from one thing — a woman of glamor and poise, in a dress the color of sherbet and matching heels — to quite another, in the course of a single speech. She never sounded embattled on Tuesday, but she was clearly responding to something, and it was this aspect of her speech that lent it a special force... “Tuesday night's speech had an almost lonely power, because it wasn't only about him but about them — about a couple that has changed the world, only to be misperceived. And it addressed those misperceptions not by naming them but by rising above them, and inviting the rest of America to rise above them, too.” --Tom Junod, “The Lonely Power of Michelle and the Idea of Barack,” on THE POLITICS BLOG at esquire.com David Denby's Defense of Clint Eastwood—Annotated David Denby, film critic for The New Yorker, took the road less traveled last week and wound up defending Clint Eastwood's speech at the Republican National Convention. I'm a fan of the “In Defense of...” article—I've done a few of them myself—but, as I began the piece, I couldn't imagine what defense Denby could conjure. Here it is: For the record, I didn’t think Clint Eastwood’s chair dialogue was “sad and pathetic” as Roger Ebert put it, or the weird mutterings of a senescent citizen, as Rachel Maddow and other liberal commentators thought, or quite as incoherent as Amy Davidson said. John Cassidy admitted that the speech was “refreshing,” which was closer to my response. It’s amusing that so many commentators complain about the wooden or pre-fabricated nature of convention speeches and then carry on as if some unspeakable disaster had taken place when someone tries something off-beat and a little strange. That's actually not a bad defense, particularly from a film critic. 'In a world of Hollywood gloss, Eastwood has given us mumblecore.' Rachel Maddow, whom I generally admire, teases Republican squareness with shrugs and grins in every broadcast. Every broadcast, Gracie? I think I've seen, at most, a half-hour of her show total. But then I don't watch TV news. But last night, with a larger than usual national audience watching, she relied on some presumed proper standard of behavior to judge Eastwood, using that assumption as an opportunistic sarcastic tool. Last night, Maddow came off as the square. I deplore most of Clint’s politics, yet this speech was not a disaster but an act of cunning, like many of his public appearances. I looked at it as an act of “One-take Clint.” Here's Arnie Hammer on Eastwood's directing style: “At one point he was like, 'OK, cut, print.' And I was like, 'Whoa, whoa, Clint, I had my sides in my hands, I thought we were just rehearsing that.'” That's how Eastwood does it and he probably thought he could get away with it at the RNC, too. He couldn't. He eschewed rhetoric and “rousing” pro-Romney remarks. Apparently most of the speakers did without rousing pro-Romney remarks. They weren't there to nominate Romney; they were there to nominate against Obama. I could have done without his reprisal of “Make my day,” but, in general, he was folksy, Will Rogersish, eccentric, maybe, but less doddering than mock-doddering. Look at it again: there’s a kind of logic to what he said. As always, his focus was on his idea of integrity—a man should do what he promises to do. Like give a good speech at a national convention? That led him into a tangle on Obama’s not closing Gitmo, but he started out by saying that it was a broken promise. That matters to him much more than ideology. Then why is he stumping for Romney--a man who's repudiated everything he ever did as governor of Massachusetts? Does Eastwood like the fact that Romney's making no promises other than the generic and jingoistic? That's he's making the usual Republican promises to increase defense, cut taxes on the rich and yet somehow balance the budget? That he's promising us voodoo economics all over again? Does Eastwood like how the GOP's attack on Obama is an attack on a strawman? Does he like Romney's line about “voting for the American” as if Obama isn't? He’s always been more of a libertarian than an orthodox Republican, and is actually quite liberal in his social views. Exactly. So why was he there? His remark that we should have consulted the Russians before going into Afghanistan was startling and very far from stupid. No, it was stupid. Particularly if it was an attack on Obama. Or was it an attack on Bush 43? Or was it attack on our post-9/11 response? Dirty Harry was telling us we shouldn't have attacked those who attacked us? That we should have read al Qaeda its rights? Funny. His assertion that Obama should bring the troops home tomorrow morning was even more startling. How many people at the convention reject our military efforts in Afghanistan and want to end them tomorrow? Besides Eastwood and the Ron Paulites? I'm guessing ... none. Eccentric, maybe, but not a disaster, and it will be remembered fondly as the one humanly interesting moment of the convention. Nice try, David. The mere fact that Eastwood was there was a bad call, given his politics; but it was his lack of rehearsal, his thought he could do this in one take, that hurt him. Sometimes, Clint, a man's gotta know his limitations. Eastwood said Hollywood has conservatives; they just don't “hot-dog it” like Hollywood liberals. And where did he say this? Before a national audience at the RNC. Chris Rock Rules Mitt Romney Drives I-5 to Chehalis My friend Ben (“The Obamanator”) has a cousin who helped create this video for the Obama campaign. “He built it,” as Ben says. It focuses on the lack of specifics in Mitt Romney's speech at the GOP convention last week: I didn't watch that speech or much of the convention. I had a busy week at work building things and didn't need the extra aggravation of all the GOP lies. But what stands out in this video is less Romney's generic fluff than this line from his acceptance speech: When the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American. Lousy sentence construction anyway (“the world”...“you”) but worse in its implication. Romney = an American. Obama = not an American. You know. It's a sentiment straight out of I-5, Chehalis. Mitt Romney: What a fucker. Great Moments in Right-Wing Paranoia: Swinging Sixties Edition The following examples of right-wing paranoia are all from the late 1950s and early 1960s as seen in the book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Dream,” by Rick Perlstein. It's a good reminder that right-wing paranoia isn't new. It's been around a while. It's almost always wrong. - “A private outfit, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, bankrolled by the conversative Richardson Foundation, was being retained by military bases worldwide... Among their teachings was that Defense Secretary McMamara's project to replace bombers with missiles as the centerpiece of American nuclear strategy was in fact a deliberate, covert plan for unilateral disarmament.” (pg. 146) - “In Pensacola....the chief of naval air training set up a series of mandatory, weeklong seminars for officers that taught that the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, and increased business regulations were, just as Robert Welch believed, part of the Soviet takeover of the United States.” (pg. 147) - “Day after day, fanatics pressed into [Nixon's] hand yet another copy of that damned little blue pamphlet with the United Nations insignia on the cover, Department of State Publication 7277, which they claimed was proof that the government was about to sign over America's armed forces to a Soviet colonel. (Actually it was a woolly UN report setting a course for atomic disarmament over something like a century...) (pg. 167) - ”On May 10 , the same day as the Birmingham settlement-cum-riot, the far right returned to the news when Tom Kuchel stood up in the Senate to declare that 10 percent of the letters coming into his office—six thousand a month—were 'fright mail,' mostly centering on two astonishing, and astonishingly widespread, rumors: that Chinese commandos were training in Mexico for an invasion of the United States through San Diego; and that 100,000 UN troops—16,000 of them 'African Negro Troops, who are cannibals' [sic]—were secretly rehearsing in the Georgia swamps under the command of a Russian colonel for a UN martial-law takeover of the United States.“ (pg. 210) - ”[TV host Steve Allen] decided to get Goldwater's reaction to a far-right hotline, 'Let Freedom Ring.' ... The nation heard a frantic voice say: ... 'The pattern in this country is very closely following the events which took place during the internal takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1946. ... Keep yourself well-informed. Do not trust newspapers, radio, TV and newsmagazines for your information. These are the main weapons the enemy has to use against us.'“ - ”In Mississippi, vigilantes were setting upon black churches, tearing them apart for 'weapons' they assumed were being stockpiled as a prelude to the Communist takeover, then burning them to the ground at the rate of one a week when no weapons could be found.“ (pg. 363) - ”Goldwater delegates were at the top of Nob Hill at the city's WPA-style Masonic Temple screamng their heads off when Michael Goldwater explained how his father had taught his children to 'be wary of any man who tries to take our land away from us or our God away from us,' and that Johnson's self-professed Great Society 'can only result in dictatorship.'“ (pg. 380) The book contains some left-wing paranoia, too, such as this letter sent to John F. Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, on Nov. 19, 1963: - ”Don't let the President come down here. I'm worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.“ (pg. 241) Salinger tried to quiet the woman's fears: ”I appreciate your concern for the president,“ he wrote back, ”but it would be a sad day for this country if there were any city in the United States he could not visit without fear of violence. I am confident the people of Dallas will greet him warmly." That Right-Wing, Uncle Sam Billboard near Chehalis, Wash. P and I, with our friend Ward, went to a friend's place along the Columbia river on Friday, stayed over, hiked, drove back Saturday. On the way down, on I-5 near Chehalis, Wash., we saw a tattered Uncle Sam sign with these words spelled out: VOTE FOR THE AMERICAN Do they mean ...? I wondered. Of course they do. On the way back it read: WHY IS OBAMA SUPPRESSING THE MILITARY VOTE? It's a well-known billboard, started by a farmer named Alfred Hamilton, who died in 2004. The messages keep going up even as they eminate from an image that grows ever-more faded. They're the usual loony paranoid crap. They're the usual, accuse-the-Dems-of-what-the-GOP-is-doing crap. Because voter suppression? Ain't nothing but a GOP thang. Of course, now Romney is doing his version of the first sign mentioned above. It's his 1,001st sign of desperation. Stay classy, America. A Legitimate Choice Until last weekend, whenever I heard the word 'legititmate' I thought of Kenneth Branagh doing Edmund's soliloquy in a Renaissance Theater Company recording of “King Lear”, which I listened to while schlepping in the University Book Store warehouse in the mid-1990s: Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land: Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: fine word: legitimate! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper: Now, gods, stand up for bastards! Now, thanks to Todd Akin, U.S. Rep from Missouri, current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and professional douchebag, my association is somewhat more ... base: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” You see where it comes from. If you're pro-life, the tough question is “What about in instances of rape and incest? Do you demand that the woman, or girl, carry the fetus to term?” This is the wish-fulfillment answer. Oh, women don't get pregnant when they're REALLY raped. That's science. It's what I understand from doctors. Or misunderstand from doctors. I like that word: legitimate. I'd like to talk to the GOP about that word. Because in my lifetime, in U.S. elections, they've rarely given me a legitimate choice. I shouldn't be that hard to win over. I have conservative elements in me. The mewing and whining of the left often bothers me. The political correctness of the left often bothers me. But in almost every election, increasingly so as I age, it's not even a contest. The choice is between the conservative, which is the Democrat, and the reactionary, who is the Republican. It's between those who want to hold the line and those who want to dismantle what we have, those who want to repair the social safety net and those who want to hack it to pieces, those who think government has a role and those who think it has virtually none. In my lifetime, the GOP appeals to fear and retribution, paranoia and selfishness. Its candidates are chest-thumpingly stupid, and proudly so. They invoke God against the Constitution and the founding fathers as if they were gods. They are expert propagandists who spread their bullshit uniformly across the country. They accuse others of wanting to take what we have, then take what we have. Anyone who doesn't agree with their platform is a Socialist or a Communist or a Fascist—or all three. They are adept at the Big Lie. They accuse the opposition of being what they themselves are—again and again and again. They demonize the powerless and hold up the powerful as victims. They are always on the wrong side of history when it comes to the rights of others, and then, when it's convenient, they rewrite that history. They like to rewrite history. In this way, they are absolutists in rhetoric but relativists in strategy, relying on the relativity of truth to obfuscate that which doesn't favor them, which is most things. They undermine democracy by not giving me a legitimate choice. I'd like one, one day. 'Sikh, Arab, What's the Difference?' The Sikh Temple Killings and Spike Lee's 'Inside Man' When I first heard of the Sikh Temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wis., last Sunday, and the identity, such as it is, of the neo-Nazi shooter, my thoughts turned to filmmaker Spike Lee—specifically his 2006 action-film “Inside Man.” The movie is about hostages and a bank heist, in the manner of “Dog Day Afternoon,” and there's a scene halfway through where a Sikh hostage is released by the robbers only to be ordered by New York cops, with itchy, post-9/11 trigger fingers, onto the ground. They call him an Arab and take away his turban. Here's a later scene where the cops (Denzel Washingon, Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor) question the Sikh, Vikram, about the hostage situation, while he questions them about his turban situation: “I bet you can get a cab, though,” is a good line, but it's a shame Vikram didn't get the last word. He deserved it. I also thought of Anthony Lane, the great critic for The New Yorker, and his review of “Inside Man,” and the way he contrasted Spike Lee's vision of the world with that of Jean Renior in “The Grand Illusion”: “Inside Man” needs to be seen. The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion. A hostage is released, and an armed cop shouts, “He’s an Arab!” The hostage replies, “I’m a Sikh,” and you can hear the weariness at the edges of his fear. Another hostage is quizzed by Frazier about his name: “Is that Albanian?” “It’s Armenian,” the man explains. “What’s the difference?” Frazier asks, not that he cares either way. It is these small, peppery incidents of strife—far more than the stridency of recent Lee projects like “Bamboozled” and “She Hate Me”—that show the director at his least abashed and most tuned to current anxieties, and that mark him out, for all the fluency of his camera, as the anti-Renoir of our time. “Grand Illusion” offered the ennobling suggestion that national divisions were delusory, and that our common humanity can throw bridges across any social gulf. To which Lee would reply, Nice idea. Go tell it to the guy who just had his turban pulled off by the cops. Or to the folks who lost loved ones in south Milwaukee last Sunday. The Gettysburg Address, Out of Context I remember visiting the Lincoln Memorial with my friend Dean in 1989, looking up at the words of the Gettysburg Address engraved on the wall, and asking him, with the news-junkie question of the day: Where's the sound bite? What portion of this speech would modern news organizations focus on? I think we decided on this: The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. Today's question is actually worse. Today's question is: What portion of the speech would Lincoln's opponents take out of context? What would they focus on, and mangle, in the tradition of FOX-News, in order to demonize Lincoln? My thoughts in bold: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. [1.] Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, [2.] can long endure. We are met on [1.] a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. [3.] But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that [4.] government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. The talking points would be: - Lincoln thinks the civil war is great. He thinks the battle of Gettysburg was great. Try telling that to the mothers and fathers of the young men who died, Mr. President! - He doesn't believe this nation can endure. - He refuses to give a blessing to the battlefield! - Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Socialist! Abraham Lincoln hates America! This post results, of course, from a recent speech by Pres. Obama, which was taken out of context by the usual suspects. Let it be noted--but not long remembered--that I agree with everything Pres. Obama said. Pres. Lincoln, too. Remember when Abraham Lincoln refused to bless the Gettysburg battlefield? He hates America! Why a Patriotic WWII Film Starring Frank Sinatra Would Get Booed by Modern Republicans I was going to include “The House I Live In,” a short, cornball, patriotic film starring Frank Sinatra and made in the middle of World War II, in my earlier post about what Seattle means to me. Then I watched it and realized it was a post of its own. The first thing you notice about the film is that Sinatra looked good. You finally understand what all those bobbysoxers were screaming about. Plus I love his jacket. Then in the middle of the film (4:22), he delivers a lesson on religious tolerance to tough neighborhood kids who've been beating up on another boy of another religion. He tells them this: Listen, fellas. Religion makes no difference--except maybe to a Nazi or somebody who's stupid. Why, people all over the world worship God in many different ways. God created everybody. He didn't create one people better than another. Your blood's the same as mine, mine's the same as his. Do you know what this wonderful country is made of? It's made of a hundred different kinds of people, and a hundred different ways of talking, and a hundred different ways of going to church. But they're all American ways. It's kind of stunning to hear in 2012, and it's indicative of how reactionary the far-right in this country has become. A cornball patriotic film, with Frank Sinatra, made nearly 70 years ago, in the middle of World War II, is a bastion of tolerance compared with their rhetoric. If someone said the above at a Tea Party rally, they'd probably get booed off the stage. So I guess the question Tea Party folks have to ask themselves is: Are you a Nazi, or are you stupid? Frank is waiting for your answer. Here's the film: The Annotated David Brooks The following appeared on the New York Times op-ed page on Friday. Without annotations. Democrats frequently ask me why the Republicans have become so extreme. As they describe the situation, they usually fall back on some sort of illness metaphor. Republicans have a mania. President Obama has said that Republicans have a “fever” that he hopes will break if he is re-elected. He's kind. I hope it kills them. “We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared. ... We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism.” So what do you mean by “welfare state”? Social security? Medicare? Highways? Policemen? Speak up, David. To Republican eyes, the first phase of that collapse is playing out right now in Greece, Spain and Italy — cosseted economies, unmanageable debt, rising unemployment, falling living standards. And Sweden? And Germany? Why are Greece, Spain and Italy seen as harbingers of the U.S.? Doesn't Germany, 'to Republican eyes,' have a bloated health care system? Are Republican eyes paranoid eyes? Can I look through them? America’s economic stagnation is just more gradual. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. economy grew by well over 3 percent a year, on average. But, since then, it has failed to keep pace with changing realities. The average growth was a paltry 1.7 percent annually between 2000 and 2009. Highlighting stagnant years, which were led by a conservative administration intent on ending the so-called welfare state, isn't exactly a strong argument for ending the so-called welfare state. (And by 'welfare state' you mean... what exactly? Social security? Medicare? Highways? Policemen? Speak up, David.) It averaged 0.6 percent growth between 2009 and 2011. Well, it does take a while to climb out of a Republican-dug shithole. (P.S. Thanks for the shit.) Wages have failed to keep up with productivity. Yeah, thanks for that, too, fuckers. Family net worth is back at the same level it was at 20 years ago. Ditto. Fuckers. In America as in Europe, Republicans argue, the welfare state is failing to provide either security or dynamism. The safety net is so expensive it won’t be there for future generations. Or we could tax the rich at levels we taxed them at during most of the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care and education. Bloated like babies in Africa. Numbers would be nice here. Or anywhere. Successive presidents have layered on regulations and loopholes, creating a form of state capitalism in which big businesses thrive because they have political connections and small businesses struggle. I actually agree with this. The secret to your success, David: one good thought out of 20. You're the .050 hitter in the Major Leagues. The welfare model favors security over risk, comfort over effort, stability over innovation. Money that could go to schools and innovation must now go to pensions and health care. I thought schools were bloated? Two sentences back. Numbers would be nice here. Or anywhere. And when did we stop innovating anyway? The 1930s? The 1960s? Last year? This model, which once offered insurance from the disasters inherent in capitalism, has now become a giant machine for redistributing money from the future to the elderly. This is beginning to sound like a euthanasia column, David. This is the source of Republican extremism: the conviction that the governing model is obsolete. Psst. That is extreme. It needs replacing. Or you could tax the wealthy at a higher rate. A thought. Mitt Romney hasn’t put it this way. Of course not. He wants to keep the focus on President Obama. But this worldview is implied in his (extremely vague) proposals. As are yours, David. As are yours. He would structurally reform the health care system, moving toward a more market-based system. Pardon me, sir, but the free hand of the market needs to examine your prostate. He would simplify the tax code. He would reverse 30 years of education policy, decentralizing power and increasing parental choice. I thought we already spent 30 years decentralizing power and increasing parental choice. Oh, right. That was centralizing corporate power and increasing corporate choice. My bad. The intention is the same, to create a model that will spark an efficiency explosion, laying the groundwork for an economic revival. The level of wish fulfillment in this sentence outdoes the level of wish fulfillment in any Hollywood blockbuster. I wanted a bucket of popcorn after reading it. I wanted to see it acted by Bruce Willis. Democrats have had trouble grasping the Republican diagnosis because they don’t have the same sense that the current model is collapsing around them. Or because Republicans aren't upfront about what their proposal entails. Killing social security? Medicare? Highways? Policemen? Speak up, David. In his speech in Cleveland on Thursday, President Obama offered an entirely different account of where we are. In the Obama version, the welfare-state model was serving America well until it was distorted a decade ago by a Republican Party intent on serving the rich and shortchanging the middle class. Don't be modest. Republicans began distorting our system three decades ago. In his speech, Obama didn’t vow to reform the current governing model but to rebalance it. The rich would pay a little more and everyone else would get a little more. I'd have the rich pay A LOT more. Erik 2016! He’d “double down” on clean energy, revive the Grand Bargain from last summer’s budget talks, invest in infrastructure, job training and basic research. Obama championed targeted subsidies and tax credits. Republicans, meanwhile, envision comprehensive systemic change. The G.O.P. vision is of an entirely different magnitude: replace the tax code, replace the health care system and transform entitlements. With what... with what ... to what? This is what this election is about: Vagueness? Is the 20th-century model obsolete, or does it just need rebalancing? Is Obama oblivious to this historical moment or are Republicans overly radical, risky and impractical? Are there national issues that require national solutions? Should the wealthiest people pay a smaller percentage in taxes than you and me? Do we want to return to the economic policies of 2001-2009? How about 1801-1809? What percentage of U.S. voters are now part of the reality-based community? Republicans and Democrats have different perceptions about how much change is needed. I suspect the likely collapse of the European project will profoundly influence which perception the country buys this November. David, because of your column, I got off the schneid. I just donated $500 to Obama for America. Thank you. The Myth of Job Creators Confession. I often imagine myself on cable news shows wrangling out the issues of the day. Probably because that's where we often see the issues of the day being wrangled out. The dialogue I've had in my head for the past year goes something like this: FOX News Blowhard: BLAH BLAH BLAH 1%. BLACK BLAH BLAH job creators. Me: Excuse me? What did you just call them? FNB: Job creators. That's what they-- Me: What's the goal of a CEO or corporation? FNB: To create jobs. Me: It's to create profit. You know that. So does everyone out there. That's what capitalism is all about. That's Business 101, isn't it? I ask because I've never taken Business 101. FNB: Yes, but when you create profit, you create jobs. Pinhead. Me: Not necessarily. If to create profit, a CEO has to elminate jobs, or ship them overseas, he'll do that. In a heartbeat. That's part of what's been going on for the last 30 years. So why do you call them job creators? FNB: BLAH BLAH socialism BLAH BLAH Obama BLAH BLAH Jimmy Carter. Me: You call them 'job creators' because it's politically expedient to do so in a time of high unemployment. But it's a lie. You know it's a lie. And so does everyone watching. I know. For some reason in my fantasy appearance on FOX News I sound like Bob Dole. It's sad that this is still a talking point for all the blowhards out there. It's such a talking point that when venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, Seattle's own, gave one of those TED talks on the myth of job creators, the people behind TED felt it too divisive, too immediately political, to actually post on their site. They didn't feel it was worthy of all of the other TED talks about BLAH BLAH BLAH. And in this manner they stumbled right into controversy. Hanauer's talk has since been uploaded to YouTube. Here it is: He takes the businessman's stance on the matter, which is deeper and infiinitely more knowledgable than mine. He argues that the way things are is the opposite of the way they've been presented. They've been presented this way: If taxes on the wealthy go up, job creation goes down. He argues that job creation actually stems from consumer demand; and consumer demand stems from a rising middle class; and for the past 30 years our middle class has been falling—in part because tax policies favor the wealthy and place a greater burden on what was once our proud middle class. This may be the talk that TED didn't want, but it's the talk the US needs. I know it's not “Sovereignty means it's sovereign; you're a — you've been given sovereignty,” but it'll do if you want some smart, straight, teleprompter-less talk. Endorsement of the Day I posted the above this morning before work, and before I knew Pres. Obama would be speaking today about marriage equality, and before he came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Now it's even more true. Now it's a great day. I've seen a lot of good messages, good comments, good thoughts out there in the social media landscape, but the one below is my favorite. From someone named Erin on Twitter: My parents don't approve of the fact that I'm gay. It's sort of nice to know that my president does. Stat of the Day “Today the United States economy is producing even more goods and services than it did when the recession officially began in December 2007, but with about five million fewer workers.” --from “U.S. Added Only 115,000 Jobs in April; Rate Is 8.1%” by Catherine Rampell in The New York Times. Reheadlined “Why You May Be Exhausted” on Andrew Sullivan's site. Compare to an interview I did two years ago with labor lawyer Thomas Geohegan. Quote: It defies the laws of economic gravity. Under everything you understand about labor economics—if you take Economics 10 or Labor Economics 101—productivity goes up, wages go up. That’s the gold standard. That’s what raises the standard of living. Hasn’t happened here. Productivity has shot up a lot; the real median hourly wage has gone down. So we're working more, producing more, getting less. 'I Don't Want Government in My Bank...' Why Mitt and Ann Romney are Just Like You: Scrimping By with a Seven-Bedroom Colonial and a 5,000-Foot Lakefront Vacation Home Now that Ann [Romney] is using the details of her domestic life for political purposes, journalists and Obama supporters are sure to focus on parts of that existence that might reflect less well on her and her husband. For example, she has said that when Mitt was in college, the two of them were so financially strapped that they had to liquidate some of their stock portfolio to get by. At the time Mrs. Romney said that she was engaged in a “struggle” to bring up her children, the family was living in a seven bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom mock-Colonial mansion in Belmont, Massachusetts, while spending summers at their five-thousand-square-foot vacation home, which sits on eleven lakefront acres in New Hampshire. It'll be interesting to see if the GOP, working with the mainstream media, who love to turn a mouse into a lion (because reporting what we already know is so boring), can turn Mitt and Ann Romney, rich beyond our wildest dreams, into ordinary Americans. There's no amount of BS we can't lap up. And it is BS. It's all beside the point. The point is the economy, and what to do, and what each candidate's plan is. New Yorker Magazine Paints Ted Nugent as Funny and Unfiltered Here's what Ted Nugent said at an NRA convention last week: If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year. Here's what Reeves Wiedeman writes on the New Yorker site today: This second-act version of Ted Nugent may seem manic, but on inspection it’s clearly more rehearsed. I doubt anything Nugent said to me was something he had never said before. His answers are so print-ready (and, let’s be honest, often pretty funny), that it seems unlikely he’s freestyling. I suspect Nugent’s comments this weekend were not off the cuff, but meant squarely for the audience he was addressing. Whether this is simply ignorant and depressing, or actually dangerous, depends on your view of the power of rhetoric. (If the President can’t convince people of something, can Ted Nugent?) Not only is Nugent's comment dumb and dangeorous, so is New Yorker's commentary. Obama is trying to convince a majority, or a supermajority, of people. Ted Nugent needs to convince only one. Guns Guns Guns: An Overview of Jill Lepore's BATTLEGROUND AMERICA Article Have you read Jill Lepore's article, “Battleground America: One Nation, Under the Gun,” in the latest New Yorker? You should. It's necessary reading. It details one way our country has gone insane since the 1970s. We keep bowing to the wrong people: Grover Norquist, Rush Llimbaugh, the NRA. They're ruining our country. We're letting them. Lepore visits a firing range, the American Firearms School, near Providence, R.I. She visits the biggest gun show in New England, in West Springfield, Mass. She delves into the history: how state after state in the 19th century adopted laws against concealed weapons. She quotes the Governor of Texas in 1893: The “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder,“ he said. ”To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.” Yes: Texas. She reminds us that the NRA was once a gun club. It was about firearms safety. Then there was a coup in the late 1970s in Cincinnati and it became what it became: a loud, angry, lobbying organization that fueled paranoia among its members. She reminds us how the Second Amendment was once interpretted by the U.S. Supreme Court: How, in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, FDR’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, “argued that the Second Amendment is 'restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.' Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right 'is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.' The Court agreed, unanimously.” Those were the days. Some facts worth noting: The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five. ... Gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, higher in the country than in the city, and higher among older people than among younger people. One reason that gun ownership is declining, nationwide, might be that high-school shooting clubs and rifle ranges at summer camps are no longer common. Because the NRA is too busy lobbying. A positive: NRA members appear to be less nuts than its leadership: Gun owners may be more supportive of gun-safety regulations than is the leadership of the N.R.A. According to a 2009 Luntz poll, for instance, requiring mandatory background checks on all purchasers at gun shows is favored not only by eighty-five per cent of gun owners who are not members of the N.R.A. but also by sixty-nine per cent of gun owners who are. Its history is also more tempered than we've been led to believe: The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). ... In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights. Then in the 1960s our leaders were killed. JFK. MLK. RFK. Gun control became a common conversation. Here's a nice irony: Gun-rights arguments have their origins not in eighteenth-century Anti-Federalism but in twentieth-century liberalism. They are the product of what the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet has called the “rights revolution,” the pursuit of rights, especially civil rights, through the courts. In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. than of black nationalists. In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Establishing a constitutional right to carry a gun for the purpose of self-defense was part of the mission of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was founded in 1966. The NRA picked up on the Black Power rhetoric: In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense. Fights over rights are effective at getting out the vote. Describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right gave conservatives a power at the polls that, at the time, the movement lacked. Opposing gun control was also consistent with a larger anti-regulation, libertarian, and anti-government conservative agenda. In 1975, the N.R.A. created a lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, headed by Harlon Bronson Carter, an award-winning marksman and a former chief of the U.S. Border Control. But then the N.R.A.’s leadership decided to back out of politics and move the organization’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where a new recreational-shooting facility was to be built. Eighty members of the N.R.A.’s staff, including Carter, were ousted. In 1977, the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, usually held in Washington, was moved to Cincinnati, in protest of the city’s recent gun-control laws. Conservatives within the organization, led by Carter, staged what has come to be called the Cincinnati Revolt. The bylaws were rewritten and the old guard was pushed out. Instead of moving to Colorado, the N.R.A. stayed in D.C., where a new motto was displayed: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” Ronald Reagan was the first NRA president and he was shot two months after he took the Oath of Office. The irony was lost on everyone. The act of John Hinckley seemed to make the NRA stronger: In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and an act of citizenship gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principle that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned, or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the District’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Two years later, in another 5–4 ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Heller to the states. All of these victories mean nothing. The NRA remains a paranoid organization. They're paranoid about Pres. Obama. “If this President gets a second term, he will appoint one to three Supreme Court justices,” says David Keene, 66, the N.R.A.’s current president. “If he does, he could reverse Heller and McDonald, which is unlikely, but, more likely, they will restrict those decisions.” Keene is worried about losing any ground. He's standing his ground. Actually he's moving forward. He's advancing on us. Yes, Lepore also writes about Trayvon Martin, and Chardon High School outside Cleveland. She doesn't write about Ted Nugent seeming to threaten the life of the president of the United States, for which he refuses to apologize. He's standing his ground, too. No, he's advancing on us. Mouth flapping. Waving something. Keene and Nugent are paranoid about the wrong things. They see enemies where there are none. Their true enemy is themselves. The dwindling number of Americans who own and use guns is their fault. The NRA used to be a gun club, about gun safety, but they decided to spend all their time lobbying instead. So now we have what we have: laxer gun laws than at any time since the early 19th century, and fewer and fewer people utilizing them. Crazy people get to carry concealed weapons. Lepore is right. We're a nation under the gun. Our society is sick. It doesn't know how sick: One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left. A gun show in Houston, which are, like classified ads for gun sales, unregulated. The Symbiotic Relationship between the GOP and the Mainstream Media It's pretty simple. The mainstream media is interested in news, i.e., what's new, or, a la Slate.com, what's contrary to what we currently believe. The GOP, particularly since the ascension of Karl Rove, has no scruples in discrediting its opponents. So the GOP presents contrary images of Democrats, over which the mainstream media has a feeding frenzy. Pres. Obama is somehow involved in a war on women, John Kerry's decorated Vietnam War record is suspect, Al Gore makes huge mistakes. Al Gore's mistakes are actually tiny, George W. Bush's are huge, but we all know Bush isn't that smart so that's not news. But Gore: He should know better. Democrats attack Republicans for what they are, which isn't news. Republicans attack Democrats for what they are not, which is. It's the only way the GOP, with its platform (supporting the rich few against the many), can thrive. Indeed, the GOP attacks Dems for what it, the GOP, is actually guilty of: being anti-women, avoiding service, fudging economic numbers. As I've stated elsewhere, this is the ultimate in propaganda. Supporting the troops: In the 2004 election, the record of John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, was questioned, while George W. Bush, who sat out the war in Texas and Alabama, mostly received a bye. Bullshit of the Week: the Hilary Rosen Fiasco I hate having to do this. I hate having to write this. I hate having to wade through the bullshit of the week because other people aren't doing their jobs. The bullshit of this week is that somehow the Obama camp is against women, or housewives, because Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist, who is not part of the Obama campaign, said that Ann Romney, Mitt Romney's wife, who is apparently advising her husband on economic matters, “never worked a day in her life.” So the GOP is doing what it can to connect “Never worked a day in her life” with the idea that “Democrats look down on housewives” with the idea that “Obama looks down on housewives.” Let's clear away the bullshit for a moment. The initial discussion on CNN was about how the Romney camp was pegging Obama as “anti-women” because the economy still isn't going gangbusters, and women, more than men, are out of work. If Rosen had simply said “Ann Romney hasn't had to look for a job since she got married” we wouldn't be here. We would be some other stupid place, just not this stupid place. Here's the transcript of what Rosen said. The key line is in the second paragraph. The video is below: With respect to economic issues, I think actually that Mitt Romney is right, that ultimately women care more about the economic well-being of their families and the like. But he doesn't connect on that issue either. What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, 'Well, you know my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues and when I listen to my wife that's what I'm hearing.' Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and why do we worry about their future. So I think that, yes, it's about these positions and yes, I think there will be a war of words about the positions. But there's something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney. He just seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women and I think that comes across and I think that that's going to hurt him over the long term. He just doesn't really see us as equal. The GOP focuses on the second graf, second sentence. Rosen's true meaning is in second graf, third sentence: She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and why do we worry about their future. The Romneys are rich. You and I are not. I don't know about Ann, but Mitt Romney has never been poor and unconnected. He doesn't know what that's like. Just as most of us don't know what it's like to be as rich and connected as Mitt Romney has been all of his life. I don't know about Ann, but Mitt Romney doesn't know what it's like to scour the Want Ads and see nothing that says “you,” nothing that says “hope,” nothing that says “possibility” or “I have a chance.” Everything else about this discussion is bullshit. The mainstream media is always looking for a different story and the GOP is always ready to give it to them to distract everyone from the real story. It's 3 A.M.: Do You Know Where Your Affordable Care Act Is? I awoke in the middle of the night thinking of the Affordable Care Act. Such are the times we live in. No matter what the U.S. Supreme Court decides in the next few weeks, I'm still of the mind that the health insurance industry should not be a for-profit industry. It's not just the amorality or immorality of making a profit off of people's health. It's the shaky capitalism of it all. The goal of the insurance industry is to sell to whose who don't need its product and reject those who do. Its market efficiency leads to this vast product inefficiency. It wants to sell us something we'll never use. If there's a chance we'll use it? It doesn't want to sell it to us. Are there other products or services like this? Not broccoli, certainly. That Sound You're Hearing is the Rich Getting Richer Some cheery economic news from Steven Rattner, a longtime Wall Street executive, in a New York Times Op-Ed. His data comes from French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who worked from U.S. tax returns: In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households... The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation... Government has ... played a role, particularly the George W. Bush tax cuts, which, among other things, gave the wealthy a 15 percent tax on capital gains and dividends. That’s the provision that caused Warren E. Buffett’s secretary to have a higher tax rate than he does. As a result, the top 1 percent has done progressively better in each economic recovery of the past two decades. In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, the figure was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent... The only way to redress the income imbalance is by implementing policies that are oriented toward reversing the forces that caused it. That means letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy and adding money to some of the programs that House Republicans seek to cut. Allowing this disparity to continue is both bad economic policy and bad social policy. We owe those at the bottom a fairer shot at moving up. Why Democratic Veeps Run for President; Why Republican Veeps Don't Apparently Joe Biden is thinking of running for president in 2016. He should. Yes, he'll be 74, and, no, I don't know if he'd make a good president. But it's the way of Democratic vice-presidents. As opposed to Republican ones. Since 1972, when more open primary rules were first enacted, three Democrats have been elected president: Carter, Clinton and Obama. In the case of the first two, in the election after their last election, the nomination went to their vice president: Mondale in '84 and Gore in '00. Neither won. This was true for Reagan's veep as well: George H.W. Bush ran and won in '88. Since then? Bush's veep, Quayle, sputtered in '96 and never got out of the starting gate. He was considered a lightweight with no shot. Still is. W's veep, Cheney, never ran. He was considered a horrible heavyweight with no shot. Still is. Darth Cheney, who chose himself veep. The lightweight was the president. There's always a lightweight on the Republican ticket, isn't there: a “folksy” someone, generally, who isn't that smart. Each election you think it can't get worse and then it does. It can't get worse than Reagan, you think, and then they choose Quayle. It can't get worse than Quayle, you think, and then they choose W. OK, W's gotta be the bottom, right? Hello, Sarah Palin. Dems are always a little more serious about who might be a heartbeat away. Or who might be the heartbeat. So I can see Biden in 2016, although I'm more intrigued by Hillary. As for the Republicans in 2012? This certainly wouldn't break the trend: Ben Volunteers for Obama My friend Ben recently moved to Seattle after eight years in Hanoi. I like introducing him as “the former AP bureau chief in Hanoi,” which he was. I don't know of a more romantic phrase in the English language than “AP bureau chief in Hanoi.” Like most true journalists I know, Ben's an opinionated S.O.B. It probably goes with the territory. You spend 30 years objectively reporting the world until you want to grab the world by the lapels and shout in its face about what it doesn't get from your objective reporting. Ben is now doing some shouting, about politics and volunteering for the Obama campaign, over at The Obamanator blog. Much, much recommended. Some samples: - “...the Republicans made the mess and are campaigning to restore the very policies that created it... from ”Flying High at Boeing“ - ”We called someone who thought that Tiger Woods was the African-American running for president...“ from ”Another Phone Bank, Another Moron“ - Newt Gingrich is so full of baloney, he’s going to explode. Perhaps this accounts for his remarkable girth...” from “Excuse Me While I Rant for a Moment.” I think my favorite is this juxtaposition: “I Used to Be an Objective Journalist” on March 16th, followed by “Only a Twisted, Deranged, Hard-Hearted Creep Would Try to Repeal the Affordable Care Act” a day later. Stay tuned. I will. The 400 Highest Earners in the U.S. Pay Only 18.1 Percent in Taxes Do you subscribe to The New Yorker yet? Why not? Come on. James B. Stewart has a must-read piece in the March 19th issue entitled “TAX ME IF YOU CAN: The things rich people do to avoid paying up.” Money (cough) quote: The Internal Revenue Service discloses detailed statistics for the four hundred highest-earning taxpayers in the country. In 2008, the most recent year available, those taxpayers had an average adjusted gross income of two hundred and seventy million dollars each. Thirty of them paid less than ten per cent in federal taxes, and a hundred and one paid between ten and fifteen per cent. On average, the group paid 18.1 per cent. President Obama has seized on that fact, making tax fairness a central issue in his reëlection bid. The President has called for comprehensive tax reform and for specific proposals for a “Buffett Rule,” which would raise tax rates on taxpayers earning more than a million dollars a year. Romney has called for a twenty-per-cent across-the-board tax cut, while limiting some deductions. ... None of the proposals address the fact that rich people aren’t taxed on certain income, either because it is exempt, as with interest on municipal bonds, or because they claim to be living outside the jurisdiction that is levying the tax. Relatively scant media attention has been paid to residency requirements, even though enormous revenue is at stake. So that's what Stewart does: he pays attention to the residency requirements and how the rich can afford to skirt them. A thumbnail of the piece is available here. It's also on newsstands. You can also borrow my copy if you promise to bring it back. And subscribe. The U.S. Right-Wing: Sharing Conspiracy Theories with the Middle East John Lee Anderson's reporting, or “letter,” from Syria (in New Yorker parlance), entitled “The Implosion: On the front lines of a burgeoning civil war,” which is now a few weeks old, is one of those articles you really need to read if you're at all interested in fathoming what's going on in that country. To a degree, of course. If before I understood bupkis, I now understand bupkis +1. But it's an improvement. Check it out. I'm nearly 50 now and not surprised by much these days, but this part just threw me: Skepticism about the rebels was common among Assad’s supporters. One influential businessman, Nabil Toumeh, informed me that what was taking place in Syria was the result of a plan—dreamed up years before by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and supported by Israel—to help the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East. “After fifty years of persecution, they are being given power, and this will bring the Arab world to a state of backwardness,” he said. Assad’s friend told me, “This is not the Arab Spring. It’s the awakening of the extremes of Islam.” The Brotherhood was trying to seize power in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but it would not happen in Syria. “There is no reasoning with these people; with them, it is only God.” But in Zabadani one of the protesters, a Sunni, told me, “There’s no Muslim Brotherhood here. The people are Muslims, yes. But the Brotherhood doesn’t have any real plan for them. What we want is freedom, to be able to protest in peace without being fired upon.” We'll never get away from these insane conspiracy theories, will we? It's one thing, I suppose, that right-wing nutjobs in the U.S. have in common with some folks in the Middle East: they both think the Obama administration favors the Muslim Brotherhood. The right-wing nutjobs think he favors the Brotherhood because he is Muslim. (Or because he's Obama and he's black and he's all foreign-y and they just don't like him.) The Syrian nutjobs think the Obama administration favors the Muslim Brotherhood—and before him the Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan administrations—in order to better foment radical Islam and keep Arab countries backward. I.e., the very thing the U.S. doesn't want in the Middle East is the very thing some Middle Easterners think the U.S. has plotted for decades to unleash. I throw up my hands. Read the article. Will that lake's name change anytime soon? Quote of the Day “It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than [Thomas] Frank is willing to give him.” --Michael Kinsley in his review of “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” by Thomas Frank, which is as critical of Pres. Obama as Frank's previous book, “What's the Matter with Kansas?,” was critical of Kansas. Conservatives Disrespecting Authority Jonathan Chait's New York Magazine piece, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” is necessary reading for anyone concerned with the 2012 election--particularly those on the left. I tend to agree with Chait. Obama has disappointed me a few times but he's by far the best president I've had in my lifetime. More power to him. Four more years to him--hopefully, with a Tea Party-less Congress. Hell, if folks on the left spent as much time working to get rid of these bastards as they do bitching about the imperfection of Obama, we might be getting somewhere. So bravo to Chait. Even so, there's a line in his piece that made me squint my eyes in disagreement. Conservatives, compared with liberals, have higher levels of respect for and obedience to authority and prefer order over chaos and continuity over change. Generally and historically true. Yet they've spent the last three years besmirching, demonizing and undermining the ultimate authority figure in the country--the president of the United States--in a way that has never been done before. Democrats may have considered George W. Bush illegitimate because he only became president through a very shaky ruling by a very conservative U.S. Supreme Court; but Republicans and Tea Partiers argue that Pres. Obama's very presence in this country is illegitimate. They say he's not a U.S. citizen, he's not Christian, he's a socialist, he's Hitler. It's ugly stuff. More importantly, beyond Obama, conservatives have shown massive disrespect for traditional authority figures for a long, long time: - Judges (“activist”) - Lawyers (“frivolous”) - Teachers (“incompetent”) - Cops (how can they be against armor-piercing bullets?) It astounds me sometimes. The law-and-order folks that the left disrespected in the 1960s--pillars of the community--now get pilloried daily by Republicans and the usual loudmouths on FOX-News. Chait's thoughts on conservatives, in this regard, need some correction. From the Archives: A Review of Muammar Qaddafi's “Escape to Hell and other stories” In 1999 I reviewed several novels written by politicians, including Newt Gingrich's “1945” and Ed Koch's “Murder on Broadway” for a slightly humorous piece in Washington Law & Politics magazine. One of the other books was Muammar Qaddafi's “Escape to Hell and other stories.” The review is below. Take note, in bold, of the main character in the title story and his fear of the masses, and his obsession with Mussolini's fate... The first section of Qaddafi's book, “Novels”, is essentially polemic intermingled with parable; the second section, “Essays”, is mostly polemic. Why the division? And why use the word “novels” when these things are, at best, essays? I suppose ours is not to question the mind of Qaddafi. Yet here I go. At one point he sounds like a New Age chick: “Truly, the earth is your mother; she gave birth to you from her insides. She is the one who nursed you and fed you. Do not be disobedient to your mother--and do not shear her hair, cut off her limbs, rip her flesh, or wound her body.” In another chapter, he's G. Gordon Liddy, extolling, he says, “the fact that a person's will can overcome death...” Near the end of the book, he talks up the virtues of “the people” like a good politician should, but earlier, in the titular story, the masses are dreadful, inspiring an almost Kafka-esque paranoia. “People snap at me whenever they see me,” he writes. He chronicles the rise and fall of other leaders: “...the masses dragged Mussolini's corpse through the streets, and spat in Nixon's face as he departed the White House for good, having applauded his entrance years before.” Spat in his face? When did this happen? And why wasn't I allowed my turn? Muammar has his moments. He does up western culture pretty well, for example. “Entertainment,” he writes, “takes on the meaning of wasting time and being absorbed; culture becomes superficial, telling and exchanging jokes takes the place of good literary work and criticism.” Overall, though, Escape to Hell is boring as hell. Quote of the Day “To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.” --Andrew Sullivan, “A Tale of Two Presidents” Also worth reading: Sullivan's post, “The Untold Story of the Actual Obama Record.” Why I'm Behind Occupy Wall Street 99% In 2009 I interviewed Chicago labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan, who, that year, 1) argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (he won); 2) ran for Rahm Emanuel's congressional seat in Chicago (he lost); and 3) wrote a cover story for Atlantic magazine (“Infinite Debt: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy”). May we all have such successful and far-ranging years. At one point in our Q&A, we had the following exchange about the depressed state of labor and the rise of the Tea Party: Does it surprise you that angry populism seems to exist on the right rather than the left? I think the left is pretty beaten down in this country. The non-electoral checks that I think a republic needs—and here I’m thinking about labor movements, works councils, co-determination—they just don’t exist here. So you would think, given the unemployment, given the debt, given the poverty in this country, and how wealthy it is, you’d think people would be really angry. In fact, I think they are. And so they are. And so angry populism is existing, in public, on the left again. I'm truly grateful for the Occupy Wall Street crowd. I'm behind them 99 percent. My generation, born in the early-to-mid-sixties, and coming of age in the early years of the Reagan administration, dropped the ball completely. We helped create the world as it is. Hopefully these kids will help create the world as it should be. Or closer to that ideal. It'll get messy. It'll be disorganized. What can I say? It's the left and it's human beings and many will talk over their heads and/or demand what they can't get or what the majority of protesters don't even want. Plus you'll get your anarchists and nutjobs, and the mainstream media will focus on them, as will the right, and they'll try to discredit the movement any way they can. They'll say: It's just spoiled college kids. They'll say: Get a job! Leave the poor Wall Street brokers alone! They'll talk up the individual responsibility of the protesters, as if the lives of others, and the lives of powerful others, have no bearing on our own. As if the Global Financial Meltdown just kinda—oops—happened. Others will parse, and have parsed, that 99% number. Isn't it more like 90%? Or 75%? They'll shake their heads and think the kids have already blown it. But they don't know a good slogan when they hear one. “Shouldn't it be, We WILL overcome?” Others will conflate, and have conflated, the Occupy Wall Street crowd with the Tea Party: Andrew Sullivan keeps doing this. He loves this chart. He thinks it's meaningful. I don't. Look at the point of intersection between the two movements. It says: “Large corporations lobby for government to have more power, and in return the government enacts laws and regulations favorable to corporations.” Question: In this scenario, what is the government doing? It's enacting laws and regulations. Which is its job. The problem isn't what the government is doing; the problem is who the government is listening to (corporations/CEOs/lobbyists) and who it isn't listening to (the 99%). That's what we need to fix. That's why the Occupy Wall Street crowd makes sense and the Tea Party never did. I admit it: I hated the Tea Party from the get-go. It was the wrong people marching about the wrong things at the wrong time. It was historical movement as farce. If Tea Partiers were truly worried about the national debt, as they said they were, where were they when the national debt doubled from $5 trillion to $10 trillion during the Bush years? Why wait for the first few months of the Obama administration before taking to the streets? And if they were worried about taxes, as they said they were, why protest at all? Aren't taxes at historic lows? And if they were worried about both, well, how to reconcile the two? Lowering taxes raises the debt. You can say you want lower taxes and a lower debt, but, as the saying goes, people in hell want ice water. That kind of wish fulfillment, which has been going on for more than 30 years now, is why we're in this mess in the first place. Others will conflate the movements in this manner: Bigger version here. Andrew Sullivan keeps doing this, too. He thinks this kind of thing is meaningful. I think it's ludicrous. The folks on the right want to cut taxes, or, absurdly, cut them to zero, when surrounded by all the necessities their taxes create. That's hypocrisy. The folks on the left may or may not think corporations are evil (none of their signs indicate that), but even if they did, the fact that they use the products of these corporations (and, again, the “razors by Gillette” indicators are mostly guesses) is not a sign of hypocrisy. It's evidence of just how pervasive corporations are in our lives. As consumers, we can't escape corporations. As employees, we may not be able to, either. So we better make sure they do the right thing. We better make sure that we, as both consumers and employees, are protected from the natural corporate drive to create profit at our expense. Besides, this isn't what the movement is really about. What's it about? That 99% number is a clue. It's about the growing American oligarchy. It's about how the many have less, the few have most, and the government seems to be listening to the few with most rather than the many, the 99%, with less. Which isn't democracy as we were taught it. Quote of the Day “Though I have some respect for 'The Virtue of Selfishness,' her collection of essays ... I don't think there's a need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.” --Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand, from the Q&A portion of his lecture, “The Moral Necessity of Atheism,” given on February 23, 2004 at Sewanee University How great is it to be as stupid as Maureen Dowd? In her latest column, “Eggheads and Blockheads,” Maureen Dowd chastises the Republican party as the “How great is it to be stupid?” party, which it is, by comparing its current front-runner for president, Rick Perry, to ... wait for it ... John Wayne. So she attempts to trash a man by comparing him to one of the most iconic heroes of American cinema? How great is it to be as stupid as Maureen Dowd? Dowd uses John Ford's “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” as her prism for the upcoming presidential race. She casts Barack Obama as Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), the thin lawyer from the east who is often bullied by the likes of Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), whom, in a final showdown, he shoots and kills. From this he gains acclaim, becoming an ambassador to England and U.S. Senator. But it's all a lie. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), from behind a corner store, was the real man who shot Liberty Valance. Stoddard's shot missed high and wide. What's the connection between Ford's film and our current reality? None. The comparison is facile. The connective tissue is barely there. She merely sees Obama as an egghead (forgetting Stoddard's rage), Perry as a blockhead (forgetting Doniphan's heroism), and the rest of us as the townsfolk caught in the middle (forgetting that most were stereotypical Scandinavians, a favorite Ford trope.) As she puts it: So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity? What's awful about Dowd is not just her myopic dichotomies, not just her clumsy Hollywood analogies, but the fact that she misses the bigger picture. Because what's fascinating about modern Republicans, who continually trash Hollywood, is how their candidates fit so easily into Hollywood western and action-adventure archetypes. This is intentional. The party that trashes Hollywood is the party that apes Hollywood. Both the GOP and Hollywood create wish-fulfillment fantasies in good vs. evil battles because that's what we, the public, wish to see. Until reality intrudes. Which makes us wish to see it even more. It's not an insult, in other words, to compare Rick Perry to John Wayne. It is, in fact, the whole point to his awful, awful career. Idiots, the Bush Administration, and 9/11 At an outdoor dinner party last night, overlooking Puget Sound, the subject got around to freedom vs. safety, and I mentioned how most people would give up the former for an imagined version of the latter (not a very original thought), and that our reaction to 9/11 was indicative of this (another not very original thought). One of the other guests disagreed. We went back and forth in a genial enough manner. He felt we hadn't given up any freedoms post-9/11. Then he talked about how 9/11 was foreseeable to anyone who was paying attention. We had the following exchange: He: Anyone who didn't see 9/11 coming was an idiot. Me: Or in the Bush administration. He: Don't go there. At this point I was warned away from the conversation by the hostess. I later found out that the guy I'd been talking to was, like the hostess, a Republican and a Bush supporter. If only I'd known. I would've totally gone there. Conversation of the Day I've had some good conversations today, long ones, too, but this short, awful conversation stands out. I was leaving Metropolitan Market on Mercer with some red peppers for Patricia, who's recovering nicely from arthroscopic surgery, thank you, when a clean-cut, 20-ish dude, a young man really, waved his hands at me to get my attention. I looked down at his table, on which there was a poster of Pres. Obama with a Hitler moustache and the words “Dump Obama.” He smiled at me. I shook my head at him and kept going. He called after me. He: Are you ready to end the madness? And kept going. Obama, the GOP and Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life” Early in Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” the following existential dichotomy is set up in voiceover narration from the mother (Jessica Chastain): The nuns taught us there were two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. The she explains what she means by each one: Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Gets others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things. The movie focuses on a young boy in Waco, Texas in the 1950s, Jack (Hunter McCracken), who aspires to the way of grace, like his mother, but who succumbs to the way of nature, like his father (Brad Pitt). It struck me, as I was writing my review last weekend, around the time of the Ames, Iowa straw poll, that our current political struggles, and the upcoming 2012 election, can be seen through this same prism. Obama is the way of grace. He's been more insulted than any sitting president, and his response has been to work with those who keep insulting him. People on his side often fault him for that. I'm often one of them. The GOP, which claims to have God on its side, and which claims a kind of Godlessness for Obama, is the way of nature. It wants to please itself. It's about more for me and less for you (or us). It's about lording it over people. You see this attitude, which can be bullying or swaggering, in Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann and the pundits on FOX-News. There's a killer instinct there. Sometimes this instinct exhibits itself in actual calls for violence. It is, at the least, a stark contrast. The question remains whether this country sees any value in the way of grace, or if we, like young Jack in the film, and like most of us in our lives, will succumb to the way of nature. Images from Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life” (2011) Your Liberal Media at Work The above screenshot is from The New York Times. Their lede? Perry drowned out a heckler with a Texas college football reference. Now you know who to vote for. So let's see if we can't get away from the Times front page for a little perspective. Over at Salon.com, Joan Walsh puts the Texan on the grill: Perry's Texas leads the nation in minimum-wage jobs, uninsured children, high school dropouts and pollution. He balanced the state's budget with stimulus money he railed against. His record won't back up his bragging. The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed is hardly enthusiastic: The questions about Mr. Perry concern how well his Lone Star swagger will sell in the suburbs of Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the election is likely to be decided. He can sound more Texas than Jerry Jones, George W. Bush and Sam Houston combined, and his muscular religiosity also may not play well at a time when the economy has eclipsed culture as the main voter concern. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman, the Times Op-Ed columnist, is perhaps sharpest on the matter. How is Perry's Texas doing so well economically? In “The Texas Unmiracle” he gives two reasons: Big Oil and surprisingly strong mortgage regulations--the kind Republicans are usually against. Plus they're not necessarily doing well: From mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else. In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach. So what about all those jobs Perry claims he added in Texas? The result of population growth more than anything: Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State. So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed. Quote of the Day “This Shariah law business is crap. It’s just crazy, and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.” --Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, responding to questions about the campaign to villify his judicial appointee to the Superior Court in Passaic County, Sohail Mohammed. I've been on this story for awhile. Six years ago, the publication I work for featured Mohammed in the profile “First Call for Freedom.” Mohammed, despite the crazies, wound up being confirmed. He's now the second Muslim judge in New Jersey. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for Bloomberg News, applauds Christie here. And here's the full Christie. Enjoy: Lessons in Headline-Making Here's the headline in today's Seattle Times: Dissent stalls GOP debt plan Here's what it should have read: Dissent among GOP stalls GOP debt plan Is that partisan? Of course not. It's factual. Does it matter what the headline reads? Of course it does. Most people, if they even see the headlines, don't get past the headlines. The current headline makes it seem Republicans and Democrats are in disagreement. That's a problem but it's not this problem. Not nearly. Folks glancing at the headline need to know what the real problem is. The real problem is a GOP problem. They have people in government who don't believe in government, who want to bring down government, who want to shrink it and (their words) kill it in the cradle. It's their final solution after 30 years of Reaganesque anti-government pronouncements. We're already here. Welcome to the jungle. Welcome to hard times. Quote of the Day “In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And [Michele] Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.” --Matt Taibbi, “Michele Bachmann's Holy War,” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine Al Qaeda's New Leader “In [Ayman al-]Zawahiri's hands, al-Jihad had splintered into angry and homeless gangs. ... His disillusioned followers often reflected on the pronouncement, made during the prison years by the man Zawahiri betrayed, Major Essam al-Qamari, that some vital quality was missing in Zawahiri. Qamari was the one who had told him, 'If you are the member of any group, you cannot be the leader.' that now sounded like a prophecy.” —from page 246 of Lawrence Wright's much-recommended book, “The Looming Tower,” on one of the low points for Ayman al-Zawahri, the former leader of al-Jihad, and current leader of al-Qaeda. The Christian Science Monitor agrees about his lack of charisma. This Wright paragraph, by the way, follows a horrific story of Egyptian intelligence drugging and sodomizing the thirteen-year-old son of a senior member of al-Jihad, then blackmailing him to spy on his father, then recruiting another boy, a friend, for the same purpose. When the two boys were discovered, Zawahiri convened a Sharia court, forced the boys to strip to determine if they had attained puberty, and, since they had, and so were officially men, had them convicted of sodomy, treason and attempted murder. “Zawahiri had the boys shot,” Wright writes. “To make sure he got his point across, he videotaped their confessions and their executions, and distributed the tapes as an example to others who might betray the organization.” Quote of the Day “You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. ”You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing. “I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I'm trying to do the right thing, and that's where I'm going with this.” --State Sen. Roy McDonald (R-Saratoga), in The New York Daily News, on why he'll vote to legalize gay marriage in New York. Bumper Stickers Seen Driving From Seattle, Wa. to Bodega, Ca. WHY IS THERE ALWAYS MONEY FOR WAR BUT NOT FOR EDUCATION? FOLLOW ME TO DRIVE-THRU FEED GOD DANCED THE DAY YOU WERE BORN MY OTHER CAR IS A DRAGON BOAT LAND OF THE FREE/ BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE ARNOLD DON'T SURF Patricia, Dairy Queen, and Hwy 101 during a rare sunny moment on our trip. Humphrey, at 100, is Still the Man; Nixon Still Goes in the Garbage Can There's a nice Op-Ed in the New York Times by Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America,” on the forgotten liberal, Hubert H. Humphrey, former Mayor of Minneapolis, Senator from the great state of Minnesota, and a man for whom a downtown stadium was named. It's now called Mall of America Field. So it goes. Humphrey was born 100 years ago today and Perlstein reminds those who need reminding that he helped turn the Democratic Party toward civil rights in a 1948 speech at the Democratic Convention. Humphrey said: To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. A friend on Facebook also gave us this HHH quote: It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped. One of his friends added this comment, which made me smile: I was at a dinner once when the speaker said, “We can't just throw money at problems.” Unfortunately for him, Hubert was in the audience. He stood up and said, “What, then, is money for, if not to throw at problems?” I miss him. He was abused by LBJ, but we know that. Is that LBJ's greatest legacy? Not the Vietnam War, not the Great Society, but abusing his vice-president so much that it paved the way for Nixon and dirty tricks. Not in our household in south Minneapolis, by the way. My father, a fierce Democrat, once recounted in a letter to his father, a Danish immigrant who voted Republican, some ditty my brother and I had picked up in the schoolyard and recited at the dinner table back home: He's our man! In the garbage can! My political awakening. I was 5. And not wrong. The Humphrey statue outside the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis. Life-sized, like the man himself. Quote of the Day “This spring, Obama officials often expressed impatience with questions about theory or about the elusive quest for an Obama doctrine. One senior Administration official reminded me what the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said when asked what was likely to set the course of his government: 'Events, dear boy, events.'” -- from “The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring remade Obama's foreign policy” by Ryan Lizza in the May 2, 2011 New Yorker. Amusingly, Lizza's last graf begins thus: “Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine.” Oh, Ryan. Read the whole thing here. Osama + Arnold Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, surveying the books about Osama bin Laden: As for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, most of these books agree that it was a terrible misstep that played into Bin Laden’s hands, fueling Qaeda recruitment efforts and diverting critical military and intelligence resources away from Afghanistan, which in turn led to the resurgence there of the Taliban. Peter L. Bergen’s new book, “The Longest War,” provides a devastating indictment of the Bush administration on many levels, from its failure to heed warnings about a terrorist threat, to its determination to conduct the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, to its costly, unnecessary and inept occupation of Iraq. Both “The Longest War” and Lawrence Wright’s “Looming Tower” give readers a visceral sense of what day-to-day life was like in Qaeda training camps. Mr. Wright, noting that Bin Laden was not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world, observes that Qaeda trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night ( Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tactical tips. My History of the U-S-A Chant: With a Benediction from Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld I'm not much of a fan of chants. On the left we have this old chestnut: “What do we want? X! When do we want it? NOW!” On the right there's “USA! USA!” It didn't used to belong to the right. In the winter of 1980 it belonged to all of us, all of the new hockey fans around the country watching a team of college kids beat the best players in the world, a Soviet machine who had dominated everybody, including U.S. professionals. The Olympics were imbalanced back then, restricted, as they were, to amateurs, to non-professionals, when non-capitalist societies had nothing but. Their players were state-sponsored non-professionals, trained since infancy, drilled daily, while ours were college kids: Mike from Minneapolis and Mark from Madison and Mike again from Wintrop, Mass., and Neal from northern Minnesota. Guys. As in: Hey, why don't you guys get together and play some games? I'd followed their run through the Winter Games peripherally but was assuming the worst when, flipping channels one Friday night (literally: hand on the knob, kids), I came across a newsbrief informing us that the U.S. hockey team had beaten the Russians. Immediately I flipped back to the Olympics, to the tape-delayed game, just in time to see Mark Johnson (from Madison) slide between two defenders and flip it in the goal with one second left in the first period to tie it, 2-2. Holy crap! We win this? I watched the rest of the game on tenterhooks even though I knew its outcome, then went out into the night pumped beyond belief. It was an odd sensation. I'd grown up in unpatriotic times, when patriotism was the last refuge of squares rather than scoundrels. I'd watched the country fall apart militarily (Vietnam), politically (Watergate), economically (OPEC, stagflation). We had gas lines and hostages. Now we had this. What was this? It felt good. USA! USA! Four years later the chant was already the province of louts. In the interim “USA Today” had been published, full of its dull news and patriotic charts, and capitalizing on the acronym “USA” as much as possible. Then we heard it all the time during the '84 Summer Games in Los Angeles, which the Soviet bloc, responding to our boycott of the 1980 Summer games in Moscow, boycotted. So we weren't going up against the eastern bloc's professional non-professionals; we were going up against ... Trinidad and Tobago. We weren't underdogs anymore, we were overdogs, beating our chests and reveling in our expected triumphs. Why chant for that? You'd hear it on the campaign trail, too. Ronald Reagan would reference the Olympics and get the chant going. Eventually the chant became his. And theirs. It turned my stomach. I thought Homer Simpson killed it in 1993. I really did. There was an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Homer and Marge, driving to a parent-teacher conference, argue over who gets Lisa's teacher (an easy gig) and who gets Bart's (trouble). Homer, who had Lisa's teacher the previous year, whines and wheedles his way into getting Lisa's teacher again, and when Marge finally capitulates he does this: Brilliant, I thought. That's that. They'll never be able to use it again. Wrong. Too many scoundrels in this country. Too many louts. Now we use it to cheer on death rather than college kids. I don't know if there is a proper response to bin Laden's death. Mine is, as I wrote yesterday, muted. I'm glad he's gone, glad he was killed in the way he was killed, applaud the men who did it; but I assume someone somewhere will take his place. I suppose the response closest to mine comes, ironically, from the website of David Frum, the right-wing originator of the phrase “Axis of Evil,” written by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, a man of God 11 years my junior, in a piece entitled “Is it Wrong to Feel Joy at Bin Laden's Death?” Rabbi Herzfeld writes: First there is recognition that even when our enemy falls, this does not signal an end to all our troubles. Just because one enemy or one army or one threat has been removed does not mean we are entirely safe. Second, we must acknowledge that the destruction of the enemy did not necessarily arise from our own merits. We are perhaps not worthy of the good fortune that we have received and so we do not want to tempt God, as it were, or remind the Angel of Death of our own defects. At the same time, I can't admonish those who have the impulse to chant “USA! USA!” for the death of the man who perpetrated this. Herzfeld again: The Talmud tells us that “God does not rejoice with the fall of the wicked.” As the rabbinic teaching goes, as the Children of Israel were crossing the sea and the army of Pharaoh was drowning, God rebuked the angels for showing excessive joy. The chanters are in good company. It's the impulse even of the angels. Osama's Death Certificate In June 1989 I was 26 years old, recently returned from a year in Taiwan, and driving around at night with some friends in an unfamiliar warehouse district north of downtown Minneapolis when the news came on the radio: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, was dead at the age of 86. We were a fairly liberal group in a very liberal city but a spontaneous cheer went up in that car. Khomeini had been a thorn in our country's side for 10 years, we'd been hearing about him for 10 years, and it was nice to know we wouldn't be hearing about him much anymore. A minute later we sobered up. It felt classless, cheering for death. Last night Patricia and I had some friends over for Sunday Movie Night. We used to do this fairly often but got off course this winter; but some of our members, who've been through hellacious springs, needed it again, so we gathered in our living room for homemade pasta and wine and salad, to watch Martin Scorsese's “Goodfellas.” Afterwards, before going to bed, I checked my email and received one from Ward, the man who made the homemade pasta: FW: BREAKING NEWS: An AP source says Osama bin Laden is dead See what we miss watching movies? I immediately went to the New York Times site for confirmation, then Andrew Sullivan to read his thoughts, then Salon to read their headlines (which were already aftermath headlines; “And now what?” headlines). I looked up Abbottabad on Google maps. Finally I went to Facebook. “Oh right, Facebook,” I thought. I scrolled backwards to see who posted the news first. It was a friend from Delaware who referenced, obliquely, how happy Wolfie B. had made her with “those five words.” Two people had already posted this photo, which made me smile, since it encapsulated the seriousness of one side of our political debate versus the decided lack of seriousness on the other: Someone wrote “The world feels better tonight.” Another: “I wish I had some fireworks to set off,” to which her friend, our mutual friend, replied, “I just heard one go off in my neighborhood.” People were gathering at the White House, and in Times Square, to cheer. A local journalist admonished his readers: “I hope people (esp. liberals) don't overthink this. Bin Laden dead is a good thing.” A movie critic wrote, “If you're in Times Square in a Navy uniform tonight and don't kiss a nurse, you have no sense of history. And no game.” There were also the usual status updates about weekend trips, Sunday concerts, and funny things the child said. Despite the wine, I stayed sober. I didn't disagree with the local journalist—“Bin Laden dead is a good thing”—I just knew the world wasn't much of a changed thing. Bin Laden has been a thorn in our country's side for 10 years, and it was nice to know he was gone, but there will be others, because there are always others. I simply hope he was the worst of it. In this way, and perhaps only this way, Osama bin Laden and I were in accord. He wished to be the western world's greatest enemy for the 21st century, and I sincerely hope, when the century's history is written, he's gotten that wish. - Today's front pages via Newseum - David Remnick on Obama vs. Osama - Also from the New Yorker: What did Pakistan know and when did they know it? - Via NPR: The Pakistani who tweeted the news without realizing it - David Weigel on the gathering outside the White House - ABC News footage of the bin Laden compound - One more time: Andrew Sullivan liveblogs the news of the death of Osama bin Laden Thomas Geoghegan: Future Supreme Court Nominee? “Memo to President Obama: How about appointing [labor lawyer Thomas] Geoghegan (whom you surely know, or know of, from his quiet heroics on behalf of working folk in Chicago) to the federal bench, preferably the Supreme Court? He’s eminently qualified. He writes prose that can be read for pleasure. He thinks clearly and creatively. He even ran for dogcatcher once. Admittedly, he’s not one of your chronically cautious “centrists,” but isn’t it about time the Court had a serious (and funny) counterweight to the charmless right-wing dittoheads who now dominate it and who are so politically and morally insensible that they cannot distinguish between a Fortune 500 corporation and a human being?” --Hendrik Hertzberg in “Mr. Justice Geoghegan, Dissenting,” on The New Yorker Web site. I'm not smart enough to say who does or doesn't belong on the USSC, but I interviewed Mr. Geoghegan for Illinois Super Lawyers a few years back—about running for U.S. Congress, about why the left seems so beaten down in this country, about why productivity goes up and real wages don't—and he's impressive. Put it this way: I'd certainly like to hear his voice, his point of view, more often in national discussions than, as Hertzberg says above, the usual charmless dittoheads. I asked him, for example, what stayed with him about his campaign for Rahm Emanuel's seat and he said: “I met a lot of elderly people living alone who don’t have enough to live on.” Please send that sentence to Paul Ryan and John Boehner, symptomatic of the unsympathetic right. Quote of the Day “With this budget deal, America's brief flirtation with milquetoast progressivism comes to an end.” Quote of the Day “I'm not saying that our debt problem isn't serious and that adjustments to entitlements shouldn't be part of of the solution. But the hard question that Paul Ryan's hucksterism avoids is this: what is government's role in caring for its most vulnerable citizens?” Quote of the Day “If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do. ”For now, anyway. But I wouldn't have intervened in Libya and he did. I sure hope his judgment really does turn out to have been better than mine.“ —Kevin Drum, ”Obama, Libya and Me," in Mother Jones Quote of the Day “Well, now there are two Minnesotans in the 2012 race, despite the fact that the Constitution strictly states that no Minnesotan will ever reach office higher than vice president. Michele Bachmann, three-term congresswoman with no accomplishments beyond an ability to enrage Chris Matthews, will form an exploratory committee, according to CNN.” --Alex Pareene, “Michele Bachmann is running for president now, sigh,” on Salon.com Plus Ca Change... I was reminded of the JFK “Wanted for Treason” poster, popular in Texas in the early 1960s, while watching the documentary “Oswald's Ghost” the other night, then easily found the Obama poster, one of the milder anti-Obama propaganda pieces out there, via Google. I've said it before: In 50 years, the extreme right in this country has managed to change exactly one letter. They've gone from Birchers to Birthers. The content of the above posters may be the same but the form of each bears scrutiny. In the early '60s, it was enough to convict Pres. Kennedy through a modern, FBI prism. Maybe the extreme right now views the FBI, a government organization, as equally suspect, so they have to delve even deeper into American history and mythology to make their case. They need to see themselves as cowboys, not knowing the derivation of cowboys. They're forced to rely on Hollywood mythmaking, even as they despise Hollywood. They think they're protecting America when they represent the worst of America. Movie Review: “Oswald's Ghost” (2007) WARNING: MAGIC SPOILERS Norman Mailer gives us the title. “Oswald is the ghost that lays over American life,” he says, with his usual twinkle, near the end of this well-made documentary. “What is abominable and maddening about ghosts is you never know the answer. Is it this or is it that? You can’t know because the ghost isn’t telling you.” Yet “Oswald’s Ghost” tells us plenty—because it’s less conspiracy theory, or conspiracy debunker, than conspiracy history. It takes us chronologically, and cleanly, through events, and delves into why we began to believe there was a cover-up, and what it means that we now believe there was a cover-up, and how we now act as a result. It sees the Kennedy assassination as the great dividing point of the American century, the break from which we never recovered. John F. Kennedy began his administration with the pro-government rhetoric of his inaugural—“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—and yet the mystery surrounding his assassination, along with the lies of Vietnam and Watergate, set the stage for the anti-government rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and all of his acolytes, from which we still haven’t recovered. Is there a story of the last 50 years that’s been told more often than the Kennedy assassination? Yet filmmaker Robert Stone, working for PBS and “The American Experience,” finds footage, and photos, I’ve never seen before. Here’s Oswald in the Dallas police station professing his innocence so matter-of-factly that I began to believe him: Oswald (in glare of TV lights): I'd like some legal representation, but these police officers have not allowed me to have any. I don't know what this is all about. Reporter: Did you kill the president? Oswald: No, sir, I didn't. People keep asking me that. ... They are taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy. One suddenly wonders: Hey, how did they trace him to the murder of Officer Tippit? How did they find him in that Dallas movie theater? How did they make him the focal point of the worst American murder of the 20th century? Newsman: Was this the man that you believed killed President Kennedy? Dallas police: I think we have the right man. Dan Rather: Confusion reigned inside the Dallas police station. Abraham Zapruder didn’t help. Instead of showing his film to the American people, he hired a lawyer and sold the rights to Life magazine, which printed individual frames. The film itself wouldn’t be shown on television until 1975. Oswald’s mother didn’t help. She said her son was being framed, which one expects, but she also said her son was a government agent, which raised spectres. Jack Ruby certainly didn’t help. Did Mark Lane? The New York lawyer became the first man to openly question whether Oswald acted alone, in a December 1963 article in The National Guardian entitled “Lane’s defense brief for Oswald.” Did the Warren Commission? Shouldn’t its hearings have been public? Shouldn’t we have taken our time with the matter instead of rushing out a verdict before the 1964 elections? Yet, at the time, most Americans accepted the lone-gunman theory. That would quickly change as conspiracy books began appearing, then proliferating, two and three years later: First Lane’s “Rush to Judgment,” then Edward Jay Epstein’s “Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth.” Then it was off to the races. Initially outsiders were blamed. It was Castro or the KGB. It was the South Vietnamese government, responding to the Diem assassination. Eventually we began blaming ourselves. It was some rogue CIA element. It was some right-wing element that wanted to stay in Vietnam just as JFK was getting ready to pull us out. “And like all those theories,” Mailer says, “it had a certainly plausibility and a depressing lack of proof.” That didn’t stop New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, wild-eyed and bug-eyed, and the worst of the conpiratorialists, who went after Clay Shaw, a prominent, closeted businessman. Stone (Robert, not Oliver) includes a fascinating 1967 news report critical of Garrison: Garrison’s investigation has seemed to concentrate on homosexuals. That of course is an old police trick, and homosexuals have been a particular target of Garrison’s over the years. Even members of his staff have been privately critical of his emphasis on men whose deviation makes them vulnerable. 1968 didn’t help. Both MLK and RFK were assassinated by “lone gunmen.” Both were progressives. How could it not be conspiracy? (But did it have to lead to the inaninities of “The Parallax View”?) Post-Watergate, the Church Committee detailed all of those early 1960s CIA assassinations of foreign leaders. Was Malcolm X more right than he knew? Was the JFK assassination a case of the chickens coming home to roost? It’s the Ruby factor that’s always bugged me. He had mob ties. He was a strip-club owner. Yet he killed Oswald, effectively silencing him, out of respect for Jackie? Out of sudden anger? Tie that with the difficulty of Oswald's shot, of squeezing three bullets out of the 6.5 mm Carcano rifle in the time allotted, and of the whole back-and-to-the-left thing, with that final shot, the kill shot, looking, in the Zapruder film, like it’s blasting him from the front, well, you know, maybe there was something to it. It's Jack Ruby's dog who pushes us back from the brink. Oswald was scheduled to be moved at 10:00 a.m. that Sunday morning. Here’s Hugh Aynesworth, a Dallas reporter: Ruby slept 'til probably 9:30 or 9:20 something of that sort, and then he drives with his dog down to the Western Union and sent a telegram at 11:17 that morning. Came out and he looked one block up and he saw the crowd there at the police department. Jack Ruby was always on the scene of action, whether it be a fire, whether it be a raid, whether it be a parade, whatever. He had to be there. And he knew some of those cops. The fact that he left the dog in the car indicates to me that he thought he was going down to send a telegram and go back home. He took that little dog everywhere with him. Few have assumed conspiracy longer and more vocally than Norman Mailer—yet even he comes around. “The internal evidence just wasn't there,” he says. “There were too many odd moments that just didn't add up.” Instead he focuses on Oswald’s mindset: I think what Oswald saw was that if he committed the crime, if he assassinated Kennedy and he got away with it, then he would have an inner power that no one could ever come near. And, if he was caught, well then, he was quite articulate, he would have one of the greatest trials in America's history, if not the greatest, and he would explain all of his political ideas. He would become world famous and might have an immense effect upon history ... When he shot Tippit, I think at that point he knew he was doomed because he could no longer make the great speech. If you shoot a policeman forget it, you're a punk. And so after he was caught he did nothing but protest his innocence and say, “I'm a patsy.” “If you shoot a policeman, forget it, you're a punk.” “This is not a whodunnit,” says Stone (Robert, not Oliver) in a DVD special features interview. “This is what a whodunnit has done to us.” He adds: “Conspiracy theory is part of the human condition; and it always will be.” Think of the doc as one Stone to correct another. Is conspiracy the new American religion? The notion that we exist as small nothings for a short span of time in a cosmic eternity is unbearable, and thus we construct meaning out of it. The notion that this small nothing brought down the most powerful, glamorous man in the world is unbearable, and thus we construct meaning out of it. It was our enemies—foreign or domestic. It was the left or right. It was anything—please, God, let it be anything—other than little Lee Harvey Oswald. “[George] Washington was a very good President, and an unhappy one. Distraught by growing factionalism within and outside his Administration, especially by the squabbling of Hamilton and Jefferson and the rise of a Jeffersonian opposition, he served another term only reluctantly. His second Inaugural Address was just a hundred and thirty-five words long; he said, more or less, Please, I’m doing my best. In 1796, in his enduringly eloquent Farewell Address (written by Madison and Hamilton), he cautioned the American people about party rancor: 'The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.' And then he went back to Mount Vernon. He freed his slaves in his will, possibly hoping that this, too, would set a precedent. It did not.” --Jill Lepore in her article, “His Highness: George Washington scales new heights” in The New Yorker. Much recommended. The Non-Partisan President I first heard Barack Obama speak in April 2006 at the annual Democratic Farm Labor Party convention in downtown Minneapolis. At the time I was working for Minnesota Law & Politics, which was part of Key Pro Media, which was owned by Vance Opperman, and since Opperman was a major donor to the DFL we had a pretty good table for the show. An embarrassingly good table. During appetizers, I looked around and saw famous faces. Hey, there's Mayor Ryback. Behind me. Hey, there's Walter Mondale. Behind me. Apologies, Mr. Vice-President. Hope I'm not obscuring your view. The speech Sen. Obama gave that night was the speech he gave often in 2006, and which became the prologue to his second book, “The Audacity of Hope.” Here's a sample: You don't need a poll to know that the vast majority of Americans—Republican, Democrat, and independent—are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. Whether we're from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a contentious menu of false or cramped choices. The guy was talking my language. He was articulating the great unsaid in American politics. He was offering a third way. Now to the present. I have some friends on the left who are outraged, outraged by the tax deal cut earlier this month, which basically boils down to: We'll extend the Bush tax cuts even for the richest 2% and you give us extended unemployment benefits. They see it as a gigantic betrayal. They fill their status updates on Facebook with invective. Now I'm someone who thinks the wealthiest people in this country should be be taxed at a 50% rate (as they were for most of the Reagan years), or maybe at a 70% rate (as in the '70s). Tea Partiers seem to idolize the stability of the 1950s ... when the tax rate for the richest people in the country was more than 90%. I wouldn't go that far but wouldn't mind scaring some people with it. Even so, I don't see the deal as a great betrayal. The opposite. I know this is who Pres. Obama is. I know this is the reason he appealed to me in the first place. But I am amused as the cries of the left recede and the cries of the right crescendo. I'm with Andrew Sullivan here: I think of Frank Rich and Paul Krugman as brilliant men, but profoundly resistant to the core rationale of the Obama presidency (and the underlying dynamic of its accumulating success). That rationale is an attempt to move past the paradigms of the boomer years to a pragmatic, liberal reformism that takes America as it is, while trying to make it more of what it can be. Now, there's little doubt that in contrast to recent decades, Obama has nudged the direction leftward - re-regulating Wall Street after the catastrophe, setting up universal health insurance through the private sector, recalibrating America's role in the world from preachy bully to hegemonic facilitator. But throughout he has tried, as his partisan critics have complained, not to be a partisan president, to recall, as he put it in that recent press conference, that this is a diverse country, that is is time we had a president who does not repel or disparage or ignore those who voted against him or those who have grown to despise him. ... He really is trying to be what he promised: president of the red states as well as the blue states. And a president who gets shit done. The results after two years: universal health insurance, the rescue of Detroit, the avoidance of a Second Great Depression, big gains in private sector growth and productivity, three stimulus packages (if you count QE2), big public investments in transport and green infrastructure, the near-complete isolation of Iran, the very public exposure of Israeli intransigence and extremism, a reset with Russia (plus a new START), big drops in illegal immigration and major gains in enforcement, a South Korea free trade pact, the end of torture, and a debt commission that has put fiscal reform squarely back on the national agenda. Oh, and of yesterday, the signature civil rights achievement of ending the military's ban on openly gay servicemembers. In some ways, and despite his famous press conference, I think the least surprised person by all the anguish and disappointment on the left is Pres. Obama himself, since, in “The Audacity of Hope,” he anticipated it: Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. How's that hopey-changey thing working out for us? Slow and steady. Packer on W. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, George Packer, who spent all that time in Iraq thanks to George W. Bush, goes over W.'s memoir and comes up with a telling but not surprising question: Why does a book called “Decision Points” tell us so little about how the author's decisions were made? But of course this tells us almost everything we need to know about George W. Bush (but knew already). Some excerpts from Packer's review: - There are hardly any decision points at all. The path to each decision is so short and irresistible, more like an electric pulse than like a weighing of options, that the reader is hard-pressed to explain what happened. Suddenly, it’s over, and there’s no looking back. - Here is another feature of the non-decision: once his own belief became known to him, Bush immediately caricatured opposing views and impugned the motives of those who held them. - For Bush, making decisions is an identity question: Who am I? The answer turns Presidential decisions into foregone conclusions: I am someone who believes in the dignity of life, I am the protector of the American people, I am a loyal boss, I am a good man who cares about other people, I am the calcium in the backbone. This sense of conviction made Bush a better candidate than the two Democrats he was fortunate to have as opponents in his Presidential campaigns. But real decisions, which demand the weighing of compelling contrary arguments and often present a choice between bad options, were psychologically intolerable to the Decider. They confused the identity question. - For him, the [Iraq] war remains “eternally right,” a success with unfortunate footnotes. His decisions, he still believes, made America safer, gave Iraqis hope, and changed the future of the Middle East for the better. Of these three claims, only one is true—the second—and it’s a truth steeped in tragedy. Then there's this devastating close: - Bush ends “Decision Points” with the sanguine thought that history’s verdict on his Presidency will come only after his death. During his years in office, two wars turned into needless disasters, and the freedom agenda created such deep cynicism around the world that the word itself was spoiled. In America, the gap between the rich few and the vast majority widened dramatically, contributing to a historic financial crisis and an ongoing recession; the poisoning of the atmosphere continued unabated; and the Constitution had less and less say over the exercise of executive power. Whatever the judgments of historians, these will remain foregone conclusions. FOX News: Accusing Others of Its Own Crimes What must it be like to be Roger Ailes? To conduct the national discussion as if it were a symphony? To get people to talk about what you want them to talk about. To get them to question what you want them to question (Pres. Obama, NPR, ACORN, “the ground-zero mosque,” Woodrow Wilson) and get them to accept what you want them to accept (Pres. Bush, WMD, Sarah Palin, the Bush tax cuts). That’s a lot of power. But apparently the FOX-News channel isn't enough of a bully pulpit for him. So he spouted off yesterday to The Daily Beast about NPR, saying the following: “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view.” He’s since apologized. “Apologized.” He apologized to the Anti-Defamation League, with whom he now has a bit of a relationship, ever since one of his more popular stars, Glenn Beck, earlier this month, spun George Soros' attempts to pass as a gentile in Nazi-occupied Europe as if they were Nazi war crimes. But he didn't apologize to NPR. In fact, he continued to attack NPR in his apology: “I’m writing this just to let you know some background but also to apologize for using ‘Nazi’ when in my now considered opinion, ‘nasty, inflexible bigot’ would have worked better.“ Ailes is a fascinating man. If he weren't upending democracy and ruining this country, he might be amusing. Look again at what he says about NPR: These guys don’t want any other point of view. Or in the apology: Nasty, inflexibile bigot. Who does this remind you of? There’s a documentary out now called “A Film Unfinished,” which is one of the best movies of the year. Is it playing somewhere near you? Can you stream it? PPV it? Do so. The background: At the end of World War II, a 60-minute, silent documentary was found in the German archives on Jewish life in the Warsaw ghetto in the months before the ghetto was liquidated and its inhabitants shipped off to the extermination camps of Treblinka. The question arise: Why document what you're about to destroy? And why stage scenes of better-off Jews going about their day? A woman puts on lipstick in her vanity mirror, another buys goods at the butcher, couples dine out. Initially one thinks the Nazis are showcasing comfortable people to refute claims of horrible conditions. Except they also showcase the horrible conditions. We see emaciated people with shaved heads. We see children in rags. We see a corpse every 100 meters. The Nazis filmed it all. Why? The answer is juxtaposition. Here’s take 1, take 2, take 3 of a well-off woman buying meat at the butcher while children in rags starve outside. Here’s take 1, take 2, take 3 of sated couples leaving a restaurant and ignoring the emaciated woman in rags begging for a handout. This juxtaposition is justification. The Nazis are attempting to showcase a race of people so indifferent to the suffering of others that they didn’t deserve to live. They are documenting an excuse for extermination. Once one realizes this one finally understands the true meaning of propaganda. It is the powerful blaming the powerless for the crimes of the powerful. The Nazis herded 600,000 Jews into a single zone of Warsaw. They gave them no way to live. They let them starve. They let them die by the hundreds of thousands. Then they staged scenes of Jewish indifference to the suffering of others. There is, of course, no modern equivalent of the Nazis. But there is modern propaganda. There is even modern propaganda is this most virulent form: the powerful blaming the powerless for the crimes of the powerful. Example: class warfare. You hear that phrase all the time on FOX. It may be the only place you hear it. And you hear it lately for the following reason: the Bush tax cuts are set to expire on Jan. 1, 2011. Pres. Obama wants to preserve the middle-class portion of the tax cut and allow the tax cut for the wealthiest one percent to expire. The tax rate for the wealthiest Americans will zoom from 35% all the way up to 39%. On FOX-News, this is considered class warfare. Here's an example of that language. Here's another. OK, here's a bunch of them. But who's really conducting class warfare? I would argue it's the rich, the powerful, who are accusing the poor and middle class, or the powerless, of what the rich are in fact doing. Because the rich can't deal with a 39-percent tax rate. Question: What was the top tax rate during most of the Reagan years? 50 percent. Question: What was the top tax rate during the Eisenhower years? 91 percent. It's all here. So the question shouldn't be: ”Should we roll back the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans to a 39-percent rate?“ The question should be: ”Should we tax the richest Americans at a 50 percent rate?" The right, and FOX-News, keep doing this. It's not always powerful/powerless—Pres. Obama isn't powerless, for example, and the Democratic party shouldn't be powerless—but FOX's attacks almost always have that vibe. It's FOX-News accusing others of its own crimes. These guys don’t want any other point of view. Here he is on Jon Stewart: “He loves polarization. He depends on it. If liberals and conservatives are all getting along, how good would that show be? It’d be a bomb.” He's describing himself and his own network. Again and again and again. Pay attention. That's all. Just pay fucking attention. Hertzberg on the Midterms Hendrik Hertzberg's column in the latest New Yorker, about the midterms, is a must-read. He alludes to why the Republicans should be angry with, rather than beholden to, the Tea Party: The Democrats retained their Senate majority, now much reduced, only by the grace of the Tea Party, which, in Colorado, Delaware, and Nevada, saddled Republicans with nominees so weighted with extremism and general bizarreness that they sank beneath the wave so many others rode. In 2008, when 130 million people cast votes in the Presidential election, 120 million took the trouble to vote for a representative in Congress. In 2010, 75 million did so—45 million fewer, a huge drop-off. The members of this year’s truncated electorate were also whiter, markedly older, and more habitually Republican: if the franchise had been limited to them two years ago, last week’s exit polls suggest, John McCain would be President today. He comes up with a better metaphor (big surprise) than the Dems' “they drove it in the ditch/we're pushing it out”: By the time the flames [from the economic firestorm] reached their height, the arsonists had slunk off, and only the firemen were left for people to take out their ire on. Best, there's this graf, on the “cognitive dissonance” of the election—or, in layman's terms, the reason why it was so fucking annoying: Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block. But the scariest graf is the penultimate graf, on the problems the Dems had this election: proving a negative (things woulda been worse without the stimulus), delayed gratification (the health-care bill doesn't fully enact until 2014), good-for-the-goose, not-for-the-gander logic (citizens tighten belts while government goes on a spree). Then he gets into what he calls “public ignorance”: An illuminating Bloomberg poll, taken the week before the election, found that some two-thirds of likely voters believed that, under Obama and the Democrats, middle-class taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program are gone, never to be recovered. One might add to that list the public’s apparent conviction that illegal immigration is skyrocketing and that the health-care law will drive the deficit higher. Reality tells a different story. He goes on to show that each of these things is not true, and, in the final graf, blames the Dems for not beating their chests enough. I agree, but also fault Hertzberg (and everyone) for not stating what this “public ignorance” truly is: the triumph of FOX-News, the Koch brothers, and a propaganda machine that went into 24/7 mode as soon as Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, telling us it was time to “get to work.” The propagandists listened. They cared not a lick for the act of governing; they weren't interested in sorting through proposals to see which were the best means of extracting us from the mess we were in; they were only interested in confusing the issues and demonizing opponents—often by accusing those opponents of the very things that the propagandists themselves were guilty of. We need to call this what it is: propaganda. You don't need totalitarian control of the government, or the media, to effectively propagandize. You just need money, and a forum, and a message that appeals to our worst instincts. The American people have been effectively propagandized. It can happen here. It has. Why The Tea Party Hates George Washington Here's the long view, courtesy of Joseph J. Ellis' Pulitzer-Prize-winning “Founding Brothers,” published in 2000: There are two long-established ways to tell the story [of the founding of the republic in 1787]... Mercy Otis Warren's History of the American Revolution (1805) defined the “pure republicanism” interpretation, which was also the version embraced by the Republican party and therefore later called “the Jeffersonian interpretation.” It depicts the American Revolution as a liberation movement, a clean break not just from English domination but also from the historic corruptions of European monarchy and aristocracy. The ascendance of the Federalists to power in the 1790s thus becomes a hostile takeover of the Revolution by corrupt courtiers and moneymen (Hamilton is the chief culprit), which is eventually defeated and the true spirit of the Revolution recovered by the triumph of the Republicans in the elections of 1800. The core revolutionary principle according to this interpretive tradition is individual liberty. It has radical and, in modern terms, libertarian implications, because it regards any accommodation of personal freedom to governmental discipline as dangerous. In its more extreme forms it is a recipe for anarchy, and its attitude toward any energetic expression of centralized political power can assume paranoid proportions. The alternative interpretation was first given its fullest articulation by John Marshall in his massive five-volume The Life of George Washington (1804-18O7). It sees the American Revolution as an incipient national movement with deep, if latent, origins in the colonial era. The constitutional settlement of 1787-1788 thus becomes the natural fulfillment of the Revolution and the leaders of the Federalist party in the 1790s—Adams, Hamilton, and, most significantly, Washington—as the true heirs of the revolutionary legacy. (Jefferson is the chief culprit.) The core revolutionary principle in this view is collectivistic rather than individualistic, for it sees the true spirit of '76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger purpose: of American nationhood, first embodied in the Continental Army and later in the newly established federal government. It has conservative but also protosocialistic implications, because it does not regard the individual as the sovereign unit in the political equation and is more comfortable with governmental discipline as a focusing and channeling device for national development. In its more extreme forms it relegates personal rights and liberties to the higher authority of the state, which is “us” and not “them,” and it therefore has both communal and despotic implications. It is truly humbling, perhaps even dispiriting, to realize that the historical debate over the revolutionary era and the early republic merely recapitulates the ideological debate conducted at the time, that historians have essentially been fighting the same battles, over and over again, that the members of the revolutionary generation fought originally among themselves. When looked at through this prism, we get a sense of how fucked-up the current generation is. The Jeffersonians in this equation are obviously the tea partiers, who are in the midst of an extreme, and paranoid, period. They view Pres. Obama, for example, who talks the language of cooperation, as a despot. But the original Jeffersonians fought moneyed interests while the current Jeffersonians, the tea partiers, are bankrolled by those interests: The Koch brothers, the Citizens United decision, etc. Moreover, if, in the 1790s, the debate was individual liberties (Jefferson) vs. American nationhood (Washington), the rhetoric on the right now equates individual liberties with American nationhood. At the least, the current Washingtonians, the Democrats, don't use the rhetoric of “America” as well as the current Jeffersonians, the Republicans. They haven't for some time. Thus we have imbalance. The rhetoric and the money have gone over to the Republican side. It's a wonder the Democrats ever win at all. Or to quote a cinematic version of FDR: “I often think of something Woodrow Wilson said to me. 'It is only once in a generation that people can be lifted above material things. That is why conservative government is in the saddle for two-thirds of the time.'” Bush Offers Mea Culpa - WTF has Pres. Obama done so far? Click here. - My favorite sign from the Jon Stewart rally: “I support reasonable conclusions based on supported facts.” - St. Louis Park's own Tommy Friedman, that old Iraq War supporter, worries about a know-nothing future. - Bob Herbert on what has happened to the middle class? Not in the last two years, kids. In the last 30. - Nate Silver, the 538 guy, predicts a divided Congress...but it could all go Republican. - A practical definition of propaganda could be: “accusing others of your own crimes.” For more than a year the right has called the left “Fascists.” But I don't remember anyone on the left literally stomping heads. - Imagine any Republican, any, being as articulate and open as Pres. Obama is with this “It gets better” message. - No link here, but yesterday I kept seeing banner ads from “Freedom Club State PAC of Minnesota,” who apparently don't know I haven't lived there in three years, urging me to vote against Mark Dayton, and trotting out their favorite Republican candidate: Ronald Reagan. Love the new ideas they have. Love their new candidates. - And who is the Freedom Club State PAC of Minnesota? White suburban businessmen. The kind who give “white,” “suburban” and “businessmen” bad names. - Two years ago on election day, Michael Sokolove visited his hometown of Levittown, Penn., and found people both anxious for change and patient. Here's one former Vietnam Vet: “How long did it take Bush to get us into this mess? It’s a lot easier to screw things up than to make them better.” A shame this isn't the voice we're hearing these days. - Again no link, just a promise. No depression. Tomorrow I'll either be relieved or ... really pissed off. - Vote. Democrat. Jon Stewart's Funny, But... I finally saw the interview with Pres. Obama on “The Daily Show” the other night and thought the president continued to do what I want him to do. He explained, articulately, about the slow business of governing. I was happy at the end. I thought he came off well. I should say “read,” in quotes, because I can only get so far into these things. Their assumptions are not my assumptions. Neither is Jon Stewart's, for that matter. He's had a lot of fun these past two years juxatposing the high rhetoric of politicking with the slow process of governing, but in doing so he comes off as a spoiled shit. He wants it, and he wants it his way, now. I'm a little tired of that attitude. Which increasingly seems to be the American attitude. “The Daily Show” has it both ways. When the Obama administration plays politics, Stewart calls them on it—as he should. But when they don't play politics, when they tell uncomfortable truths, Stewart calls them on that, too. (E.g., “Dude, that's not the way you play the game.”) So “The Daily Show” wins either way. No matter what the Obama administration does, Stewart can make comedy out of it. Listen to Milbank on the appearance: Stewart, who struggled to suppress a laugh as Obama defended [Larry] Summers, turned out to be an able inquisitor on behalf of aggrieved liberals. He spoke for the millions who had been led to believe that Obama was some sort of a messianic figure. Obama has only himself to blame for their letdown. By raising expectations impossibly high, playing the transformational figure to Hillary Clinton's status-quo drone, he gave his followers an unrealistic hope. A messianic figure? Who are these people? It's not me. Is it Milbank? Is it Stewart? Again: Obama is doing what I want him to do. And he's doing it in the face of the strongest internal propaganda campaign a sitting president has had to endure (from the right), and dopey liberals, or at least the perception of dopey liberals, who wonder why he hasn't made all the bad things go away (from the left). Here's more from the Post: President Barack Obama barely cracked any jokes during an appearance Wednesday on “The Daily Show” despite host Jon Stewart's attempts to draw out the president's humorous side. Is that criticism? Look, I'm happy that Stewart is holding his rally to restore sanity and/or madness today. I think we need it. I think too many people are buying into too much right-wing propaganda. Plus, who doesn't need a laugh? I'm just tired of Obama being criticized for being the only adult in the room at a time when we desperately need adults in the room. Not spoiled shits. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the “Just a Bunch of Guys” Theory of Al Qaeda I've said it before: If you're going to pay for any magazine in this freebie-content world, particularly a general interest magazine, get The New Yorker. Their Sept. 13th issue is a case in point. Writer Terry McDermott give us a startlingly good, startlingly detailed profile of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and the cause of much fear, in the U.S. press if not in the U.S., because of talk he would get his day in court in New York City. If McDermott's article isn't part of the conversation yet it's because it's not online, or it's only online in an abstract, which means it can't be copied and then disposed of. It also means you have to go get the magazine your own damn self. The takeaway: We tend to think our enemies as united but they're not, any more than a Bush administration of Dick Cheney and Colin Powell was united, any more than the United States of America is united. We tend to think of Al Qaeda as an international terrorist organization when it may just be “a bunch of guys.” This, too: After nine years, we still don't know who our enemies are. Insofar as we know Mohammed, we see him as a brilliant behind-the-scenes tactician and a resolute idealogue. As it turns out, he is earthy, slick in a way, but naive, and seemingly motivated as much by pathology as ideology. [Al Jazeera reporter Yosri] Fouda describes Mohammed's Arabic as crude and colloquial and his knowledge of Islamic texts as almost nonexistent. A journalist who observed Mohammed's apparearance at one of the Guantanamo hearings likened his voluble performance to that of a Pakistani Jackie Mason. A college classmate said that he was an eager participant in impromptu skits and plays. A man who knew him from a mosque in Doha talked about his quick wit and chatty, glad-handing style. He was an operator... Mohammed's parents moved to Kuwait from Pakistan in the 1950s....[where he] was born on April 14, 1965... He and his nephews attended Fahaheel Secondary School... [He] was a superior student... He was also rebellious; he told interrogators that he and his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim (later internationally known as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center) once tore down the Kuwaiti flag from atop their schoolhouse... In January 1984, Mohammed, travelling on a Pakistani passport, arrived in tiny, remote Murfreesboro, North Carolina, to attend Chowan College, a two-year school that was advertised abroad by Baptist missionaries... Arab students who were there at the time said they were the butt of jokes and harassment, in the anti Muslim era that followed the Iranian takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, in 1979. The local boys called them Abbie Dhabies... They were required, along with all the other students, to attend a weekly Christian chapel service... Mohammed developed a dislike for the U.S. in his time here. He told investigators that he had little contact with Americans in college, but found them to be debauched and racist... [In] 1986, both he and his nephew graduated with engineering degrees. Mohammed returned home to Kuwait... unable to find work... [During the Afghanistan War against the Soviet Union], Mohammed and his brother Abed went to work for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the leader of Ittihad e-Islami, one of the Afghan-refugee political parties headquartered in Peshawar [Pakistan]... In 1991, [Mohammed's nephew] Basit got in touch with Abdul Hakim Murad, a fellow-Baluchi and a boyhood friend from Kuwait, who was then in the U.S., training as a pilot. Basit told him that he wanted to attack Israel, but thought it too difficult. He would attack America instead. He asked Murad to suggest potential Jewish targets in the United States... “I told him the World Trade Center,” Murad later told investigators... In Karachi [Pakistan], Basit had introduced his pilot friend, Murad, to Mohammed... Mohammed interrogated Murad about flying. Murad, the licensed pilot, at one point suggested to Basit dive-bombing a plane into C.I.A. headquarters... The National Security Council staff in the Clinton White House wanted to pursue Mohammed... The C.I.A. was noncommital. The Pentagon objected vigorously... Instead, the State Department tried to negotiate with the Qataris... By the time the team arrived, Mohammed was gone; someone had apparently warned him that the Americans were coming... [Mohammed] didn't want to join Al Qaeda, he later told his interrogators, but merely sought resources to fund a spectacular attack against the United States.... Mohammed's initial proposal was to hijack a single airplane and crash it, as Abdul Murad had suggested, into C.I.A. headquarters. Bin Laden dismissed this target as inconsequential. So Mohammed proposed hijacking ten airlines in the United States, some on each coast. The plotters would crash nine of them, and Mohammed would triumphantly land the tenth, disembark, and give a speech explaining what he had done and why. Bin Laden thought that the plan was too complicated. It was not until late 1999 that he approved a somewhat less ambitious proposal: the 9/11 plan.... A Pakistani Jackie Mason Three Winston Churchill Quotes to Use Against Conservatives Who Quote Winston Churchill From Adam Gopnik's excellent essay, "Finest Hours: The making of Winston Churchill," in the August 30th issue of The New Yorker: - The word ‘appeasement’ is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy, he said in 1950. “Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong.” He argued that “appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.” - This faith in government as the essential caretaker led him later to support the creation of a national health service, “in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.” - This habit of thinking about peoples and their fate in collective historical cycles, however archaic it might seem, gave him special insight into Hitler, who, in a Black Mass distortion, pictured the world in the same way. Both Churchill and Hitler were nineteenth-century Romantics, who believed in race and nation—in the Volksgeist, the folk spirit—as the guiding principle of history, filtered through the destinies of great men. ...Of course, Churchill and Hitler were, in the most vital respects, opposites. Churchill was, as Lukacs insists, a patriot, imbued with a love of place and people, while Hitler was a nationalist, infuriated by a hatred of aliens and imaginary enemies. But Churchill knew where Hitler was insecure and where he was strong, and knew how to goad him, too. Democracy is Dead. Discuss. Nothing v. All "There's gotta be some kind of rebellion between the people that have nothing and the people that got it all. I don't understand. There's no in-between no more. There's the peple that got it all and the people that have nothing." —Peoria, Ill., man, in 2009, about to be put out of his home, in Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story." I have some sympathy for this guy but I still wonder about his voting patterns. Did he vote, for example, for Ronald Reagan for president? Once? Twice? When Reagan came into office in 1981, the tax rate for the wealthiest one percent of the country was 69%. When he left office? 28%. The rich got richer under Reagan and the unions got screwed. And that's just the beginning. Moore's doc is best in that short segment on the Reagan years but in the end he winds up flailing all over the place, and pulling the usual stunts about not getting into places he'd never get into. Most egregiously, he makes the initial bailout, the TARP bailout in September 2008, seem like a Bush plot when it was actually a repudiation of everything Bush believed in and stood for. It was a caving in. It was a mea culpa without the mea culpa. But the Peoria man's question is the right question. How did we lose our middle class? For me, the answer starts with Reagan and those tax rates. So the question for today isn't whether or not to roll back the Bush tax cuts from 35% to 39%. The question is why stop there? And why stop at the "top one percent," which supposedly includes families making $250,000 a year? Why not divide this group further? The top .5 percent. The top .1 percent. Tax those making $1 million at a higher rate, and tax those making $10 million at a higher rate, and those making $100 million at a higher rate, etc., etc., until maybe we have something like a middle class again. How I'm Like Dick Cheney This morning I had an epiphany: I realized I was like Dick Cheney. Not a pleasant thing for a lifelong Democrat and fervent Obama supporter to realize. But helpful nonetheless. I realized I was like Dick Cheney when I was making a sandwich before work. Patricia has been sick for four days now, and I’m a bit of a germaphobe, and so for four days I’ve been extra careful about touching things around the house, and washing my hands after I touch things around the house, particularly if I’m going to make something that goes in my mouth—like a sandwich before work. But it’s been four days now, and Patricia is feeling better, and I’m hoping that the cold germs have passed through our home like a bad wind. Even so, as I was making that sandwich, I thought, vis a vis the cold germs that might be lingering: They only need to succeed once. And that’s when I realized I was like Dick Cheney. Because that was his attitude after 9/11. Terrorists were germs, they only needed to succeed once, and once they infiltrated our body they would make us sick. It helped me better understand Cheney. Yes, “understand,” a word that the extreme right likes to sneer at, because they feel they already understand it all, and anyway understanding often leads to sympathy and they want none of that. To them, sympathy and understanding make us weak. And in a way they do. My epiphany this morning about Dick Cheney, for example, weakened some of my hatred for Dick Cheney. I saw him in a new light. “Oh. So Dick Cheney’s like me when Patricia’s sick.” Here’s the key. I don’t like myself when Patricia’s sick. I don’t like being super paranoid about everything I touch. It’s no way to live. I’ve said this often. I try to change. Paranoia gets in the way of living my life. It upends my life. My fear of getting sick actually sickens me—not physically so much as mentally and spiritually. We’re scared enough already, but to be that scared? That’s really no way to live. And that’s Dick Cheney. The left sees him as a monster, and in a way he is, but at the same time it must be awful to be Dick Cheney. To be so fearful and paranoid all the time. It must warp your mind and sicken your soul. Cold germs, after all, pass. Review: “The Tillman Story” (2010) WARNING: REDACTED SPOILERS As someone who just lived through the 2000s I can honestly say that W.H. Auden didn’t know from low dishonest decades. Auden used the phrase in his poem, “September 1, 1939,” about the 1930s: I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade... His low dishonest decade ended with war, ours began with it. The dishonesty of his decade was the enemy’s, masterminded by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebels, which played on our hopes for peace. The dishonesty of our decade was our own, the Bush administration’s, masterminded by Karl Rove, which played on our fears, as well as our corresponding need for heroes. The administration that couldn’t stop attacking Hollywood kept using the tropes of Hollywood to gather power and silence opposition. Pat Tillman was a minor figure in all of this, a pawn in the Bush administration’s game, and “The Tillman Story,” a documentary written by Mark Monroe and directed by Amir Bar-Lev, is his family’s attempt to set the record straight. Most of us are familiar with some part of the story. On Sept. 10, 2001, Pat Tillman was a an All-Pro safety with the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League, happily married and making millions of dollars. Eight months later he joined the U.S. Army Rangers. He served a tour in Iraq in 2003. In his second tour, in Afghanistan, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. He was posthumously promoted to corporal and awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for combat valor, because of “gallantry on the battlefield for leading his Army Rangers unit to the rescue of comrades caught in an ambush,” according to the New York Times. A memorial service was held in San Jose, Cal., and Tillman was eulogized by the Pentagon, by politicians, and throughout the media as a patriotic hero-soldier who died selflessly for his country and for his fellow soldiers. Except it was a lie. During an ambush by enemy forces near the village of Sperah, close to the Pakistan border, yes, Tillman led several men to higher ground; but they were subsequently mistaken for the enemy and fired upon by their own troops. Tillman and a member of the Afghanistan Military Police were killed by friendly fire. Everyone on the ground knew this. There was no mistaking it. But the lie got out quickly. Reading the first, heroic press accounts, with details provided by the Pentagon, is to be steeped in Bush-era bullshit. From USA Today: When the rear section of their convoy became pinned down in rough terrain, Tillman ordered his team out of its vehicles “to take the fight to the enemy forces” on the higher ground. As Tillman and other soldiers neared the hill's crest, he directed his team into firing positions, the Army said. As he sprayed the enemy positions with fire from his automatic rifle, he was shot and killed. The Army said his actions helped the trapped soldiers maneuver to safety “without taking a single casualty”... A month later, the truth seeped out, but it wasn’t well-covered. As the saying goes: the mistake is always on page 1, the retraction on page 14. From the May 30th New York Times: Ex-Player's Death Reviewed Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals football player, was probably killed by allied fire as he led his team of Army Rangers up a hill during a firefight in Afghanistan last month, the Army said. Sometimes there’s no retraction at all. The following is every USA Today news headline about Tillman from 2004. Notice how they fed on him until they didn't: - Tillman killed in Afghanistan (April 23, 2004) - Moment of silence at NFL draft (April 24, 2004) - Tillman's legacy of virtue (April 25, 2004) - Body returns to U.S. (April 26, 2004) - Army promotes Tillman to corporal (April 29, 2004) - Tillman posthumously awarded Silver Star (April 30, 2004) - Items related to Tillman sold on E-bay (May 2, 2004) - Tillman mourned by hometown (May 2, 2004) - Tillman memorial service held in San Jose (May 3, 2004) - Arizona salutes Tillman (May 8, 2004) - Report details Tillman's last minutes (Dec. 5, 2004) Not only did Tillman not die the way they said, he didn’t live the way they said, either. “He didn’t really fit into that box they would’ve liked,” Tillman’s mother, Mary, mentions in the doc. He joined the Rangers to fight al Qaeda but wound up in Iraq and wasn’t happy. “This war is so fucking illegal,” one of his brothers quotes him saying. He had an open curious mind at odds with the incurious absolutism of the time. There’s hilarious footage of Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity refusing to believe that Tillman read linguist and conservative bete noire Noam Chomsky. (Because it didn’t fit into their notions of a football player? A soldier? A conservative hero? All of the above?) Fellow Ranger Bryan O’Neal, a Mormon, talks about coming across Tillman, a religious skeptic, possibly an atheist, reading “The Book of Mormon.” He wanted to see what was what. He swore like a truck driver and loved risking his life. He jumped from high places and climbed to higher places. He was that rare tough guy who didn’t need to show how tough he was. He never hazed recruits. He didn’t yell and get into the face of men who screwed up—as is the Army way. O’Neal recounts how, when he screwed up, Tillman took him aside and told him how disappointed he was. That was it. According to O’Neal, that was enough. This is straight out of his father’s vocabulary, by the way. In the doc, Patrick Tillman says he’s “disappointed” in Pfc. Russell Baer, Tillman’s fellow Ranger, who was the first to lie to the family about the incident. He tells the Army in 2005 that he’s “disappointed” in them, too. The mother is lauded in the doc but the father dominates it. Thinner than his son, with the same lantern jaw, he seethes with rage. Still. He wants the answer to a simple question: Who lied about his son’s death? Eventually he tells the Army, in writing, “fuck you,” and this—and a Washington Post editorial—got their attention. In August 2005, the Pentagon launched an internal investigation into the incorrect reports of Tillman’s death. In March 2007, the report pinned the blame on a lieutenant general who had already retired. They took away one of his stars. There were some congressional hearings, and joint chiefs and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied knowledge of blah blah blah, and had no recollection of yadda yadda. It all petered out. “The Tillman Story” is a sad story but it’s not a great doc. It focuses too much attention on the Tillman family rather than on Tillman himself. Like the family, it can’t accept the military’s non-answer, and, panning up the command flowchart to Pres. George W. Bush, spends too much time insinuating who might’ve ordered the falsification of Tillman’s death. At the same time, it’s so vague in describing Tillman’s actual death that a friend, who saw the doc the same time I did, assumed Tillman had been “fragged” rather than killed by friendly fire. For all the attempts to release Tillman from his box, too, its portrait isn’t as complete as in Jon Krakauer’s book “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.” In particular it ignores an incident during his senior year of high school, when Tillman, thinking he was defending a friend from an ass-whooping, put an innocent kid into the hospital. His life was nearly derailed by this—he served jail time and came close to losing his scholarship to Arizona State—but he came out of it, according to Krakauer, more contemplative and slower to temper. He came out closer to the man he would become. The doc would’ve benefited from this story. But it’s a good reminder. Just six years ago we were all living through this: Jessica Lynch, WMDs, smoking gun/mushroom cloud, Video News Releases (VNRs), fake White House correspondents, the firing of U.S. attorneys, the outing of Valerie Plame, “greeted with flowers,” “Mission Accomplished,” “a few bad apples,” “last throes.” And Pat Tillman. What company to keep. If I were his family, I’d be enraged, too. Off By That Much "At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not enter the [Korean] war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur's troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the CIA reported that 'The Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.' On October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were there to protect hydro-electric power plants. On October 28, it told the White House that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they were Mao's soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into the sea." —from Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," pp. 58-59, beginning, or continuing, a tradition of faulty intelligence that invariably missed the biggest foreign policy events of the 20th century and beyond. Quote of the Day “Politically, these issues are poisonous. That’s what Rahm Emanuel is looking at. [But] you can’t finesse it, and you can’t spin it. The President just has to lead the American people away from fear.” —Elisa Massimino, the president of Human Rights First, on civilian trials vs. military tribunals, Guantanamo, and what kind of war is the War on Terror, in Jane Mayer's New Yorker article, "The Trial: Eric Holder and the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." - The New York Times gives equal weight to all sides by letting five lawyers, including Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and is now legal affairs editor of The National Review, have their say. - Jon Stewart spars with conservative columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen on "The Daily Show." - Scott Horton is less kind to Thiessen in this Harper's column. - A letter from conservative lawyers, such as Ken Starr, coming to the defense of Dept. of Justice lawyers against the attacks of Liz Cheney's organization "Keep America Safe." From PC to Protests: How the Right became everything it despised in the Left A week ago Friday I was walking through downtown Seattle on my way to work when I noticed, from 6th and Olive, a small group of protesters standing with signs over on 6th and Stewart. I wasn’t wearing my glasses so I couldn’t tell what exactly they were protesting, and gave a momentary thought to checking them out, but kept going my usual way. At 5th I saw two of the protesters talking to some folks. One of the them held a sign I could now read: Lord, I thought. So: Engage them? Ask them where they’ve been during the last eight years—when our national debt more than doubled from $5 trillion to over $10 trillion? Ask them if they voted for George W. Bush, whose policies and lack of foresight and accountability brought us to this place? Did they double-down in 2004? Instead I continued on 5th Avenue, where, under the monorail, I saw a few cops, then a few more, then a larger contingent. They were there to protect the protest, or the march, or whatever it was—I didn't see any reports on it. Then I noticed how much traffic was backed up. I thought of the time lost and the tax dollars and oil wasted for these 50 or so protesters. And I thought this of members of the tea party: “Get a job.” Has the right-wing become everything it used to despise? They’re all whiners and protesters now. They attack authority—judges, Congress, Democratic presidents. They’re politcally correct, scouring media and movies for signs of the slightest offense. (Some even objected to “The Blind Side,” a positive story about a white southern Christian family, because there's a quick W. joke in the middle of it.) The recent Conservative Political Action Conference called itself "Woodstock" for conservatives. Remember “Easy Rider”—the hippie-biker film from 1969? Its tagline: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere." That’s how these guys feel. They keep wondering where their America went. They keep talking about getting it back. But they’re repeating history as farce. The marches of the civil rights movement were borne because a group of people had no voice in government and second-class status everywhere. The tea party protests—at least the wing of it most concerned with fiscal responsibility—seem to have been borne because the voice they had in government led to a place they didn’t want to be: with the country overwhelmingly in debt and foundering on the brink of economic disaster. In this way they could be like anti-war protesters of the 1960s, who most likely voted for LBJ over that nuke-loving extremist Barry Goldwater and wound up in a place they didn’t want to be: in a full-fledged war in Vietnam. The difference? These folks protested LBJ. They took to the streets in ’66, ’67, ’68. They didn’t wait for Nixon to get into office. The Tea Partiers were silent for eight years while their guy wrecked the country, then took to the streets as soon as he left. Last week before going to bed I read Ben McGrath’s piece on the tea partiers in the Feb. 1st New Yorker and got so angry I couldn’t fall asleep until after 1 a.m. I guess I was mostly angry at McGrath and The New Yorker for giving deluded, potentially dangerous people a prominent place to air their views. Fanning the flames in the piece was U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, 4th district, Kentucky, who says cap-and-trade legislation would be “an economic colonization of the hard-working states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” Jesus. Can we have a discussion in this country? Can we have a back-and-forth? The above is like Reagan’s welfare mother with her Cadillac: an urban myth that won't go away. Time and again, statitistics show that the states who get more tax dollars back than they put in tend to be the quote-unquote heartland states. For the last year available, 2005, Davis’ Kentucky is at no. 9 on this list. Kentuckians got back $1.51 for every $1.00 they put in. For which they're complaining. Or Davis is. Here are the big winners in the federal tax game, as per the conservative, anti-tax Tax Foundation: 1. New Mexico 5. West Virginia 6. North Dakota 8. South Dakota Meanwhile the states that get the least bang for their tax buck? The ones who get screwed in this game? Those awful coastal and liberal Midwest states: 42. New York 47. New Hampshire 50. New Jersey The tea-partiers actually have a legitimate gripe—about the power of corporations and government—but they're not griping legitimately. Some of them are just plain nuts. They’re “we didn’t land on the moon” nuts. John McCain is a communist. All political parties bow down before George Soros. And many believe in Edgar Cayce? Really? So the tea partiers are full of discontented New Agers? Who were, what, discontent hippies? No wonder they seem like hippies. This is even nuttier. From McGrath: An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time. The final straw for the left was domestic terrorism, the Weather Underground, etc., which pretty much destroyed any progressive movement in this country for decades. Is that where the right is now? Anti-tax proponents emulate al Qaeda by flying planes into federal buildings, killing innocent people. Their actions are sympathized with by Republican congressmen. Republicans running for president condone such violence. I don’t want this. I really don’t. I want a strong, smart opposition, and the right is becoming a dumb, dangerous farce. And all the while our country suffers. Miss Me Yet? - II “As Steve Coll wrote in The New Yorker in April 2006, Saddam [Hussein] could not bring himself to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction, 'because he feared a loss of prestige, and, in particular, that Iran might take advantage of his weakness—a conclusion also sketched earlier by the C.I.A.-supervised Iraq Survey Group. He did not tell even his most senior generals that he had no W.M.D. until just before the invasion. They were appalled, and some thought he might be lying, because, they later told their interrogators, the American government insisted that Iraq did have such weapons. Saddam ”found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having W.M.D.,“ the study says. The Bush war cabinet, of course, clung to the same illusion, and a kind of mutually reinforcing trance took hold between the two leaderships as the invasion neared...' ”A Gallup poll conducted in May 2003 indicated that 79 percent of Americans believed the Iraq war was 'justified.'“ —from Jon Krakauer's ”Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," pp. 214-15 Miss Me Yet? "Jessica Lynch dominated the news for weeks. The details of the incident provided by military public affairs officers made for an absolutely riveting story that television, radio and print journalists found irresistible: a petite blond supply clerk from a flea-speck burg in West Virginia is ambushed in Iraq and fearlessly mows down masked Fedayeen terrorists with her M16 until she runs out of ammo, whereupon she is shot, stabbed, captured, tortured, and raped before finally being snatched from her barbaric Iraqi captors during a daring raid by American commandos... "Subsequent reporting by investigative journalists revealed that most of the details of Lynch's ordeal were extravagantly embellished, and much of the rest was invented out of whole cloth. Because her rifle had jammed, she hadn't fired a single round. Although her injuries had indeed been life threatening, they were exclusively the result of her Humvee smashing into Hernandez's tractor trailer; she was never shot, stabbed, tortured, or raped. After she had been transferred to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, her captors treated her with kindness and special care. And when the American commandos arrived at the hospital to rescue Lynch, they met no significiant resistance. "The spurious particulars did not come from Private Lynch. The bogus story was based on information fed to gullible reporters by anonymous military sources. The government official who arranged for reporters to interview these sources—the guy who deserves top biling for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch, in other words—was a White House appparatchik named Jim Wilkinson. Although his official job description was director of strategic communcations for General Tommy Franks... actually Wilkinson served as the Bush administration's top 'perception manager' for the Iraq War." —from Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," pp. 180-81 Picture making the rounds on conservative blogs. Quote of the Other Day — Republican Incoherence and You “On every single major issue of the day, [the Republicans] are incoherent. They have no workable plans to insure the uninsured and no practical way to contain healthcare costs; most deny climate change even exists; most seek to prolong wars because ... er, we have to be tough; their response to the massive debt is to defend Medicare and call for tax cuts; their position on civil rights is that gay people need to go to Jesus; their position on terror suspects is to detain them and torture them, violating domestic and international law; their position on immigration is to round up millions and force them to go home. ”My worry, however, is that there are enough Americans perfectly happy to live with this nihilism indefinitely, and to perpetuate the policies of spend-and-borrow and invade-and-occupy that any serious attempt to address our problems is impossible. And their response to that will be to blame all those problems on a Democratic president, if there is one; and if there's a Republican president, to simply deny that any of the problems exist at all. —Andrew Sullivan, “Tactics Over Strategy” Who's Controlling the News? Not Auletta "You missed it." I kept thinking of that line from “All the President’s Men” while reading Ken Auletta’s Jan. 25th New Yorker piece, “Non-Stop News: Who’s Controlling White House Coverage?” Auletta missed the story. Shame. I normally like Auletta. The story for me doesn’t begin until the fifth of 11 sections, the one beginning “Like other American workers, journalists these days are crunched, working harder with less support and holding tight to their jobs” and ending with a quote from Chuck Todd, who, this section tells us, is not only NBC’s White House correspondent and political director, but is busy from dusk 'til dawn with appearances on “Today,” “Morning Joe,” his own (aptly named) “The Daily Rundown,” along with the usual blogging and tweeting from and to various sites. The news cycle is now a cycle in the way that time is a cycle. It never stops. As a result, Todd, and other journalists, have no time for in-depth coverage or even deep thought or analysis. “We’re all wire-service reporters now,” Todd says. The sixth section is also about how technology has transformed media matters but this time from a White House perspective. “The biggest White House press frustration is that nothing can drive a news cycle anymore,” Republican political advisor Mark McKinnon says. Auletta then goes on to criticize the Obama White House for being too slow and reactive. He criticizes Press Secretary Robert Gibbs because “he rarely asserts control from the podium, to steer the press onto the news that Obama wants to make.” I.e., He’s not telling the newsmen what the news is. One could argue he’s treating them like adults. So if we’re all wire-service reporters now, and the Obama White House isn’t steering these reporters towards the news, who is? That’s where it gets scary. Auletta writes: “What the press is paying attention to, [former Obama White House Communications Director] Anita Dunn says, is cable and blog attacks on the Obama Administration.” And who’s steering those? Guess. That’s the story: In an increasingly fragmented, perpetual news-cycle world, who or what is steering the news? That’s even the story in Auletta’s headline, isn’t it? And he still misses the story. Because much of Auletta’s piece is old news. Has the mainstream media been pro-Obama? Is Pres. Obama too prickly with the media now that the honeymoon is over? Should he be lecturing the media on its faults the way he does? About how the media focuses on the most extreme elements on both sides? About how they’re only interested in conflict? Early on, Auletta quotes from a PEW Research Report on Obama’s early glowing press coverage: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan media-research group concurred; tracking campaign coverage, it found that McCain was the subject of negative stories twice as frequently as Obama. (The study says that the press was influenced by Obama’s commanding lead in the polls—the kind of ‘Who won today?’ journalism he now decries.) Allow me a sports metaphor. Do we assume that Albert Pujols gets more positive press coverage than, say, Yuniesky Betancourt? Of course he does. He’s a better ballplayer. Our eyes see it, the stats prove it. Unfortunately, politics has no such stats beyond poll numbers and votes. I’m not suggesting that Barack Obama is Albert Pujols; I’m merely suggesting that, in dealing with two political figures, we’re not dealing with two interchangeable blocks of wood. I’m suggesting that the mainstream press cannot pretend that the Yuniesky Betancourts of the political, legal or business realms are equal to the Albert Pujolses of same, without losing as much credibility as they would if they misreported facts. Objectivity is not stupidity. Let me add, not being a journalist, that I have no idea how you work this out within the constraints of objective journalism. But make no mistake: This is an issue for objective journalism. If objective journalism is to survive. Perhaps more importantly, does the Pew Research Center Project include FOX News and conservative radio in their study of mainstream media? If not, why not? The notion that “the media” is limited to The New York Times goes against what should be the brunt of this article. We’re in the middle of a whole new ballgame. Auletta quotes ABC’s Jake Tapper on the matter. “This President has been forced to deal with more downright falsehoods than any President I can think of,” Tapper says. Auletta then lists off some examples: “Obama was brought up a Muslim; he was not born in the U.S.; he studied at a madrassa in Indonesia.” How about: Obama is Hitler? He wants to kill your grandmother? He’s destroying the foundation of American society? That’s daily fodder in these venues, and it keeps seeping out, and it becomes the story. Even when it becomes the joke story, on “The Daily Show,” or “The Colbert Report,” it’s still the story. In addressing these falsehoods in an objective matter, or a jokey matter, how are you not perpetuating these falsehoods? That’s the issue. This was the issue in the summer of 2008 and in the fall of 2009. And today. And for 10 pages of prime New Yorker real estate, Auletta misses it. Steve Tesich Quote of the Day As an immigrant to the United States, Mr. Tesich says, he was for a long time very positive and very optimistic about this country. That optimism, he says, has changed, and the change started with Vietnam. "I didn't just love America," he says. "I was in love with America. I honestly believed that it was going to be one of those nations that would take care of everybody, that would try to make its rewards available to all. And now I feel there is absolutely no agenda for helping those on the bottom in this country. Nobody is really interested in them. And I don't know what the country stands for." The word I'd use to sum up the decade. I'm bushed, you're bushed, we've all been Bushed—the country and the world. We need a new starting line. Hey, here comes one now. Quote of the Day “What delight and joy in reading the Auburn Plainsman's Ben Bartley, some red-white-and-blue type guy from Texas who's fuming that such an anti-corporate, anti-arrogant, anti-Bush legacy, pro-eco, pro-nativist pantheist tract is raking it in big-time and spreading the myth everywhere, and there's nothing this guy can do about it. Hah! Eat shit, Christian asshole!” Lancelot Links (Wants to Deck Someone) - John Perr's blog, "Crooks and Liars," takes Sarah Palin apart for her massive ignorance of the history of our country, but equally important, not to mention related, is the accompanying graph (below) on the recent tax rate of our lowest and highest income brackets. During World War II, which Palin insists, in a Washington Post Op-Ed of all places, was paid for by war bonds (volunteerism), the top income bracket was taxed at 94%. Ninety-four percent! So much for voluteerism. Now they're taxed at 35 percent. Me, I'd raise it back to at least 50 percent —at least—as it was from 1982 to 1986. Reagan years, people. Everyone in this bracket is making tons of money off of a system they were born into and it's time they showed their appreciation to that system, and the long-term stability of that system, by, yes, "volunteering" to give back. Read the whole piece, it's worth it: - My man! Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) takes down Sen. John Thune (R-SD) on the health care bill. Franken, by way of Pat Moynihan, has given us a mantra for this age of disinformation: "You're entitled to your own opinion, you're not entitled to your own facts." I particularly like how frustrated and angry Franken gets by the end. You can tell he's fed up. These people keep lying. - It's actually worse. These people make careers out of accusing the opposition of doing what they do. It's the absolutist right, not the relativist left, that's as close to a fascistic organization as this country has ever had. The Nazis, remember, started out as a vocal minority, an absolutist, bullying, hateful group that wheedled its way into power and then shut out all opposition. That's the absolutist right in this country. And their latest alley-oop accusation? Via the Daily Show: Global-warming debunkers are now accusing global-warming proponents (i.e., the scientific community) of believing what they believe...for money! The idea being that global warming is big business so it doesn't matter if it's true or not. Nice. Because we all know it's the opposite of that. Global warming continues because of big business, because of the money that's made pumping what we pump into the air. The whole thing is so awful it makes you want to retch. It makes you want to deck somebody. - A voice of reason in this wretched political world? Hendrik Hertzberg. Again. - And another. It's worth watching Pres. Obama interviewed by Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes." He's a serious man in serious times surrounded by the unserious and the moronic. By people who are dicking around. And not just the absolutist right and not just the mainstream media but you and me. We create all of this. Every second, with every decision, we create our world. - And even this serious interview gets an idiotic response from Dana Perino, whose 15 minutes, in a normal world, that is a non-cable, non-fragmented world, would be up. Yet she keeps talking. She says that President Obama's suggestion that President Bush "was too triumphant in his rhetoric when talking about war...is demonstrably false." The obvious follow-up? "Can you demonstrate it?" But she was on FOX News so they didn't ask the obvious follow-up. Here. Here are the three words that demonstrate the truth of what Pres. Obama implied about Pres. Bush: "Bring 'em on." Do we need more? Do we need to recall the swagger and the smirk? The aircraft carrier and flight suit? The "Mission Accomplished" banners? The talk of good and evil? The covering up of America's war dead? Damn, people, it wasn't even 10 years ago. - But apparently some people can't even remember January 19, 2009. - First, The Daily Show helped expose Glenn Beck's inciting panic/encouraging gold-buying and repping for Goldline. Now it's The Colbert Report's turn. "'Pray on it.' Like we're preying on you." Brilliant. Here's an in-depth look from the L.A. Times. The question that needs to be asked—and I mean this—is: Why is Glenn Beck trying to destroy this country? - To end on an up note, here's Pres. Obama's speech after winning the Nobel Prize. It's a serious speech by a serious man in serious times. Read the whole thing. An excerpt: - We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason. - We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. - It feels like Richard Brody is a bit too kind to Wes Anderson in his Nov. 2nd, New Yorker profile on the director, "Wild, Wild Wes." Or maybe he's simply too kind to Anderson's 2003 film, "The Life Aquatic," which came on the heels of his biggest hit ("The Royal Tenenbaums"), which came on the heels of his most critically acclaimed film ("Rushmore"). After detailing several critic complaints about "Aquatic," Brody writes: "In fact, 'The Life Aquatic" does tell a story, but it's one that sprawls with an epic ambition and a picaresqe wonder. Anderson's playfully unstrung storytelling was both purposeful and meaningful: life in the wild, the film suggests, doesn't follow the neat contours of dramatic suspense but is filled with surprises, accidents, and sudden lurches off course. ... 'The Life Aquatic' was proof of Anderson's maturation as an artist..." - Come again? Here's my 2007 take on Anderson and his ouevre. I actually like Anderson, within limits, which I hope my article makes clear, but I'm not a fan of "Aquatic," for reasons stated, none of which has to do with its lack of storytelling. The short version of Brody's article is here, but you have to buy, or borrow from your local library, the Nov. 2nd New Yorker to read it in full. Or subscribe. I recommend subscribing already. - The Washington Post focuses on a quiet but powerful contingent that is being ignored in the same-sex marriage debate: the ex-spouses of now-out-of-the-closet gay men and women. This section in particular packs a whallop: Many of these former spouses -- from those who still feel raw resentment toward their exes to those who have reached a mutual understanding -- see the legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward protecting not only homosexuals but also heterosexuals. If homosexuality was more accepted, they say, they might have been spared doomed marriages followed by years of self-doubt. "It's like you hit a brick wall when they come out," Brooks said. "You think everything is fine and then, boom!" Carolyn Sega Lowengart calls it "retroactive humiliation." It's that embarrassment that washes over her when she looks back at photographs or is struck by a memory and wonders what, if anything, from that time was real. Did he ever love her? "I'm 61 years old," said Lowengart, who lives in Chevy Chase. "Will I ever know what it's like to be loved passionately? Probably not." - I'm going to have to permanently link to Joe Posnanski below but in the meantime here's his early Hall of Fame arguments and they warm the cockles of my cold, cold Seattle heart. Actually his argument is: Who is the best eligible hitter not in the Hall of Fame? He then goes through the usual suspects. Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe and Barry Bonds are not eligible so he eliminates them. Mark McGwire? Impressive, certainly. A homer ever 8 at-bats, "but we knew how he did it," and anyway there's that lifetime .263 batting average. Dick Allen? Don Mattingly? Minnie Monoso? Babe Herman? I'll cut to the chase—particularly since the photo at right is a giveaway. Posnanski suggests Edgar Martinez. He talks about why he's a great hitter, all of which should be familiar to Seattle fans (lifetime: .300/.400/.500), and why he won't make it anyway, which will also be familiar to Seattle fans. Edgar's got the percentage numbers, but he played the majority of his career as a DH and he didn't play long enough to accumulate the gross numbers: the 3,000 hits, etc., because the Mariners (idiots!) didn't bring him up until he was 27. If he'd played his entire career at third, I think he would've made it. If he'd been a DH but had the cumulative numbers, I think he would've made it. It's the two together that put the kibosh on him. Of course I'd vote for him in a second but I'm obviously biased. At the same time, here's my non-bias: How many career .300/.400.500 guys, with as many at-bats as Edgar, aren't in the Hall of Fame? Extra credit. We've just been talking lately about what a great pitcher Mariano Rivera is. So how did Edgar do against Rivera? 16 at-bats, 10 hits, 3 doubles, 2 homeruns, 6 RBIs. A .625 batting average and a 1.888 OPS. Don't know if anyone with double-digit at-bats against Rivera has ever done better. Obviously that's not an argument in favor of the Hall but it is fun. Michelle Malkin's Journey from A to A There's an odd piece on the Crosscut Web site called "Michelle Malkin's Journey from Ideas to Tribes," by Ross Anderson, a former Seattle Times political writer whose office was next to Malkin's when she was a columnist at the paper from 1996 to 1999. I remember those days and those columns. I remember thinking what a lousy writer she was. I remember wondering if she got the gig because of her race and gender. According to Anderson? Yes: The Times had been looking for a new voice, preferably a minority and a woman. That she turned out to be both of the above, plus a young libertarian was a bonus. Anderson is wondering what happened to the person he knew back then. "I didn’t always agree [with her]," Anderson writes, "but I always enjoyed chatting at our office doors." Now, he says, she's guility of tribalism, a kind of "my people vs. your people" attitude. "Missing are those ideas we exchanged at our office doors," he says. Fine. So what ideas did they exchange at their office doors? "She never asked what I thought," Anderson admits, but he told her anyway. Afterwards, he writes, "Michelle said nothing, resisting an impulse to roll her eyeballs." This is exchanging ideas at office doors? Anderson's description refutes his own premise. Malkin hasn't journeyed anywhere. She didn't care what you thought back then; she doesn't now. "You" being not just Ross Anderson but you. The More Republicans Change: Anger, Paranoia, and Visions of Apocalypse at the 1976 Republican Convention When my girlfriend, Patricia, moved to New York in 1975, she worked as an editorial assistant at New Times, a short-lived but impressive feature news magazine that included Richard Corliss, Frank Rich, Robert Sam Anson and Bob Shrum among its writers. She still has some bound copies. I was leafing through these the other day when I came across a piece by Nora Sayre on the 1976 Republican convention. It's startling how familiar the language is. In the wake of Watergate, in the face of an almost-certain Jimmy Carter victory, these Republicans offer nothing but complaints, paranoia, conspiracy theories and visions of apocalypse. Some samples: That entire shower of joy—the celebration of a happy and healthy America [at the '72 Republican convention]—was a spectral memory in Kansas City in 1976. Never has our social fabric seemed so fragile; today, imperiled by demonic forces that may shatter it from outside or from within, the mere "survival of the nation" is at stake—along with its safety... Ford himself seemed to have forgotten that he had actually been in office, while Goldwater talked as though Carter had been elected eight years ago... [This female delegate's] sense of an America in shreds was echoed by both Ford and Reagan delegates, and reinforced by the speakers, who emphasized that we're in a race with the clock. Goldwater warned that we must "save the last stronghold of freedom on earth," since this "may be the last time" that we'll be able to "defend ourselves against our suicidal slide toward socialism"... A Texan screamed at the nearby New York delegation, "If we fought the Civil War today, we'd win!" His friends broke into a Rebel Yell... On the final night, Reagan caught the mood of his party to perfection when he mused on the letter that he'd been asked to compose for a time capsule that will be unsealed in Los Angeles a hundred years hence. He wondered if "the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule" would have prevailed by the Tricentennial, and if "horrible missiles of destruction" would have eliminated "the civilized world we live in." His readers of the next century "might not even get to to read the letter at all" if the Republicans should fail to preserve the liberties that their enemies yearn to demolish. Ecstasy greeted his bleak message, and his followers cheered on having their fears confirmed... Glenn Beck's shit is old... - Here's a good piece by my friend Jessica Thompson, who's lived in India for a year now, on the sexual harassment—called "Eve teasing"—there: "Eve teasing is to sexual harassment what Delhi Belly is to projectile vomiting and diarrhea: both are really ugly things hidden behind a cute name." - Jeff Wells begins the end-of-decade ceremonies with his top 37 (37?) films of 2000-2009. It's a fun list—particularly his no. 1 choice. Have only vaguely thought about my top list, but it would include "The Pianist" (his no. 9) and "United 93" (his no. 5). What else would I have? "Yi Yi"? "Spider-Man 2"? "Munich"? "Brokeback Mountain," definitely. That movie just gets better with age. What about you? What movies in this decade stand out in your mind? - Is "web" really the proper metaphor for this thing? It works, although not with the verb. You crawl a web while we claim to surf this one—and surfing is much cooler than what we do here. The metaphor that comes to my mind is pinball. I bounce from spot to spot. I careen the Pinball. The other day I visited Jeff Wells again, and he bounced me to this James Rocchi piece on MSN about press junkets in general and "Couples Retreat"'s in particular, and after reading one sentence I sought more of Rocchi and bounced all over the place. Found this MSN review on "Transformers 2," which definitely echoes my feelings about that abomination: "Where the first film was desperate, this one is desperate and sad. Where the first film sent mixed messages about ethnic and racial groups and women, this one is overtly racist and sexist. Where the first 'Transformers' was clumsy, 'Revenge of the Fallen' is paralyzed with its own stupidity." Rocchi's own site is here. - Some good lines from Anthony Lane on "The Invention of Lying": "...as for the soundtrack, it’s like being haunted by the ghost of Easy Listening Past. Supertramp and the Electric Light Orchestra are one thing, but Donovan: there’s no excuse. And what really galls is not the songs themselves but the greasy way in which they are wrapped around crucial passages of action, to muffle any awkward transitions; thus, once Mark has armed himself with white lies, he strolls off to reassure all the other miserable folk we have encountered so far—old-timers, bums on the street, a bickering couple—with a smile and a word in their ears. But what word? We can’t tell, because Elvis Costello is busy belting out “Sitting” by the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens." - The New York Times' business column is becoming more of a must-read every day, particularly David Carr's on Monday and David Leonhardt's on Wednesday. This week, Carr wrote a sober, infuriating piece on the $66 million in bonuses delivered to Tribune Co. managers who mostly axed reporters to increase profits...which mostly went to them. Funny how that works. Leonhardt, on Wednesday, wrote of the excesses of left and right economic thinking, and who on the right (Bruce Bartlett) is finally going beyond "cut taxes" as a means to economic stimulus. We'll see how it plays. A smart voice on the right would be a nice change. - Not all these links are worth clicking on, by the way. This is one. I'm sure you heard about it: The First Lady has white, slave-owning ancestors. That's the big story. A bigger story for me is that Mrs. Obama's great-great-grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields, the first child born to Melvina Shields, who was born into slavery, co-founded the First Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which was pivotal in the civil rights movement. It's amazing, on the one hand, how carefully the Times tells its story, and, on the other, how carelessly. "While [Melvina] was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time." That's in the second graf. I would definitely lose "under circumstances lost in the passage of time," which is, given the circumstances, so romantic a phrase as to be close cousin to "under circumstances now...gone with the wind!" Plus the quotes from Edward Ball, "a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors," are embarrassing: "We are not separate tribes," he says. "We've all mingled, and we've done so for generations." Nice verb: mingled. - Finally a must-read by another friend, Jim Walsh, in Southwest Journal in Minneapolis, on the funeral of the father of a friend. Jim's the real deal. Not just as a writer. Quote of the Day “I got a note from a good friend yesterday expressing shock, and anger, about Drudge and Malkin's usage of that alleged racial beat-down on a school-bus. On some level, I wonder if something's wrong with me. I'm neither shocked, nor angry. This is exactly how I expected these fools to respond to a black president. ”If anything, I'm a little giddy. For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. ... Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance. He tells kids to study--and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness--and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date--and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them." Flash: Rush Limbaugh Has No Genitalia! Frank Rich has a piece in this morning's New York Times on Obama's squandered summer. It's a good piece. He talks up Obama's m.o.: Let everyone else rachet up the rhetoric until it becomes intolerable, and then come in, cool and calm, and direct things like an adult. He did it during the campaign—to both Hilary and McCain—and he's done it now with the health care debate. Rich wonders if it's worth it. Couldn't he have made that speech in June? Why did he let the inmates take over the asylum all summer? Rich says that m.o. is good for winning elections but bad for making policy. It's a particularly bad method when your party dominates the executive and legislative branches of government. Get involved. Now. Don't stay above the fray. Be yourself but direct things daily, rather than seasonally. I tend to agree. There's a stink from the idiocy of this summer that may never wash out. You elect a president, in part, because his is the voice you want to hear every day for the next four years, and I haven't heard enough from Pres. Obama. The voices that seep through tend to be the crazy conservatives, elected or not: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, the LaRouche-ites. Joe Wilson. Here's a question for Frank Rich, though: To what extent is the media responsible? To what extent are we responsible? This isn't happening in a vaccum. Every day each news organization puts out its material. Every day each person picks up, or at, the material he wants. What material are they picking? What material are we choosing? I've used this example many times before but one more time won't hurt. Say I'm a nationally known media figure in the political realm. Say I've got my own show. And then I say the following: Rush Limbaugh has no genitalia. Literally. He just has a ball of fluff between his legs. Is that news? Not in a serious country. But in this country? Here's the beauty of the accusation: Not only is it sensationalistic, not only is it "sexy"—since it deals with sex, or the lack of it—but it can never be proven without Limbaugh demeaning himself greatly. So it stays out there. Does he or doesn't he? Well, his wife says he does but should we believe her? Can't we hear from an objective source? Is there an objective source? And is that why he smokes those big fat cigars—as compensation? Why can't we get a definitive answer on this! It's the shouted whisper campaign. And it's no more absurd than half the stuff I've heard this summer. Look at Tobin Harshaw's "Opinionator: A Gathering of Opinion from Around the Web" in Friday's Times. It's all about Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" during the president's speech on Wednesday. Harshaw begins by taking "The Hill," a Capitol Hill liberal newspaper, to task, for its weak response. Then he writes this: So what’s the point, exactly? For conservatives, it’s that another reflexively liberal publication is trying to tarnish a new straight-talker. Straight talker? Why is Harshaw allowing conservatives to frame the debate this way? He even quotes from FOX News: Indeed, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service study found that the House health care bill does not restrict illegal immigrants from receiving health care coverage. You know what else it doesn't restrict? Rush Limbaugh from getting a faux-penis to cover up his lack of genitalia. Just because something isn't restricted doesn't mean it's allowed. Shouldn't Harshaw mention that? But he doesn't. He blabs on. He's got this important platform and he talks about everything that doesn't matter: the conseratives who condemn Wilson; the liberals who support him. Then he ends it with such a facile close I'd edit it out of one of my publications, which is a trade publication, and not The New York Times. We used to live in an echo chamber. We now live in an outragegous chamber. The more outrageous the behavior the more likely it is to get covered. And the feces go flying. I tend to agree with Frank Rich in his column today. It just seems bad form to complain that Pres. Obama—the custodian-in-chief—is cleaning things up seasonally, rather than daily, when most of Rich's colleagues are doing everything they can to keep the feces flying. We are lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky to have Barack Obama as the president of the United States of America. Here's Andrew Sullivan's live blogging of the president's speech before Congress on health care reform. I agree with almost everything Sullivan says. Pres. Obama, too. How Texas Executed an Innocent Man In a 2006 case before the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the death penalty, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that there has not been “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.” First, Justice Scalia seems to be employing horse-and-barn-door logic. In order to prevent this horrible thing from happening, we must first let it happen. Second, guilt and innocence are tricky matters, requiring an entire court system to sort out. The assumption that the sorting has been done correctly, 100 percent of the time, for the entire life of our nation and maybe all nations, seems a trifle naive. Third: Cameron Todd Willingham. Does Scalia read The New Yorker—from which the above quote was taken? The Sept. 7 issue has a good long article (“Trial By Fire”) by David Grann on Cameron Todd Willingham, who, in Dec. 1991, watched in horror as his three children were burned to death in their home. A month later he was arrested for arson and manslaughter. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. In Feb. 2004 he was executed by the state of Texas. Grann employs a Rashomon-style type of reporting. But rather than giving us different people’s perspectives of the same event, he gives us different “general perceptions” of the same event. The event is the burning to the ground of a one-story wood-frame house, in Corsicana, Texas, on Dec. 23, 1991. Three children died. The first “general perception” is the immediate one. The wife is away. The father is out front, and frantic, and has to be restrained from trying to re-enter the building, which is erupting in flames. The fire department arrives, too late, and the girls die. It’s a tragedy. The second “general perception” is the one started by the fire investigator, whose maxims include “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it," and “The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter.” The investigator finds the evidence and interprets the story, and in this interpretation Willingham is found wanting and monstrous. Based upon the evidence, he could not have done the said the things he did...unless he started the thing. As a result, neighbors and ministers begin to change their stories. Maybe Willingham wasn’t as distraught as he seemed. Maybe he didn’t try to get back in the house until there were people there to restrain him. Maybe he protested too much. This is the story of a monster who rightfully winds up on death row. The third “general perception” begins in 1999 when a woman named Elizabeth Gilbert volunteers to become a pen pal to someone on death row, and winds up with Cameron Todd Willingham. She listens to his story and doesn’t believe him. Then she begins to research the case. She wonders why neighbors and ministers changed their tune. She questions the mental state of the cellmate who claimed Willingham confessed the crime to him. She doubts Willingham received a fair trial. The case against him is still based upon strong evidence from the fire investigator but it’s beginning to unravel. This is a story full of ambiguity and doubt, which is where most of us live most of the time. What happened again in that one-story wood-frame house? What was the event? The fourth and final “general perception” occurs when Dr. Gerald Hurst, a national fire investigator, looks at the evidence in the case and disagrees vehemently with the local fire investigator, whose interpretations, he says, are all wrong. Fire, after all, is a foreign language. It’s as if the original fire investigator, interpreting Mandarin Chinese, says “Szi means ‘death,’ and that’s why he’s guilty,” and then another interpreter comes along and says, “Wait. Don’t you know szi also means ‘four’? It’s completely innocuous. He’s not guilty at all.” But even though the evidence is found in time, and backed by other, prominent fire investigators, and presented to the powers-that-be in Texas, including Gov. Perry, Willingham is still executed by lethal injection in Feb. 2004. Our story is back to being a tragedy, but now it’s a double tragedy. The girls are killed by fire; the father is killed by us. Cameron Todd Willingham, Justice Scalia. Cameron Todd Willingham. No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day. Last night P and I and Courtney and Eva checked out the town hall madness at Meany Hall on the UW campus. U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott hosted. He was a gracious host. Some in the audience were not gracious guests. It didn’t get as bad as health care town halls I’ve seen on television. The naysayers, who mostly seemed of the Lyndon Larouche camp, simply tried to disrupt things. They shouted comments while Rep. McDermott was mid-sentence. Initially the rest of the folks in the audience turned toward the noise, curiously, but when it continued, when the guy in question wouldn’t shut up, they shouted him down. There was an adamance to this that was refreshing. The best shoutdown, a quiet but poignant shoutdown, came from Rep. McDermott himself. He was talking about a particular universal health-care-coverage proposal and then asked rhetorically, “Where did this idea come from?” One of the rabble-rousers yelled “Communists!” McDermott cocked his head, put his hands on the lectern, and enunciated distinctly: “Richard M. Nixon.” Laughter and applause. There was a lot of applause last night. There were a lot of questions. A lot of people’s concerns were my concerns. This is Seattle so most in the audience wanted the public option if not a complete single-payer system like in Canada. They’re worried they won’t get the public option. They’re worried the Dems will fold. They asked: “What can we do to make sure the public option, or public choice, gets through?” McDermott mentioned showing up, as we were showing up, and letting our voices be heard. He said show up at the rally at Westlake Thursday evening. He said write your Senators. Let them know how you feel. For Washington-ites, you can e-mail Sen. Patty Murray here. You can e-mail Sen. Maria Cantwell here. It’s Google time people. It’s easy to contact these folks. Here are some other resources. T.R. Reid, a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, and the author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, hosted a Frontline special last summer, that you can watch here, at the end of this Q&A. (It’s worth it.) Reid also has a good Op-Ed in The Washington Post: “Five Myths About Health Care Around the World." It continues to startle me how xenophobic this country remains, and how much our xenophobia is used against our better interests. “Communist!” when someone isn’t, “Terrorist!” when they’re not. “Kenyan!” when someone’s American, “Socialist Medicine!” when it’s generally not. And even if it is a socialist system, like Great Britain’s, well, it’s socialist in the sense that our education system and police force and firefighters are socialist. What do these things have in common? They’re essential to our well-being. Isnt health care? Other countries’ health care systems are always used to stifle debate in this country—it’s gotten to the point where merely mentioning it is disparaging it—but who’s happy with our system? We’re locked into our employer’s heath care package (and thus fear getting fired or changing jobs), we waste everyone’s time with “gatekeepers” (and thus have to go through general practitioners to get to specialists), and 20-22% of our heard-earned money goes toward administrative costs rather than, you know, actual medical costs. This compares with 6-10% in other countries. And the nutjobs say we have the best health care in the world? We may spend the most, in terms of GDP, but the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. system 37th. Time to get better. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to write my Senators. Worst Wedding Day Ever I guess I wasn't paying enough attention watching the second episode of "Mad Men," but it took a while for the other shoe to drop. Maybe I was distracted by all the tension involved in the wedding plans. Last season Roger Sterling left his wife for a young thing and now his daughter didn't want the golddigger at her wedding—why should she?—and Roger was drinking too much, and the wife, the original wife, was calm and coy, and so the date of the wedding skipped by me. It wasn't until the episode was two-thirds over that the tumblers fell into place. Odd how the mind works. Appropos of what exactly I suddenly woke up. "Wait a minute," I asked Patricia. "They didn't say the wedding was November 23rd, did they?" "November 23rd. 1963." "The day after Kennedy was assassinated." "They've just given this poor girl one of the saddest days in American history to have her wedding." That's part of the sad fun of "Mad Men." Waiting for history to catch up with its characters. To overwhelm them. ADDENDUM: I wrote the above without realizing that history, or time, had caught up with the final Kennedy brother. Godspeed, Senator. The Reverse Debate Idea The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' —from Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine article, "Without a Doubt," October 2004 So it goes. So it continues. We thought this was a Bush administration thing but it's obviously a Republican thing. One can see their entire strategy in the above quote. They lie about one thing until it gains traction in the mainstream media, until it becomes a talking point, until it begins to get refuted by responsible sources ... and then they'll lie about something else. The bigger the lie the better. Repeat the lie often enough and people believe it. The point isn't to debate, it's to distract. It's to misread and mislead. It's to accuse the oppositon of being like yourself so the opposition has trouble responding. Democrats are the ones who are fascistic, bullying, and fomenting a civil war? Maybe Dems should accuse Republicans of being vacillating and overly compromising. Maybe that way we can at least have a reverse debate. Truly, there's such awfulness here, such mind-numbing goo, that anyone with a heart can't help but turn away in disgust. Which is also part of the gameplan. The more I think about it, the more I like the reverse debate idea. The point of accusing someone of what they aren't is to make them more of what they are. To a fault. So you accuse compromising Dems of being fascists and Nazis, which makes them even more compromising. So you accuse uncompromising Republicans of being wishy-washy and vacillating—of being hippies, say—in order to make them even more uncompromising. It won't help us get anything done but at least it'll stick them through the looking glass for a while. For a change. Gun Nuts and the People Who Support Them Frank Rich's Sunday column in The New York Times is called "The Guns of August," which was the title of Barbara Tuchman's 1962 account of the beginnings of World War I, which was a favorite book of Pres. Kennedy. He gave copies to the prime minister of England and the U.S. ambassador to France, among others. Rich's column is less about the long and intricate European windings to war than about the same homegrown violence—the culture of it and the cultivation of it—that led to Pres. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. It's about American gun nuts and the people who support them. Not just the bigmouths of Fox News and far-right radio but elected officials such as Sen. Tom Coburn (R, Ok.), who, when asked if he was troubled by the rising threats against the U.S. government, blamed the government: “Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.” Rich reminds us that Coburn did the same thing in supporting the Barr amendment to the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995. He said people in this country were worried more about their own government than terrorism: Terrorism in this country obviously poses a serious threat to us as a free society. It generates fear. But there is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own Government. We should not further that fear. We should not do anything to promote further lack of confidence in our own Government. Public officials must recognize that our citizens fear not only terrorism, but our Government as well. Then there was Rep. Phil Gingrey (R, Ga.) who told Chris Matthews on MSNBC that he saw no reason to discourage citizens from carrying unconcealed weapson to public debates about health insurance. In fact, he seemed to encourage it. He seemed to revel in it. Rich is worried and so am I. He's worried that Pres. Obama is compromising too much with forces that don't compromise and so am I. But mostly he's worried about the rise in the rhetoric of violence and so am I. I wish I could say something insightful about all of this but I've got nothing. Thoughts are welcome. Quote of the Day "Conservatives love to pretend they're the disability community's knights in shining armor when it suits their political purposes. In years past, they tried to co-opt us in the abortion debate by making both subtle and explicit claims that every gimp would be snuffed out in the womb were it not for them staying the liberals' murderous hand. The right has now adapted the tactic to the health care debate, portraying themselves as the defenders and protectors of us meek and vulnerable cripples who dwell in the shadow of a tyrannical and cruel government. "I won't win any Pulitzers for this sentence, but they can take their false magnanimity and go fuck themselves... "The only reason I'm able to live a life with any measure of dignity or independence is because of a government health plan. ... We need health care reform. I need it. Trig needs it. Kids and adults with every kind of disability need it. "What we don't need is a bunch of screeching ideologues attempting to cynically exploit us for purposes of maintaining the status quo." —Mark Siegel, the 19th Floor. Read the whole post and pass it along. The Most Banned Movies Ever! ... Maybe A few days ago The Independent ran a short piece on the most controversial films in...history? Or just 10 banned films? If the former then “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) is the most banned film ever (11 countries), while Singapore, no surprise, is the banningest of all countries, preventing seven of the ten listed films from arriving on their chewing-gum-less shores. A bigger surprise, at least for me, is the second banningest country, Ireland, which refused “Chainsaw,” A Clockwork Orange,” “Life of Brian,” “Freaks” and “The Evil Dead.” And who’s Italy to ban “Last Tango in Paris”? Have they seen some of their own films? I’m also curious what constitutes a ban. Not every film is distributed abroad, so... Do distributors have to begin inquiries before the ban is announced, or are some governments more proactive in their banning? Refusing before it’s offered, as it were. This list includes two best picture nominees (“A Clockwork Orange” and “The Exorcist”) and one best picture winner (“All Quiet on the Western Front”), and it was this last one that intrigued. Which country, you might ask, banned the peace-loving, war-hating “All Quiet”? Why Germany, of course, after the Nazis took power. In fact, according to The Independent... During its brief run in German cinemas in 1930, the Nazis disrupted the viewings by releasing rats in the theatres. Another reminder of what democracy isn’t. Disruption—whether with actual rats or with the kind Rachel Maddow talks about here. Krugman: "Government involvement is the only reason our [health care] system works at all" Please don't buy the various anti-government scare tactics. It's b.s. You probably know it's b.s. Listen to Krugman: Private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion... Most Americans do have health insurance, and are reasonably satisfied with it. How is that possible, when insurance markets work so badly? The answer is government intervention. Most obviously, the government directly provides insurance via Medicare and other programs. Before Medicare was established, more than 40 percent of elderly Americans lacked any kind of health insurance... The vast majority [of Americans under 65], however, don’t buy private insurance directly: they get it through their employers. There’s a big tax advantage to doing it that way, since employer contributions to health care aren’t considered taxable income. But to get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees. And it’s thanks to these rules that employment-based insurance more or less works... So here’s the bottom line: if you currently have decent health insurance, thank the government... Wearing Wool Caps in 100 Degree Weather It hit 100 degrees in Seattle today. It’s been over 90 degrees for, what, four days in a row now? Five? That’s a lot of heat for a city without much air-conditioning, and where people tend to complain when it hits 78. Seattleites like their weather, like their politicians, temperate. Despite this, biking through downtown this morning, I saw a few people wearing wool caps. Yesterday, when it was already around 75 degrees, I saw a guy wearing a thick coat, a stocking cap, and a determined look of crazy. You avert eyes at that point. You just keep biking. I thought of these folks when I visited Oliver Willis’ site and watched the clip of Orly Taitz on “The Colbert Report.” Stephen was having fun with this lawyer/dentist/realtor and professional debunker of Pres. Obama’s birthplace, but the interview ceased to be funny after a while. The woman is under the mistaken impression that because Pres. Obama’s father was not a citizen of this country, then Pres. Obama cannot be a citizen of this country, and therefore he cannot be president. If her first fact is so wrong, so grossly wrong, why is anyone giving her a forum? But then how does Michelle Malkin get a forum on the "Today" show? How about these folks on “The O’Reilly Factor,” slamming Amsterdam with words meant to evoke ‘60s liberalism (naïve, social tolerance, free love), while ultimately revealing how clueless they are? More and more of the prominent voices on television, on the Internet, and particularly within the Republican party, remind me of folks wearing wool caps in 100 degree weather. I avert my eyes. P.S. Visit Amsterdam. Overreacting with Color Coding: 1975 "The biggest bomb at the Pentagon recently was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Christmas party for the department's 22,000 employees. The recently appointed secretary decided to introduce himself by throwing a handshaking party. Expecting one of the largest reception lines in history, Rumsfeld had aides devise a three-party, color-coded pass system to prevent congestion and delay. ... There were few takers. Rumsfeld set aside three hours and was prepared to stay longer. Only 200-odd employees showed up, however, and by 4:00 a bewildered Rumsfeld was standing virtually alone with his deputy defense secretary, William Clements." —New Times magazine, January 23, 1976 What I Would've Said If I'd Been with the Cambridge Police Dept. and Seen Henry Louis Gates Breaking Into His Own Home "I really liked 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.' Good book. Needs an update, though, don't you think? Hey, what are the chances of my nephews getting into Harvard? Ha ha. Just kidding. Well, duty calls. Sorry about the door, sir. You should have somebody look at that." Tax the Rich Already Hed and subhed in today's New York Times: Obama Pushing, But Early Vote on Health Fades Tax on rich is at issue My question: At issue? For whom? Prescient Quote of the Day "She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does." —Todd S. Purdam in his August 2009 Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin, "It Came from Wasilla," published before her July 3rd resignation announcement. Rich, Noonan, Palin Many greeted Sarah Palin’s sudden, July 3rd resignation from the Alaska governorship with a Nelsonesque “HAW-HAW” but Frank Rich, last Sunday, argues both why she’s dangerous (“The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. ... The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.”), and why she might be back (“No one thought Richard Nixon—a far less personable commodity than Palin—would come back either after his sour-grapes ‘last press conference’ of 1962.”) For me, I doubt 1012 could be 1968, just as I doubt BHO could be LBJ. But the whole column is worth reading. Then I found myself actually agreeing with Peggy Noonan (that Reagan shoe fetishist) in her July 11th column on same. She’s of the good-riddance school, and says what I’ve often said: It’s time for the Republican party to get smarter, not dumber. Then she adds this: Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate. All of us, certainly, have fears of a prolonged American crash and an American city getting hit. But secession? Is that a concern serious enough for the pages of the WSJ? It's certainly more politics of resentment. It also reminds me of a child throwing away a toy that he himself has broken. He's not even waiting around to see if the nearest grownup can fix it. Minnesota Corrects a Low-Rent Mistake Garrison Keillor is known for his supercalm demeanor on “Prairie Home Companion,” and he used it to good, skewering effect in this 2002 article on Norm Coleman, the former Democratic St. Paul mayor who switched sides, went deep for the Bush camp, and was rewarded, in the absence of Paul Wellstone, with a U.S. Senate seat in 2002. Now, finally, thankfully, about-freakinly-time, we've taken it away from him. Godspeed, Al Franken. Good riddance, Norm Coleman. Good work, Mr. Keillor. Empty victory for a hollow man How Norm Coleman sold his soul for a Senate seat By Garrison Keillor Nov. 7, 2002 | Norm Coleman won Minnesota because he was well-financed and well-packaged. Norm is a slick retail campaigner, the grabbiest and touchingest and feelingest politician in Minnesota history, a hugger and baby-kisser, and he's a genuine boomer candidate who reinvents himself at will. The guy is a Brooklyn boy who became a left-wing student radical at Hofstra University with hair down to his shoulders, organized antiwar marches, said vile things about Richard Nixon, etc. Then he came west, went to law school, changed his look, went to work in the attorney general's office in Minnesota. Was elected mayor of St. Paul as a moderate Democrat, then swung comfortably over to the Republican side. There was no dazzling light on the road to Damascus, no soul-searching: Norm switched parties as you'd change sport coats. Norm is glib. I once organized a dinner at the Minnesota Club to celebrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday and Norm came, at the suggestion of his office, and spoke, at some length and with quite some fervor, about how much Fitzgerald means to all of us in St. Paul, and it was soon clear to anyone who has ever graded 9th grade book reports that the mayor had never read Fitzgerald. Nonetheless, he spoke at great length, with great feeling. Last month, when Bush came to sprinkle water on his campaign, Norm introduced him by saying, “God bless America is a prayer, and I believe that this man is God's answer to that prayer.” Same guy. (Jesse Ventura, of course, wouldn't have been caught dead blathering at an F. Scott Fitzgerald dinner about how proud we are of the Great Whoever-He-Was and his vision and his dream blah-blah-blah, and that was the refreshing thing about Jesse. The sort of unctuous hooey that comes naturally and easily to Norm Coleman Jesse would be ashamed to utter in public. Give the man his due. He spoke English. He didn't open his mouth and emit soap bubbles. He was no suck up. He had more dignity than to kiss the president's shoe.) Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago. So this false knight made his way as an all-purpose feel-good candidate, standing for vaguely Republican values, supporting the president. He was 9 points down to Wellstone when the senator's plane went down. But the tide was swinging toward the president in those last 10 days. And Norm rode the tide. Mondale took a little while to get a campaign going. And Norm finessed Wellstone's death beautifully. The Democrats stood up in raw grief and yelled and shook their fists and offended people. Norm played his violin. He sorrowed well in public, he was expertly nuanced. The mostly negative campaign he ran against Wellstone was forgotten immediately. He backpedalled in the one debate, cruised home a victor. It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm. ...And he's only 54 “In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, [John] Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.” —Jeffrey Toobin in his New Yorker article “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” Worth reading in its entirety. I was a little perplexed that we got this now, rather than at the end of June when the decisions in the more controversial Supreme Court cases are announced. And the end of the piece is a little weak, particularly for Toobin, who's such a good writer. But worth reading, and considering, as the more vocal part of the conservative nation picks-a-little, talks-a-little about Pres. Obama's recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee. Is this another example of a journalist trying too hard to be objective? Or is it merely poor writing? Read the entire piece (it’s short) by Janie Lorber, under the headline “Cheney’s Model Republican: More Limbaugh, Less Powell,” in The New York Times. Two observations, both by Lorber, stick out. Here’s the first: The [Powell] endorsement, in a carefully timed and deliberate statement after Mr. McCain chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate in a move to fire up the party’s conservative base, helped solidify Mr. Obama’s campaign. Yes, it did help Obama’s campaign but…doesn’t this graf make it sound that the Powelll endorsement came shortly after the Palin selection? But McCain chose Palin on August 30, while Powell endorsed Obama on October 19. That’s more than a month and a half difference. And a month and a half thick with campaigning. How was that “carefully timed and deliberate”? And deliberate? What does that mean anyway? As opposed to carelessly timed and accidental? Here’s the second: Mr. Cheney has been a particularly fierce critic of the Obama administration and a defiant defender against critics of the Bush administration, including President Obama. While his remarks have been striking, they are not unusually outspoken by comparison, for example, to former Vice President Al Gore’s condemnations of the Bush administration when it held office. True. But Al Gore didn’t criticize the Bush administration immediately, the way that Cheney is doing with the Obama administration. After the 2000 election, Gore disappeared, remember? Then returned with a beard that everyone made fun of. Then 9/11 happened and no one criticized the Bush administration. Gore really didn’t criticize Pres. Bush, et al., until the Bush adminstration began gearing up for war with Iraq in the fall of ’02. And, yes, he was one of the first to do so. To his credit. I guess all I’m saying, with both points, is: chronology matters. Quote of the Day In case the moral argument against torture isn't swaying you: Imagine if an American operative out of uniform were captured by the Iranians tomorrow. Imagine he were put into a coffin for hours with no light and barely enough air to breathe, imagine if he were then removed and smashed against a plywood wall by a towel tied around his neck thirty times, imagine if he were then kept awake for eleven days in a row, then kept in a cell frozen to hypothermia levels, and then waterboarded multiple times, after which he confessed to being a spy trying to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. Would you believe that intelligence? Would Krauthammer? Would you believe both that he wasn't tortured and that the information he gave was reliable? —Andrew Sullivan, taking on Charles Krauthammer, here. The Journalistic Mission of Bill O'Reilly You don’t need to read any more. Quick: What’s goal no. 1 for any journalist? To get the story first. To scoop the other bastards. What’s goal no. 2? To be as objective as possible in doing this. Journalistic mission? These villains? Does he know he's sticking his foot in, if not his own mouth, then his producer's mouth? And what villains? Murderers? Torturers? Bernie Madoff types? Not exactly. The ambushees include Mike Hoyt, executive editor of The Columbia Journalism Review, who assigned a story on right-wing media to a writer with a supposed liberal background. There’s Hendrik Hertzberg, my man from The New Yorker, who, the Times writes, “was confronted for what Mr. O’Reilly described as taking a ‘Factor’ segment out of context.” (No word from the Times on how Mr. Hertzberg described the incident.) There’s also Amanda Terkel of thinkprogress.org, who organized a protest against O’Reilly. These are the villains. People who disagreed with Bill O’Reilly. From what I remember of those “60 Minutes” segments, Wallace and his producers would use the ambush technique, when they used it, to confront either legitimately powerful people and/or crooks. It was a technique unmotivated by politics or personal vendettas. Michael Moore, when he uses the ambush technique (which is often), uses it to confront legitimately powerful people: U.S. congressmen and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. His ambushes are, more often than not, motivated by politics but unmotivated by personal vendettas. Both are examples of the journalistic mission, the journalistic mission, to speak truth to power. Most of O’Reilly’s targets are less powerful than he is. Thus these ambushes simply seem another bullying aspect of his show. It’s less speaking truth to power than power picking on (often) truth. Journalistic mission? These villains? Presidential Quote of the Day “We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them.” — Pres. Barack Obama in a speech before the Turkish parliament. I read this in The New York Times (newspaper version) while sitting at the Kerry Park overlook on this sunny Seattle day, eating my lunch and listening to Teddy Thompson's “In My Arms.” I was pretty happy for that half hour. Tomorrow it's supposed to rain. Tomorrow things may get worse economically. But for now it's sunny and more people realize we're at least heading in the direction we should. Amen. ED HENRY, CNN (asking a follow-up question): So on AIG, why did you wait — why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? PRESIDENT OBAMA: I -- ED HENRY: It seems like the action is coming out of New York in the attorney general's office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, look, we're outraged. Why did it take so long? PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak. There are also good takes on the press conference from Andrew Sullivan (love his line about the White House press corps' job being “polite assholes”) and Eric Alterman's Daily Beast piece, which posits the short-term thinking of those polite assholes versus Pres. Obama's long-term thinking. Toles and Jelly Seriously, is there a better editorial cartoonist in the country? Is there a better editorial anything in the country? Most cartoonists are inevitably reductive but Toles merely simplifies a point to its essence. The issue seems larger in his hands rather than smaller. God, I Love This Guy “Going forward,“ Mr. Obama said, ”each and every time we’ve got an initiative, I’m going to go to both Democrats and Republicans and I’m going to say, ‘Here’s my best argument for why we need to do this. I want to listen to your counterarguments. If you’ve got better ideas, present them. We will incorporate them into any plans that we make, and we are willing to compromise on certain issues that are important to one side or the other in order to get stuff done.’” ... When asked about the sharp drop in the stock markets after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced an expanded bank bailout plan last week, Mr. Obama replied: “I am not planning based on a one-day market reaction. In fact, you can argue that a lot of the problems we’re in have to do with everybody planning based on one-day market reactions, or three-month market reactions, and as a consequence nobody was taking the long view. “My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’” — from Bob Herbert's column, “Obama Riding the Wave,” from The New York Times, February 17, 2009 We Are Not a Serious Nation I checked out YouTube for the first time in a long time this morning, saw the shit that passed for shit there, and thought of Gore Vidal: We are not a serious nation. I read a friend’s account of how even at a pizza gathering half the kids were texting other kids rather than talking with the kids present, and thought: We are not a serious nation. I read Paul Krugman’s column in this morning’s New York Times, about how serious our economic crisis is, and how lame the response in Congress has been, particularly from the Republicans in Congress, and thought: We are not a serious nation. I look at this site and think the same. You do what you do. I try to write about movies seriously but to what end? We’ll see where this goes. Both versions of “this.” In November I wrote a spirited defense of how “The Daily Show” would fare in an Obama administration but I’m having my doubts now. It’s the economic crisis more than Pres. Obama. Every joke about it, from a guy making millions, and I think: “That shit ain’t funny.” Comedy is, what, tragedy plus time? They’re ignoring time. We’re just wasting it. I apologize for this post but a blog is about what’s on your mind and this is what’s on my mind. Probably yours, too. The economy shed 598,000 jobs in January. I knew of three of them. Ponzi and the Happy Days (Are Here Again) Gang My friend Dave McLean, currently living in Presov, Slovakia, alerted me to this piece by Dan Roberts in the Guardian, which, with the aid of some cheery graphics, explains, in layman's terms (or as layman as he can get), the extent of the less-than-cheery global financial crisis, and why the infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government isn't likely to stabilize the beast. Just how much is the world in debt? Or overvalued? Some stats: from small to large numbers: - $845 billion: The amount of gold reserves in central banks — held as a buffer against financial instability. - $3.9 trillion: All global notes and coins in circulation, plus reserves, in Oct. 2008. - $39 trillion: The assets (or loans due to be paid back) at the world's big financial banks. - $62 trillion: The peak amount of credit derivatives, which, from my limited understanding, is a financial instrument whose value is derived from the value of something else, such as an asset or index. All part of the shadow banking system, which I also don't understand. - $290 trillion: Peak of the total asset value of all developed economies. Roberts says that it resembles, if anything, a Ponzi scheme. I get it...but still don't understand it. Meanwhile Wall Street bankers gave themselves $20 billion in bonuses for 2008. That, unfortunately, I understand. Barack Obama Quote of the Day “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.” —How Pres. Obama autographed a photo for U.S. Rep. (and civil rights legend) John Lewis after the inauguration on Jan. 20th. From David Remnick's must-read “Talk of the Town” piece in this week's New Yorker. Paul Krugman has a great piece today on — basically — arguments against Republican arguments against Obama's stimulus package. Among them: - First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years. It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.) - Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money. Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens. - Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration’s chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.It’s true that the normal response to recessions is interest-rate cuts from the Fed, not government spending. And that might be the best option right now, if it were available. But it isn’t, because we’re in a situation not seen since the 1930s: the interest rates the Fed controls are already effectively at zero. That’s why we’re talking about large-scale fiscal stimulus: it’s what’s left in the policy arsenal now that the Fed has shot its bolt. Rome is burning and the Republicans are fiddling, but it's nice to have a Nobel-Prize-winning economist on your side. “There's Work to be Done” Here's a great site, via Andrew Sullivan, that collects the newspaper headlines of the day. Yesterday was the day for it. Interesting to see what different editors chose to highlight or headline. There's almost poetry in it: “A New Era,” “A New Day,” “A New Beginning,” “A New Start,” “A New Hope.” “Hope Over Fear,” “Hope Meets History,” “History Made Today,” “History in the Making,” “Remaking America.” “Hello, Mr. President,” “Mr. President,” “The President,” “The 44th President,” “The 44th and the First.” “President Obama,” “Obama Ovation,” “Obama's Promise,” “Let's GObama,” “The Obama Era Begins.” “Change,” “Change Has Come,” “The Time Has Come.” “Face of a Nation”? “Yes, He Is.” “Mark This Day”: “We Are Ready to Lead.” There was also this: It struck a chord and it took me a minute before I remembered why. It's similar to a line in “TimeQuake,” Kurt Vonnegut's last novel. I reviewed it for The Seattle Times in 1997. Back then I wrote: Just as Billy Pilgrim could get unstuck in time (in “Slaughterhouse-Five”) and gravity could become variable (“Slapstick”), so Kilgore Trout and the world discover in “Timequake” that the universe isn't always expanding. In the year 2001, the universe has second thoughts and contracts, or hiccups, sending everyone back to what they were doing 10 years before. It's a perverse form of eternal recurrence. Everyone has knowledge of the next decade but is unable to alter it in any fashion. They essentially become prisoners within their own bodies. Thus, when the universe gets going again, people are unprepared — asleep at the wheel, as it were — and disasters occur. They don't realize that once again they have to drive their cars or fly their airplanes or concentrate on walking straight. So cars crash, planes plummet, people wobble and fall over. Trout, one of the first to realize what has happened, tries to wake people out of their stupor by shouting, “You have free will!” When this doesn't work, he tells them, “You were sick, but now you are well, and there's work to do!” It's January 21, 2009. You were sick. But now you are well. And there's work to be done. Sam Cooke Quote of the Day There’ve been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long Now I think I’m able To carry on It’s been a long A long time coming But I know Change gonna come Oh, yes it will ADDENDUM: The New York Times editorial on the inaugural speech. Since last February I’ve seen bumper stickers, and sometimes signs and t-shirts, celebrating my upcoming birthday. “1-20-09,” they read. Sometimes they added: “End of an Error,” which I thought a bit much. The first 45 years of my life have had their share of bumps but I wouldn’t say they were an “error.” That’s a tough decision from the official scorer. OK, jokes aside, you and I and the world have been waiting for this day. It’s not just because the most incompetent guy is leaving. It’s because the most competent guy is arriving. For the past year I’ve littered this blog with the overall thought that the wrong guy — the guy obsessed with numbers rather than people, with getting ahead rather than helping others get ahead — is invariably put in charge. That’s certainly the lesson of “The Wire.” It’s even the lesson of that recent article on Tim Palen and marketing. We’ve become a nation that sells the insubstantial so well we’ve convinced ourselves it’s substantial. Maybe that’s the error we’re tryng to end. It’s been a helluva ride. I first heard him speak at the annual Minnesota Democratic-Farm-Labor dinner in downtown Minneapolis in the spring of '06 and he cut through my cynicism right away. “Jesus,” I thought, “this guy could do it.” He was my guy from the get-go, even as the press 1) dismissed him too soon, then 2) annointed him too soon, then 3) invariably missed the point. But I still had my doubts. Sure, the Democrats might vote for him. But the nation? When idiocies flared up, when Palen and that circus arrived, when community organizers were dismissed out-of-hand as somehow undeserving, he stayed calmer than I did. I went to him to get calm. He gave us this, and this, and this. We gave him this. I’m 46 today and the most competent guy is arriving. It's the best birthday present I ever got. Now let’s get this party started. Quote of the Effin' Year "A gangly Illinois politician whom 'the base' would today label a RINO—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many 'some' is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. "The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing." — Hendrik Hertzberg, "Talk of the Town," New Yorker, Jan. 19, 2009 The Tyranny of the Short Term The best article I've read on the financial crisis was the second-most e-mailed article on the NY Times Web site yesterday. Today's it's the most e-mailed. It's by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn and it should be read by everybody. It explains the crisis in ways that even laypeople, of which I am hopelessly one, can understand. Some highlights: Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest... Over the last 20 years American financial institutions have taken on more and more risk, with the blessing of regulators, with hardly a word from the rating agencies, which, incidentally, are paid by the issuers of the bonds they rate... These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it... The instinct to avoid short-term political heat is part of the problem; anything the S.E.C. does to roil the markets, or reduce the share price of any given company, also roils the careers of the people who run the S.E.C. Thus it seldom penalizes serious corporate and management malfeasance — out of some misguided notion that to do so would cause stock prices to fall, shareholders to suffer and confidence to be undermined. Preserving confidence, even when that confidence is false, has been near the top of the S.E.C.’s agenda... Read the whole thing. You get a sense that the people who are running our world are not the people who should be running our world. "The tyranny of the short term" is a phrase that could be used to describe almost every aspect of American life. Worse: The things we did to wind up in this hole are the very things we're now doing to get us out of this hole. We're relying on the same people. We're relying on the same institutions. We're trying to preserve confidence even when the confidence is false. Read the whole thing. Seriously, Did That Guy Get Anything Right? In our annual Christmas letter (I know), which went out yesterday (apologies), I wrote the following: "We gave up trying to sell Patricia’s condo in May but once we did it rented like that to a very nice woman — one of 30 people who desperately wanted it. Apparently it’s a renting market. As opposed to an ownership society. Seriously, did that guy get anything right?" Even as I wrote it I began to wonder about that old Bush line, another catchphrase gone horribly awry, and why no one had done an in-depth piece on specifics of the Bush administration's culpability in our current housing — and thus economic — crisis. The New York Times to the rescue. In today's paper, Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton have a great in-depth piece on the political push for an ownership society that led to our current renting market. It's easy to see in hindsight. Basically the administration was pushing for more ownership and less regulation at a time when housing prices were soaring and salaries were flatlining. How to fit more people into more expensive homes at a time when they had less real money and fewer people were watching? Yeah: So Mr. Bush had to, in his words, “use the mighty muscle of the federal government” to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending. Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to spend up to $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs. And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for federally insured mortgages with no money down. Republican Congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as Mr. West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view. This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight,” said L. William Seidman, who advised Republican presidents and led the savings and loan bailout in the 1990s. “To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.” But Mr. Bush populated the financial system’s alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more. It gets worse. One of the top 10 donors to the Republican party in 2004, Roland Arnall, founded Ameriquest, one of the largest lenders in the subprime market. In 2005, White House aides discussed Ameriquest's troubles — including setting aside $325 million to settle with 30 states which claimed Ameriquest preyed on borrowers — but not in terms of the economy. They discussed Ameriquest because Pres. Bush had just nominated Arnall to be ambassador to the Netherlands. Gov. Blagojovitch looks like a piker in comparison. Read the entire article. It's worth it. Conservatives accuse liberals of being naive about the poor — that the poor are poor because they deserve it — and so helping them is pointless. But conservatives are just as naive, if not moreso, about the rich. They think the rich are rich because they deserve it — because they're talented, not because they're, say, predatory or ruthless — and so regulating them is unnecessary and just gets in the way of their talent. My French teacher, Nathalie, spent a week in Sayulita, Mexico last month and took this picture of the Mexican version of Shepard Fairey's famous series of Obama posters. Cambio. Change. The people there told her about the spontaneous celebrations that erupted the night Obama got elected. As here in Seattle. As all over the world. I'm sure there are similar posters from different countries and in different languages. If you know of any, or, better, if you have images of any, please send them my way. Give the People What They Want One of the top 12 videos on YouTube this morning is a thing called "Betty Cakes," in which, in the static "cover" image (is there a term for this?), you see an attractive woman's limbs and some cupcakes where breasts might be. Its three-star rating implies a come-on that goes nowhere. The 11 remaining most-seen videos show the same thing: an Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at President Bush. All have five-star ratings. I've never seen such domination of the charts since the Beatles had all top 5 U.S. singles in April 1964. That said, a friend of mine mentioned yesterday that he was more impressed by Pres. Bush's handling of the shoe-throwing incident than anything he's done during his presidency. He ducks but keeps the journalist in his line of sight. Made my friend think he's had shoes thrown at him before. One conjecture was Laura. Another was Condi. Feel free to make your guess below. Overall, footage of the shoe-throwing incident occupies 62 of the top 100 videos on YouTube. The Obama Non-Stories Idiocies of the week. First this one. Here's AP's headline: “Many Insisting That Obama Is Not Black.” Suggested headline: “A Few Idiots Insisting Obama Is Not Black.” It's beyond annoying, beside-the-point, and could only be spouted by people who hadn't read “Dreams From My Father,” or who hadn't thought one inch into our cross-country racial history. Serously: STFU. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters has smartly raised the other: the non-story of Obama's non-involvement in the Gov. Blagojevich scandal, which I've been bitching about it all week, particularly in connection with the New York Times coverage. Liberal press, my ass. Boehlert flags (and emphasizes within) this NYT graf: Although prosecutors said Mr. Obama was not implicated in their investigation, the accusations of naked greed and brazen influence-peddling have raised questions from some about the political culture in which the President-elect began his career. At least the Times used “some” here, rather than the AP's “many,” but even their “some” still turned out to be “some Republican operatives.” Meanwhile, what's Obama been up to? Nominating Nobel laureates to his cabinet. At least someone's taking their job seriously. “The Most Vicious Smear Campaign Ever Mounted Against an American Politician” Since the election, there's been a lot of talk about how the media favored Obama during the campaign. Hell, there's was noise about this before the election. Such talk seems to imply that all coverage should be equal no matter who the candidates are or what they say, but someday, when I have time, I might drill down to see if anything was unnecessarily positive or negative about either candidate, or if it was merely a matter of, say, Albert Pujols generating more positive media coverage than Willie Bloomquist because he’s the better ballplayer. To what extent, in other words, can you remove a candidate’s performance from the equation? Baseball’s a little different, of course, in that you have quantifiable statistics rather than qualitative remarks or actions. At the same time, as I often say, objectivity is not stupidity. Journalists can’t, or shouldn’t, pretend things aren’t as they are. Put another way: I had my own problems, from a pro-Obama point-of-view, with the media’s coverage of this campaign. Here, here and here. And here and here. And here. Besides, Michael Massing reminds us, in his excellent article in The New York Times Review of Books, “Obama: In the Divided Heartland,“ that a whole lotta media wasn't exactly backing Obama: For months, [Rush] Limbaugh had been hammering away at [Obama]—for abetting terrorists, hating Israel, being corrupt, supporting socialism. Today, oddly, he was faulting him for his lack of passion. ”He's like a Stepford husband,“ he said. ”He's cold enough to consort with terrorists. Cold enough to dismiss small-town America as 'bitter clingers.' Cold enough to take our guns away. Cold enough to take our money away.“ Such charges were standard fare on the toxic, overheated combine of right-wing talk radio, cable television programs, and Internet blogs that has so multiplied and festered in recent years. Americans who do not regularly tune in have little idea how nasty and venomous a campaign was waged there against Barack Obama. Day after day, night after night, a steady stream of poison was directed at him not only by Limbaugh but also by Sean Hannity, on his daily radio show and nightly Fox broadcast; by Bill O'Reilly, on Fox, the radio, and the Internet; by Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and a legion of other ranting radio hosts; by Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, Monica Crowley, and their fellow pike-bearers in the blogosphere; by columnists like Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, Michael Barone (”The Coming Obama Thugocracy“), and Ann Coulter (”Obama's Dimestore 'Mein Kampf'"), all joining together to produce firestorms of manufactured rage about Obama's purported ties to Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad, and Karl Marx... These outbursts were supplemented by a noxious barrage of e-mails, mass mailings, and robocalls claiming that Obama was pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, unpatriotic, a Muslim, a madrasa graduate, a black racist—even the Antichrist. Amounting to a six-month-long exercise in Swift Boating, these attacks, taken together, constituted perhaps the most vicious smear campaign ever mounted against an American politician. That's the question I'd ask anyone pushing one of these studies. Is talk radio included? And if not, why not? Didion, Clad in her Armor Last night, the cover of the latest New York Review of Books — VICTORY!, with a cartoon of Obama in the center, and promises of articles by Joan Didion, Darryl Pinckney and others — made me happy for a moment... until I began reading Didion’s article. Then I went: Oh yeah. This. Didion was an established writer by the time I began to read serious literature, well-known for her essays, and I enjoyed White Album and others in my twenties but began feeling disappointment in my thirties when I read Salvador. I thought: “Does she only have irony? Is that her sole tool?” After reading all of Norman Mailer’s messy attempts to be engaged with the world, Didion’s ironic distance felt dry and useless. In the Review she writes about how, in the Obama era, irony is supposedly out. Her essay proves otherwise. She casts an ironic eye less on Obama than on the support he engenders: Irony was now out. Naiveté, translated into “hope,” was now in. Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized. Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism. I couldn't count the number of snapshots I got e-mailed showing people's babies dressed in Obama gear. Was innocence ever prized in this campaign? Youth, yes, but innocence? As for the consumerism and snapshots, well, maybe she needs new friends. I received no snapshots of babies in Obama gear during this election season. My friends were too busy, among other things, campaigning for Obama. Being engaged. She goes on: I couldn't count the number of times I heard the words “transformational” or “inspirational,” or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade's war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. Must be tough to be one of Didion’s friends — to hear your words later mocked in her essays. Yet wasn’t Obama, certainly on the most basic of levels, transformational? Wasn’t he inspirational? It feels so small, her objections. She stands back, like in the famous David Levine caricature, holding her cigarette aloft, clad in her irony, while the world celebrates. It’s an easy stance because the world is full of fools and she quotes some of them. A commentator who said other nations now “want to be with us.” That’s how she ends her essay: Imagining in 2008 that all the world's people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq, but in the irony-free zone that the nation had chosen to become, this was not the preferred way of looking at it. Maybe this was not the preferred way of looking at it because “wanting to be with us” came from a commentator after someone else’s election, while “greeted with flowers” came from the highest officials in the Bush administration before their own invasion. The first, though clumsily phrased, was based upon evidence we could actually see: people around the world celebrating Obama’s victory. The second was based upon evidence the Bush administration didn’t let us see and which they wanted to see: Their policy dictating their evidence, rather than vice-versa. Maybe that’s part of why Didion's way is not the preferred way of looking at it. Irony isn’t out; it’s simply, as always, an easy way out. Torture to Watch “Dark Side” uses the incarceration and subsequent death of an innocent Afghani taxi driver while in U.S. military custody as the starting point to examine our entire post-9/11 system of torture and humiliation — specifically at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It’s a good overview of what will surely be one of the blackest marks of the many black marks on the Bush administration. For some, of course, the mark isn’t even black, but this doc should give pause to proponents of torture, as well as to regular viewers of “24” — where the efficacy of torture in extracting accurate information is regularly dramatized. Morris’ film is more focused and creepier. He trains his eye on Abu Ghraib, on what was done there, on the photos that were taken there, on what they say or don’t say and how they lie or don’t lie. He interviews, almost exclusively, the various “bad apples” who forced Iraqi prisoners to debase themselves. It’s beautifully shot, but claustrophobic and so sad about human nature. What people can convince themselves to do — particularly when ordered to do so. What they can convince themselves of afterwards. A few small apples were scapegoated for our unethical system, and their main defense is the Nuremberg defense: I didn’t know any bettre; I was just following orders. They also blame the photographs. They blame the evidence rather than the crime. It’s as if being scapegoated for the crime is keeping them from examining their role in the crime. I’m not sure what happens when we stare into those faces as they justify their actions, but it’s definitely uncomfortable. Would we have done the same in their situation? Are they us? The tawdriness of the enterprise is overwhelming. Maybe it says something that the talking head who is least culpable — who was not even a guard at Abu Ghraib, but who wound up in the background of some photographs and was prosecuted based on that evidence — blames himself the most. Maybe that’s something the rest of us could begin to emulate. DFMF Quote of the Day "So, Barry. What have you brought me from America?" I reached into my bag and pulled out one of the portable cassette players that I had bought for him [Abo] and Bernard. He turned it over in his hands with a thinly disguised look of disappointment. "This brand is not Sony, is it?" he said. Then, looking up, he quickly recovered himself and slapped me on the back. "That's okay, Barry. Thank you! Thank you." I nodded at him, trying not to get angry. He was standing beside Bernard and their resemblance was striking: the same height, the same slender frame, the same smooth, even features. Just shave off Abo's moustache, I thought to myself, and they could almost pass as twins. Except for...what? The look in Abo's eyes. That was it. Not just the telltale redness of some sort of high but something deeper, something that reminded me of young men back in Chicago. An element of guardedness, perhaps, and calculation. The look of someone who realizes early in life that he has been wronged. —Barack Obama, visiting Kendu Bay in Kenya in the 1980s, in Dreams From My Father, pg. 384 New Yorker Quote of the Day "At a Clinton event in Hampton, New Hampshire, a seventy-one-year-old woman named Ruth Keene told me that 'the Republicans would chew Obama up.' "They tried like hell. They called him an élitist, a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, an Arab, an appeaser, a danger to the republic, a threat to small children, a friend of terrorists, an enemy of Israel, a vote thief, a non-citizen, an anti-American, and a celebrity." —George Packer in his article "The New Liberalism: How the economic crisis can help Obama and redefine the Democrats." Quote of the Day “The Rush Limbaugh attacks and other attacks from the far right generate a lot of heat but not much light.” —Colin Powell, in “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama” by David Remnick, in the latest New Yorker David Grann on Why McCain Lost But as I read, I began to sense in John McCain (again) a tragic figure out of Shakespeare: The honorable man who once lost honorably (in 2000), yet who betrays that honor in order to try to win (in 2008). Worse, he betrays it with the same men who had dishonored him during his defeat. Worse, despite all he gives up, all he pretends to be in order to win, he loses. Badly. The dishonorable and divisive methods used to defeat him, are, when employed by him, part of the reason for his defeat. To get what he desires he becomes his enemy, but by becoming his enemy he is kept from getting what he desires. Somewhere in Grann's piece I not only began to feel sorry for McCain but identify with him. Most of us lose in life more than we win, and, despite being a U.S. senator, McCain lost big. Twice. He knew 2008 was his last chance and he gave up everything for it. In the process, because of all that he gave up and all that he pretended to be, long-time allies turned against him. William G. Milkien, former Republican governor of Michigan, who endorsed him in 2000 and again during the 2008 primaries, said in October, “McCain keeps asking, ‘Who is the real Barack Obama?,’ but what I want to know is who is the real John McCain?” Frank Schaeffer, son of the man credited with starting the religious right, who backed McCain in 2000, and for whose 2006 book “AWOL,” McCain offered a blurb, said the following, again in October, in an open letter to the candidate: “If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as ‘not one of us,’ I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence. ... You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.”I’ve written about what McCain said about John Lewis during the final debate, and Lord knows I was pissed off then, but my anger softened when I read this: Though McCain publicly called [Lewis’] accusations “shocking and beyond the pale,” a campaign aide told me that when McCain first heard Lewis’s remarks he sat in silence inside the campaign’s official bus.So I was feeling a little sympathetic for John McCain. Then Mark Salter opened his piehole. Salter still doesn’t understand any of the criticisms of McCain and the way that he and Steve Schmidt (his Iago) ran his campaign. He accuses the press of a double standard that favored Obama. He fobs it all off on the “liberal media.” He brings up the few positives McCain did (his poverty tour, his town-hall suggestion) and all he didn’t do (playing the Rev. Wright card), and thinks that’s enough to demonstrate his candidate’s positive side — not bothering to explain away the reactions of Milkien and Schaeffer, let alone McCain’s own brother, Joe, who pleaded with the campaign to let McCain be McCain. “Everybody kept saying, ‘Where’s the old happy warrior?’ It was fucking crazy,” Salter says. The best response to Salter is Grann’s next graf: But many who hoped that McCain could modify his policies without sacrificing his identity felt that he had crossed the line. He surrounded himself with conservative economic advisers, such as Phil Gramm, a fanatical proponent of deregulation, and Jack Kemp, the apostle of supply-side economics. He called for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent. He declared that the estate tax, which he, like Teddy Roosevelt, had championed, was now “one of the most unfair tax laws on the books.” ... [He] reversed his position on offshore drilling and endorsed the teaching of “intelligent design.” He disowned his own bill on immigration reform. Whereas he had once decried the use of torture under any circumstances, he now voted against banning the same techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that had been practiced against him in Vietnam.This election won’t truly be over until the side that lost realizes why it lost. Yes, it was the economy. But it was also who was the stronger candidate, and who was the weaker. In Ryan Lizza’s piece on Obama’s campaign, in which Obama comes off as a tougher Chicago pol than people give him credit for, the “crucial moment” for many aides came way back in July 2007 when, during the YouTube debate, Obama said he would meet world leaders without preconditions. Hilary pounced. The aides worried. They were thinking about backing off, changing the subject, bobbing and weaving, when Obama, overhearing, spoke up: “This is ridiculous. We met with Stalin. We met with Mao. The idea that we can’t meet with Ahmadinejad is ridiculous. This is a bunch of Washington-insider conventional wisdom that makes no sense. We should not run from this debate. We should have it.”In Grann’s piece on McCain, here’s the key moment: Just before the Republican Convention, McCain, who often seemed miserable in his new right-wing guise, tried to resurrect his former identity. He decided to choose as his running mate Joe Lieberman—a pro-choice Democrat who shared McCain’s views on foreign policy. The choice would have signalled both McCain’s independence and his return to a more bipartisan agenda. “He wanted Lieberman badly,” a McCain confidant said. But when leaders of the base threatened to challenge him at the Convention, McCain did the one thing that he believed a great politician never did. As the confidant put it, “John capitulated.One candidate stood up to his aides, one didn’t. One candidate ran his show, the other let it run him. One won, the other lost — not just the campaign but himself. It’s tragic, yes, Shakespearean even, but only for the candidate, not for us. By losing, in fact, you could say John McCain finally lived up to his campaign’s motto: He put country first. Baffling Republican Quote of the Day More than halfway through David Grann's must-read piece in the post-election issue of The New Yorker, "The Fall," about John McCain and his disastrous campaign, Grann paraphrases McCain speechwriter and close aide Mark Salter: In a recent conversation, Salter told me that at one moment the press was criticizing McCain for lacking a central message and the next was castigating him for not being spontaneous. First, the media is not monolithic. More importantly, those two criticisms are not mutually exclusive — as the sentence seems to imply. One can have a central message and be spontaneous. Just look at Barack Obama. Unfortunately, McCain didn't have (a central message) and wasn't (spontaneous). The worst of both worlds. Dan Savage Opens a Can of Whup-Ass TDS: RIP? — Addendum So the argument — jumpstarted, post-election, by Dan Kois — is that “The Daily Show” will have trouble with an Obama presidency because Jon Stewart and his writers are basically Dems who will have trouble mocking a Dem president. Certainly Bush provided a wider target than Obama, or anyone, will, but I've argued that Stewart's main target isn't really politicians anyway but the mainstream media and the effed-up way it portrays our world. As for the whole Dem thing, I suddenly realized — today — that the funniest thing I've seen on TDS in months, maybe ever, was the show's reaction to John Kerry's attempt to explain a “Depends” joke he made at the expense of John McCain. They spun it into its own mini-segment: “John Kerry Ruins Your Favorite Jokes.” Patricia can back me up. When we were watching this, I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard. The good stuff starts at 3:30 in. When Bush Met Obama — 2004 Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “OBAMA” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ” — from William Finnegan's article, “The Candidate: How the son of a Kenyan Economist became an Illinois Everyman,” in the May 31, 2004 issue of The New Yorker. Recommended reading. Hertzberg on McCain: 9/13/04 From the same column: McCain—who in 2008 will be three years older than Reagan was in 1980—faces a different problem [than the moderate Republicans]. Though wobbly on gays, he is solidly anti-abortion and firmly in favor of the Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how he can ever win back the trust of the hard core. As hard to see as Russia from Sarah Palin's backyard. Hertzberg on Obama: 9/13/04 From a “Talk of the Town” piece: When Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic Convention in Boston, a lot of people thought—and hoped—that they were seeing the future. Half Kansas and half Kenyan, half black and half white, yet all-American in a novel and exhilarating way that seemed to transcend the usual categories, Obama, who on November 2nd will be elected to the United States Senate from Illinois, embodied and expressed a fresh synthesis of the American civic religion —one that fused not only black and white, and immigrant and native-born, but also self-reliance and social solidarity. “He represents the future of the party,” Stephanie Cutter, the communications director for John Kerry’s campaign, said by way of explaining why Obama had been chosen to deliver the keynote speech. And it is not hard to imagine circumstances under which, a decade or two hence, he might represent the future of the country as well. So NY Times reporter Michael Sokolove returned to his hometown of Levittown, Pa., on Election Day to find out how and why people were voting. Great piece. Read it in full. Some might wonder how this differs from what Maureen Dowd does. The biggest difference is in the question itself: “Why are you doing what you're doing” vs. “How do you feel?” The latter is a lousy question even when it comes from a reporter and is directed at a championship-winning athlete, and it's positively abyssmal when it comes from two citizens partcipating in the same democratic process. It implies a separation (as between reporter and athlete) when there should be none. It also assumes that people within a generalized group (that is, African-Americans) fit the generalization (that is, support Obama), and Dowd's black bartender, a Libertarian, was one of 4 percent nationwide who did not fit this generalization. Oops. Sokolove asks a real reporter's question (or a reporter's real question?) and gets great results. Why did this area, which went overwhelmingly for Hilary during the primaries, now go for Obama? - “McCain pointed a lot of fingers instead of giving answers,” Steve O’Connor, a plumber, told me. - “I don’t want a clone of George Bush,” Mark Maxwell, 47, a corporate chef, said. “With McCain, that’s exactly what we’d get.” - Said Lisa Winslow, a 20-year-old college student: “I’m not rich. I can’t afford to vote for McCain.” - Levittown is filled with a great many veterans of the Vietnam War, not all of whom served happily. “I didn’t want to be there when I was told to go,” said Frank Carr, 62, who recently retired from his shipping job in a corrugated box factory. “I know how the boys feel. I believe Obama is a man of his word.” When Mr. Obama says he is going to bring home the troops, “I believe him,” Mr. Carr said. Sokolove then concludes smartly: The people I met in Levittown were not on Mr. Obama’s e-mail list or among his donors, but they may be more likely than his younger supporters and more affluent ones to give him what he most desperately needs: time and patience. Like characters from the songs of one of Mr. Obama’s celebrity endorsers, Bruce Springsteen, many Levittowners have been weathered by life. They haven’t benefited from a lot of quick fixes. Others of his supporters say they’ll be patient, but I sensed these people really mean it. They were harder to sell, but they could end up being pretty loyal. “How long did it take Bush to get us into this mess?” Mr. Carr, the Vietnam veteran, asked. “It’s a lot easier to screw things up than to make them better.” Maureen Dowd Sucks (Again) As the posts below indicate, I've been waiting for the Sunday Times since Tuesday evening around 8 PM (PST). Wasn't the first thing on my mind, certainly, but at some point I did want to hear how Frank Rich and the others reacted to the Obama victory. Rich's main point is that we're a better country than we (and the Rovian Republicans) think we are. Thomas Friedman wants foreign leaders, giddy over an Obama victory, to remember to back Obama when things get tough: when we try to extricate ourselves from Iraq without collapsing the entire structure, or when we have to put pressure on Iran to keep them from developing nuclear weapons. Nicholas Kristof, echoing what I've long felt, wonders if Obama's victory is as much a victory for another embattled minority group, intellectuals, as it is for African-Americans. And Maureen Dowd? She begins her column not poorly: I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week. That made me want to read on. Until the very next sentence: Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel. Really? I thought. Surely not everywhere you go. Surely there are white people in D.C. who realize how condescending that is. Surely there are white people in D.C. who are happy enough to bask in their own joy without probing into the joy of perfect strangers — as if an Obama victory went beyond their ability to understand or experience. As if it wasn't for them as well. But Ms. Dowd finds them. Or at least writes about them. A white customer quizzing his black waitress. White women quizzing their black bartender. A white-haired white woman and a UPS delivery guy. Dowd herself and her mailman. Each instance involves a black service-person and a white customer. Nice. Where does she live again? Maybe she needs to get out more. Or further. And the point of her column? It comes in the second-to-last graf: But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings? Jesus. So Maureen Dowd writes a column in which a group of people act in a suspect manner to impart the lesson that this group of people probably shouldn't act in this suspect manner. Can someone please put Maureen Dowd out of her (and our) misery? Please? Karim Sadjadpour Quote of the Day “If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you,” remarked Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “How are you going to implore crowds to chant ‘Death to Barack Hussein Obama’?" —from Thomas Friedman's column "Show Me the Money." Frank Rich Quote of the Day I recommend everyone read the entire column, but here (to me) are the highlights. It explains why we all felt so good Wednesday morning: On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic... For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k)... ...Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points. The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country. Obama Quote of the Day - for Patricia From the president-elect's first press conference earlier today. The economy, jobs, Iran, were all dealt with. Then this. With respect to the dog, this is a major issue. I think it's generated more interest on our Web site than just about anything. We have — we have two criteria that have to be reconciled. One is that Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic. There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic. On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me. So — so whether we're going to be able to balance those two things I think is a pressing issue on the Obama household. The “mutts like me” line. Jesus, I love this man. Sullivan Hammers Krauthammer I had this argument, even at the time, with people who were nominally paying attention to events, both political and financial, but who weren't obsesssing as much on the polls as I was. I remember when Obama was down to 220+ electoral votes on fivethirtyeight.com, the panic I felt, the relief I felt when his numbers began to go up before the Lehman Bros. collapse. Those who weren't obsessing didn't get this. They attributed Obama's surge to the economic collapse when it began before — around the time the shine began to wear off of Gov. Palin. Lord knows Lehman didn't help McCain, but then McCain didn't help himself, either. Despite Krauthammer, an argument can be made that with a better VP choice, with better debate performances, and with a steady campaign that seemed to anticipate events rather than reacting wildly to them, McCain, at the least, would've had a better shot. But to pull that off (particularly the “anticipating events” part), both he and Steve Schmidt would have had to be completely different people. Anonymous Quote of the Day One other thing: this is a country whose President-elect's middle name is Hussein. That is a fact to be celebrated. I received an email from a young friend, an entrepreneur in Kabul, this morning. He said, "We are all smiling now," and he attached a Pakistani press clipping--the Taliban greeted the new President and said they were ready to commence talks. Patricia Quote of the Day In an e-mail to Jeff and Sullivan... "I have a slight headache but I can't think of anytime I've been happier. There were tears and cheers at our place. Andy, who had gone door-to-door in Ohio for Obama, was in tears. And Laurion's parents came up from the Bahamas just for the election. His dad. who's black, said to me as he left, 'I'm so proud of your country. This is very special day.'" Quote of the Day at Arnellia's "Our community, we're used to the legal system letting us down," he said. "I'm used to [things] going wrong. I distrust the system so much, but this is the first time I've seen the system work in my life, and I'm 40 years old. That's harsh, but it's true. It's a relief. It's a relief to say, 'Finally. Something right happened.' But not right just for me, for everybody." — David Hall, 39, in Jim Walsh's MNPost piece "Jubiliation at Arnellia's." Quote of the Day It amazes me how commentators, especially conservative commentators, can argue that (a) Obama is a socialistic avatar and a radical redistributionist and yet (b) that his election doesn't mean that the voters have been pulled to the left or bestowed a liberal mandate—that the U.S. is still (this week's reigning buzzphrase) "a center-right country." My Election Day One day I'll live blog one of these things (World Series, unprecedented presidential elections), but here's the retroactive version: 5:30: Woke up, showered, coffee, etc. Read Andrew Sullivan. Wrote a bit. 6:30: Left our place and walked in the rain to the T.T. Minor Elementary School to vote. My first time voting there. Usually my polling location is within five or six blocks of my home but this was over a mile away. Seems a bit screwy but Seattle often seems a bit screwy. Got wet despite the umbrella. Rain forecast for the entire day, with thunderstorms in the afternoon. 7:05: Arrived at the school to find a line of about 100 people. Again: new. Usually it's just me and the old ladies in the basement of the church. The school is a sweet elementary school (Andy's daughter goes there) and has kids' names on all of the lockers. The woman in front of me commented on what great names the kids had — not the dull Marys and Davids of our childhood — and I pointed out one name and said, “Yeah, when I was growing up, 'Isis' was just a heroine on a Saturday morning TV show.” She then surprised me by repeating the whole “zephyr winds” line and we got to talking about “Shazam” and “H.R. Puffenstuff” and how the creators of the latter must've been high while making it (a magic talking flute?), and how the star of the show, Jack Wild, had played the Artful Dodger in the 1968 musical Oliver! and may have been the best thing in the movie. I was pretty sure he'd been nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor. He also sang the film's most memorable song: “Consider Yourself.” This woman then began to sing the song to herself. Consider yourself...one of the family. 7:45: Voted. (Psst. Barack.) 7:55: Walked to Broadway on Capitol Hill. The rains had stopped. Passed a garage on John Street between 12th and 13th where the owner had painted the famous “Barack Hope” poster on the door. Painted it well, I should add. 8:05: Arrived at Starbucks ahead of the precinct captain, Stuart. Phoned him. He said he was still at campaign headquarters on Pine — that there were tons of people there — but he had our packet and would meet me in about 10 minutes. 8:05-8:15: Sat in the back of Starbucks on a couch. Starbucks was giving away free coffee to anyone who voted and the woman at the table in front of me, overhearing the barrista talking about it, said to her friend, who was sitting on the couch next to me, “Oh, is it election day?” I thought: “And that's why we have a GOTV effort. Some people just don't know.” Then the woman asked the man who was gonna win: He: Well, Obama's ahead nationally but the electoral college is close. It might come down to Hawaii. Me (butting in): If it comes down to Hawaii, Barack wins. Hawaii always goes Democrat and he's from there. No way he's losing Hawaii. He: No, I'm just saying it might be close. Me: Uh huh. She: I've heard he might have trouble anyway. Because he's against the second amendment and all. Me: He's not against the second amendment. She: (Exchanges meaningful glance with the man as if to say, “Lookee here who's been brainwashed.”) She (to He): So how long have you been hypnotizing people? He: Oh, about 45 years. They then went on to have a serious talk about hypnosis. 8:15: Stuart arrives. Hallelujah. 8:15-9:15: Stuart and I walk the precinct that he's walked four times in the last month, usually alone, getting out the vote. We only had about 20 names left on his list, and a couple were his neighbors with whom he'd just spoken. They'd voted. Off the list. Getting down to the bare nub. The goal. Stuart was from Chicago, had lived in Seattle for...8 years or so? I'd met him the night before and given him shit about his Chicago Cubs cap. “You know, Barack's a White Sox fan,” I said. He smiled and said, “Well, I think we have room in the party for both Cubs and White Sox fans.”`Some part of me was actually worried about that Cubs cap: That it might transmit its losing ways into the campaign. I wondered who the Steve Bartman of the Barack campaign might be. 9:15: Stuart and I finished the packet, we said our goodbyes, and I walked the packet over to Obama's Capitol Hill headquarters on Pine. It was getting chillier but the rain wasn't coming back. In fact, the sky was beginning to clear. Nice. Campaign headquarters was packed. I'd arrived planning to phone-bank into the early afternoon but looked at the second floor, where phone-banking was supposed to take place, and thought it made more sense to split. They had more volunteers than they knew what to do with. Again: Nice. On the walk home, ran into our neighbor, Laura, who was on her way to vote. 10:00-4:00: Got our place ready for what I continually called a “gathering.” Didn't want to jinx us with the word “party.” 4:00: First results. McCain leads in the electoral college 8-3: Kentucky vs. Vermont. Damn! 4:15: Andy and his girls arrive. Mathilda, the youngest, wears wings. I ask her if that was her Halloween costume but she says, No, she went as Dora. 4:30 and on: More people arrive. Jeff and Sullivan, with two kids. Chasing games ensue throughout the condo. Charges of “schnookering” are made. Balloons are blown up. Balloons are played with. All evening. Around 25-30 people show up. At some point we order Indian food. I drink: beer and saki and red wine and champagne. By which time the gathering has become a party. I began to use the word: party. You know the rest. I was worried about Virginia, initially, but when Pennsylvania broke early and clean for Obama, I thought: Good sign. By the tme Ohio broke, giving Obama 207 electoral votes, Jim and I did the math. The three western states, California, Oregon and Washington, would give him 280. It was all over but the shouting. Then came the shouting. Today: A new day. Welcome. GOTV in America GOTV in Pennsylvania Spent a good part of yesterday at home making phonecalls for Barack Obama as part of his campaign's Get Out The Vote effort. Their online set up is pretty smart, and allows a volunteer to choose which (leaning, toss-up) state to call. I chose Pennsylvania, for obvious reasons, and it mostly went OK, although at least 90 percent of my calls resulted in 1) leaving messages, 2) wrong numbers, or 3) nobody home, which is different than 1) in that there was no answering machine or service to leave a message on or with. The phone just rang and rang and rang. A throwback to the '70s. The most interesting person I talked to was an 80-something year-old woman who was voting for Obama, and who complained about all of the mail and robocalls she was getting from the McCain camp. “I'm not a Republican!” she kept saying indignantly. She also implied that FDR helped her father get a job during the Depression. Apparently he told his kids, and he had 12 of them, before he died, “If any of you vote Republican I'll roll over in my grave.” She was proud of that. The most interesting polling location? “Prison Training Academy” in Philadelphia. My friend Andy, who was doing the same all weekend, got me on board yesterday and probably immediately regretted it, since I called him about five times with various questons. During one of those calls we got to talking about McCain's robocalls and what a nuissance they were. Andy said that whenever he left a message he always used the voter's name so they'd know it wasn't a robocall. That's when it hit me. Why McCain uses robocalls. Because he doesn't have people like us. Yet another difference between the two campaigns. McCain uses a dehumanizing technique to dehumanize his opponent. Obama uses actual volunteers from around the country to make sure everyone gets out and votes. My First Blog Post Eight years ago, either the night before or a few nights before the 2000 election, I read Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Talk of the Town” column in The New Yorker before going to bed and panicked. I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t gotten involved in the campaign much — I was a freelance writer, struggling to keep my head above water during a time of great prosperity and opportunity — but I was definitely for Gore, and not simply because I was a Democrat, but for all the reasons Hertzberg laid out in his column. What I didn’t know, what Hertzberg began to let me in on, was how bad it had gotten, and how culpable the media was in making it bad, which is to say close. Too close to call. We had to wait until the U.S. Supreme Court decided for us, by a 5-4 vote, on December 12, 2000: a date which will live in infamy. (For more on this, please read Boies v. Bush v. Gore, about Gore’s lawyer David Boies, which I edited for New York Super Lawyers magazine this fall.) That evening, instead of sleeping, I got up, turned my computer back on, searched online for the Hertzberg article (futilely, for this was 2000), and then proceeded to type the whole damn thing up and send it to everyone I knew. I suppose it was my first blog post. READ this, I told everyone. SEND IT to everyone you know. We've come a long way baby since then, and mostly, like the old Springsteen song says, down down down down. It's amazing to consider the country Bush inherited and the country he leaves behind. Only the most blinkered Republican fuckstick would consider the last eight years anything less than an unmitigated disaster. We can't re-do that choice but we can do this one right. My god, what would it be like to have a smart man, a really smart man, in the White House? Here's the Hertzberg column I sent out eight years ago. Read it and weep. Read it and hope: After the polls close next week, we will learn what Presidential politics in the year 2000 has been “about.” Specifically, we will learn whether it has been about “issues” or “personality.” If the campaign turns out to have been about “issues,” then the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, will be elected, because he is the superior candidate in point of both command and positions... Vice President Gore has shown himself to be, in comparison with the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, more fiscally responsible (because he proposes to spend somewhat less of the chimerical surplus than does Governor Bush), more socially responsible (because he proposes to spend more of that surplus on social needs such as education and health care and divert less of it to individual consumption), and more egalitarian (because his plans for changing the tax code, combined with his spending plans, would ameliorate inequalities of wealth and income while Bush’s would exacerbate them). Gore’s foreign policy would be more energetic in its promotion of democratic values than Bush’s, and probably more so than President Clinton’s. Bush has offered few clues to what his foreign policy might be, except to say that he would build a missile-defense system whether or not it was technically workable or strategically advantageous, and that he opposes the American military presence in Haiti (where, at last count, we had 29 soldiers) and in the Balkans, where a unilateral withdrawal would have the effect of weakening the Western alliance and America’s role within it. As for the superiority of Gore’s command of the issues, this is not a matter of opinion — or, if it is, everyone’s opinion is the same, even (to judge from his defensive jokes) Bush’s: Gore knows more, understands more, and has thought more, and more coherently, about virtually every aspect of public policy, domestic and foreign, than Bush has... Bush’s point of superiority, then, is in the matter of “personality,” and it is striking how narrowly that word seems to have been defined for electoral purposes. Personality apparently excludes, if not intelligence itself, then such manifestations of it as intellectual curiosity, analytic ability, and a capacity for original thought, all of which Gore has in abundance and Bush not only lacks but scorns. Personality apparently excludes courage: Gore put himself in harm’s way during the Vietnam War; Bush did not. Gore’s tendency to embellish anecdotes, especially about himself, is real and undeniable. Even so, some of his alleged lies have turned out to be strongly rooted in factuality. He did not “create” the Internet, obviously, but he was one of a tiny handful of politicians who grasped its significance when it was in its infancy, and he did take the lead in writing legislation to spur its development. In the debates, Bush uttered inaccuracies that, unlike Gore’s, falsify the underlying essence of his point — as, for example, when he said that Gore was outspending him in the campaign (when the reverse is true, to the tune of $50 million), and that he fought to get a patient’s bill of rights passed in Texas (when he actually vetoed one such bill and allowed another to become law without his signature), and that his health-care proposal would “have prescription drugs as an integral part of Medicare” (when this is precisely what Gore’s plan would do, while Bush’s would dismantle Medicare as we know it in favor of a system of subsidized private insurance). Still, there’s no denying that a large number of people find Gore irritating; to prove it, there are polls, to say nothing of the panels of “undecided voters” — that is, clueless, ill-informed citizens who even at this late date cannot summon the mental energy to make up their minds — assembled by the television networks into on-camera focus groups. Gore can be awkward and tone-deaf, and he sometimes has trouble modulating his presentation of himself, and he plainly lacks the instinctive political exuberance of a Bill Clinton or even the slightly twitchy easygoingness of a George W. Bush. Gore is aggressive, assertive, and intensely energetic, qualities once counted as desirable in a potential President but now evidently seen by many as disturbing. At a time of domestic prosperity and tranquility, much of the public seems to have developed a thirst for passivity, a thirst that Bush is eager to slake. This may explain the paradox that while Gore was widely judged the substantive winner of all three of the televised debates, he lost the battle in the post-debate media echo chambers, and perhaps partly as a result, in the opinion polls. In the final debate, Gore stretched the rules, while Bush complained and turned beseechingly to the moderator for help. To caricature them both, Gore was a smart bully, Bush a hapless tattletale. Neither attribute is attractive, but it may turn out that fear of the first will outweigh contempt for the second. In that case, “personality” will definitely have triumphed over “issues,” and the transformation of the Presidency of the United States into the presidency of the student council will be complete. — Hendrik Hertzberg All Hail Hendrik Hertzberg! Still, these guys are so good they often come through. Loved Rich’s piece last week and particularly loved Hertzberg’s latest “Talk of the Town.” Everything you wanted to know about socialism but were afraid to ask. “You” being you. Or possibly Joe the Plumber. It’s more than John McCain’s comment to the daughter of a doctor who, during the 2000 campaign, complained we were getting too close to socialism in this country (“...when you reach a certain level of comfort,” he told her, “there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more”), or the fact that Sarah Palin’s Alaska, which has no sales or income tax, funds itself with huge levies to oil companies and then gives what’s left back to (or just “to”) its citizens. Talk about spreading the wealth. And these two are basing their entire presidential campaign (this week) on attacking Barack Obama for similar economic plans? Their hypocrisy is overwhelming. One wonders, for the thousandth time, how they sleep. Hertzberg fires this: The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule.More comprehensively, he gives us this, which has always been my argument: Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support.Ex-mothereffin-actly! On HuffPost, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, of all people, who supported Hilary Clinton earlier this year and is now supporting John McCain, has an anti-Obama post in which she raises the same stupid fears. I’m not sure what her game is — is she really that greedy or does she merely want McCain to win in ’08 so Hilary can win in ’12? — but she trots out that familiar Republican talking point against higher taxes for the wealthy: Today, the top 1% of earners contributes 40% of the nation's $2.6 trillion tax intake and the bottom 50% pay 2.9% of our nation's total needs.I can’t think of a better argument for a more steeply progressive tax system than this. If the top 1 percent, paying at a rate similar to mine, already pay 40 percent of our taxes, think how much money they’re making. If these people are lucky enough to have the skills that allows them to prosper in the kind of system we currently have, then they should be paying even more to keep that system running smoothly. And they haven’t. It’s time the bastards paid up. “Idiot Wind” is a startlingly good song for the way the McCain camp has attacked Obama this fall. Line after line hits home: Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out but when they will I can only guess... I haven't known peace and quiet for so long I can't remember what it's like... I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine... The awful thing about the attacks is that you don't need to know anything about Obama, or about McCain, to know they're bullshit. You just have to know something about the world. A communist...and a Muslim? How is that possible? A secret socialist, who wants to make government all-powerful...and a secret terrorist, who wants to destroy government from within? How is that possible? The inanity (Sean or otherwise) is overwhelming. Unafraid to Listen An editorial in The Washington Post today condemns the latest guilt-by-association attack by John McCain and his campaign. The latest version involves an Arab-American scholar and Columbia professor, Raschid Kalidi, who holds, the Post says, complex views of the Middle East situation, and who was the subject of a toast at a dinner party by Barack Obama in 2003. Barack apparently said that Mr. Kalidi “offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” By the end of the editorial, the Post quotes Mr. Kalidi saying he's waiting for this latest McCain-inspired “idiot wind” to blow over, and the Post agrees. But first they write this: It's fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. I'm not a fan of “Duh” but... Duh! Seriously are we that pathetic? Are our own points of view so fragile that they can't bear the scrutiny that listening to someone else's views requires? I'm reminding of something James Baldwin said about living in France and Turkey: “Whenever you live in another civilization you are foced to examine your own.” This examination is good and necessary if you are ever to improve your own society. The people who do not engage in it — fellow non-travelers like George Bush and Sarah Palin — have limited, absolutist world views that are not only dispiriting, but, in world leaders, positively dangerous. Both Palin and Bush don't have the intellect, or intellectual curiosity, or humility about one's intellect that true intellectual curiosity fosters, to be world leaders. We've already seen what happens when they get into positions of power. John McCain isn't much better. Plus he's got a dangerous temperament. Plus he's obviously sold his soul to the devil with this campaign. He's leaving behind a stink that we may never get out. And that's if he loses. If he wins, every campaign, at every level, will be flinging the same shit. We'll be covered in it. Here's my point. This latest McCain-inspired controversy is actually one of the best reasons to vote for Barack Obama. John McCain, like Sarah Palin and George Bush, is rarely the smartest person in any room he walks into — and he doesn't need to hear what you have to say. Barack Obama is almost always the smartest person in any room he walks into — and he still wants to hear what you have to say. My god. How refreshing. Good Talking Points Memo feature here on the number of conservatives who have dismissed McCain and/or endorsed Obama, and the number of newspapers who have done the same, specifically because of McCain's VP pick. You have a favorite? Mine's still Colin Powell, although I give Chris Hitchens props. The Six Narratives of John McCain Interesting piece by Robert Draper in yesterday's NY Times Magazine on the various narratives of the McCain campaign. The subhed says it all: “When a campaign can't settle on a central narrative, does it imperil its protagonist?” In this way it's easy to blame McCain's chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, who encouraged John McCain to get away from “straight talk” in favor of “talking points,” and who encouraged him to use (or exploit) his P.O.W. status, and who favored picking Sarah Palin for VEEP and who pushed for suspending the campaign on Wednesday, Sept. 24 in the wake of the financial crisis, and who was, after all, the author of all of these various narratives, in which they tried to remake Obama as a “celebrity” or a “non-partisan pretender” or “a Washington insider” and then suffered the misfortune of not having Obama play along. So, yes, it's easy to blame Schmidt. But of course the bigger fault lies with John McCain. In the parlance of this low, dishonest decade, he's the decider, and he decided to take this path, or these paths, and so he is where he is. I believe conservatives used to call this kind of thing “accountability.” Reading, in fact, my main thought was this: Who wants a president of the United States who can be pushed around by the likes of Steve Schmidt? New Yorker Quote of the Day - I "Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms." —from Jane Mayer's article on how John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in the Oct. 27th New Yorker. More precise, it's a piece on how she wound up on everyone's radar. Blame those National Review/Weekly Standard luxury cruises that stopped off in Juneau in 2007. "The Governor was more than happy to meet with these guys," her aide said, and they were more than happy to meet with her. Starbursts followed. William Kristol was particularly smitten, to the point where, in a Fox News discussion on possible VEEPs this June, Chris Wallace told Kristol, "Can we please get off Sarah Palin?" Others beat the drums, and some beat those drums right next to John McCain. I suppose the real money quote is near the end: "By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company." Yikes. McCain Endorses Obama? More Obama stuff. Nicholas Kristof writes what everyone who thinks two feet beyond their face has known from the start (but it’s still nice to read) and The New York Times endorses Obama for president. They’ve also included this nifty little gadget on every Times presidential endorsement since Lincoln. From Lincoln to Obama. Talk about framing the issue. The Times’ endorsement is hardly a surprise — they haven’t endorsed a Republican since Ike in ’56, and this hardly seems the year to break tradition. Tradition's breaking the other way: Not just Colin Powell but former Republican governors Arne Carlson and William Weld and former Bush press spokesperson Scott McClellan. Not to mention National Review scion Christopher Buckley and 40 newspapers that backed Bush and all of these people. Not sure how Rush Limbaugh bloviates against these. Despite the polls, I’m assuming nothing. I know the Republicans will be throwing everything they can at Obama and hope something sticks. In recent weeks, the two biggest charges against him are that he’s a) a terrorist, and b) a socialist. We know why these words are chosen — both are pejorative in the minds of Americans — but they are, in the sense that the McCain camp uses them, mutually exclusive. In general, I suppose, one can be a terrorist-socialist (tearing down to build up?), but the McCain camp is implying that Obama will both destroy our government from within (leaving it in ashes) and build it up from within (leaving it stronger than ever). Jesus, dudes, pick one. You can’t have both. Oh. My. God. I don't know why I'm voting for this man. He keeps making me cry. I’d also recommend this Ron Howard video. I grew up on “Andy Griffith” and “Happy Days” so appreciate what he went through to go back there. I await the sequel, in which he re-sings "Gary, Indiana" and gets us all to eat his dust. Jim Walsh and the Wellstone World Music Weekend The following column was written by my friend Jim Walsh a year after the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone in Oct. 2002. It was a bad time. Our country gave into fear, it gave into lies, it set us on the path we're currently on. How does that path feel now? In two weeks, we may be able to begin to get off this path. We may be able to elect a leader who offers smarts,and hope, and unity; a leader who can make friends out of our enemies rather than enemies out of our friends. But it's still two weeks away. The McCain camp is stirring up old fears, promulgating new fears, disseminating misrepresentations and outright lies. They're throwing whatever shit they can against the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Here's to not giving into fear and lies. Here's to hope, and smarts, and unity. And here's to Joe Henry, Vic Chesnutt, Dan Wilson, the Tropicals, Prince, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Green Day, Jenny Owen Young, Leonard Cohen, Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, Joan Armatrading, Randy Newman, Loudon Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright, Jonathan Richman, Teddy Thompson, Antony, Iron & Wine, R.E.M., The Beatles, Paul Simon, A3 and Nina Simone. And here's to the Mad Ripple. An E-Proposal From Me to You By Jim Walsh I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, in front of a silver monument that looks like a heart, a broken heart really, and I am thinking about how wrong the world has gone, how Minnesota Mean it all feels. I’m thinking about how much everyone I know misses the man I’ve come to visit, how sick I am of sitting around waiting for change, and about what might happen if I ask you to do something, which is what I’ll do in a minute. Like most Minnesotans, I met Paul Wellstone once. It was at the Loring Playhouse after the opening night of a friend’s play. He and Sheila were there, offering encouragement to the show’s director, Casey Stangl, and quietly validating the post-production festivities with his presence: The Junior Senator from Minnesota and his wife are here; we must be doing something right. The year before (1990), I’d written a column for City Pages encouraging all local musicians and local music fans to go vote for this mad professor the following Tuesday. He won, and, as many have said since, for the first time in my life I felt like we were part of something that had roots in Stuff The Suits Don’t Give A Shit About. That is, we felt like we had a voice, like were getting somewhere, or like Janeane Garofalo’s villain-whupping character in “Mystery Men,” who memorably proclaimed, “I would like to dedicate my victory to the supporters of local music and those who seek out independent films.” After the election, Wellstone’s aide Bill Hillsman told me he believed my column had reached a segment of the voting populace that they were having trouble reaching, and that it may have helped put him over the top. I put aside my bullshit detector for the moment and chose to believe him, just as I choose at this moment to believe that music and the written word can still help change the world. When I introduced myself to Wellstone that night as “Jim Walsh from City Pages,” he broke into that sexy gap-toothed grin, clasped my hand and forearm and said, with a warm laugh, “Jiiiiim,” like we were a couple of thieves getting together for the first time since the big haul. I can still feel his hand squeezing my forearm. I can still feel his fighter’s strength. For those of you who never had the pleasure, that is what Paul Wellstone was--a fighter—despite the fact that the first president Bush said upon their first encounter, “who is this chickenshit?” He fought corporate America, the FCC, injustice, his own government. He fought for the voiceless, the homeless, the poor, the little guy—in this country and beyond. He was a politician but not a robot; an idealist, but not a sap, and if his legacy has already morphed into myth, it’s because there were/are so few like him. He was passionate, and compassionate. He had a huge heart, a rigorous mind, a steely soul and conscience, and now he is dead and buried in a plot that looks out over the joggers, bikers, rollerbladers, and motorists who parade around Lake Calhoun daily. Paul and Sheila Wellstone and six others, including their daughter Marcia, were killed in a plane crash on October 25, 2002. I remember where I was that day, just as you do, and I don’t want to forget it, but what I want to remember even more is October 25, 2003. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start something right here, right now, and we’re going to call it Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. It will happen on Saturday, Oct. 25th. On that day, every piece of music, from orchestras to shower singers, superstars to buskers, will be an expression of that loss and a celebration of that life. It will be one day, where music—which, to my way of thinking, is still the best way to fill in the gray areas that the blacks and whites of everyday life leave us with—rises up in all sorts of clubs, cars, concerts, and living rooms, all in the name of peace and love and joy and all that good stuff that gets snickered at by Them. Now. This is no corporate flim-flam or media boondoggle. This is me talking to you, and you and I deciding to do something about the place we live in when it feels like all the exits are blocked. So: First of all, clip or forward this to anyone you know who still cares about grass roots, community, music, reading, writing, love, the world, and how the world sees America. If you’ve got a blog or web site, post it. If you’re a musician, book a gig now for Oct. 25th. Tell them you want it to be advertised as part of Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. If you’re a shower singer, lift your voice that day and tell yourself the same thing. If you’re a club owner, promoter, or scene fiend, put together a multi-act benefit for Wellstone Action! <http://www.wellstone.org> . If you’re a newspaper person, tell your readers. If you’re a radio person, tell your listeners. Everybody talk about what you remember about Wellstone, what he tried to do, what you plan to do for Wellstone World Music Day. Then tell me at the email address below, and I’ll write another column like this the week of Oct. 25th, with your and others’ comments and plans. This isn’t exactly an original idea. Earlier this year, I sat in a room at Stanford University with Judea and Michelle Pearl, the father and daughter of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by members of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan in February of last year. After much talk about their son and brother’s life and murder, I asked them about Danny’s love of music. He was a big music fan, and an accomplished violinist who played with all sorts of bands all over the world. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Pearl was also a member of the Atlanta band the Ottoman Empire, and his fiddle levitates one of my all-time favorite Irish jigs, “This Is It,” which I found myself singing one night last fall in a Sonoma Valley bar with a bunch of journalists from Paraguay, Texas, Mexico, Jerusalem, Italy, and Korea. The Pearls talked with amazement about the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day <http://www.danielpearl.org> , the second of which happens this October 10th, which would have been Pearl’s 40th birthday. I told them about attending one of the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day activities at Stanford Memorial Church, where a lone violinist silently strolled away from her chamber group at the end, signaling to me and my gathered colleagues that we were to remember that moment and continue to ask questions, continue to push for the dialogue that their son and brother lived for. I vowed that day to tell anybody within earshot about Daniel Pearl World Music Day, and later figured he wouldn’t mind a similar elegy for Wellstone, who shared Pearl’s battle against hate and cynicism. Wellstone didn’t lead any bands, but he led as musical a life as they come. He lived to bring people together, to mend fences: Music. When he died, musicians and artists were some of the most devastated, as Leslie Ball’s crest-fallen-but-somehow-still-beaming face on CSPAN from Williams Arena illustrated. Everyone from Mason Jennings to Larry Long wrote Wellstone tribute songs in the aftermath, and everyone had a story, including the one Wendy Lewis told me about the genuine exuberance with which Wellstone once introduced her band, Rhea Valentine, to a crowd at the Lyn-Lake Festival. Imagine that, today. So ignore this or do whatever you do when your “We Are The World” hackles go up. I’d be disappointed, and I suppose I wouldn’t blame you; in these times of terror alerts and media celebrity, I’m suspicious of everything, too. But I freely admit that the idea of a Wellstone World Music Day is selfish. That day was beyond dark, and to have another like it, a litany of hang-dog tributes and rehashes of The Partisan Speech and How It All Went Wrong, would be painful, not to mention disrespectful to everything those lives stood for and against. No, I don’t want anyone telling me what to think or feel that day, or any day, anymore. I want music that day. I want to wake up hearing it, go to bed singing it. I want banners, church choirs, live feeds, hip-hop, headlines, punk rock, field reports, arias, laughter. I want to remember October 25, 2002 as the day the music died, and October 25, 2003 as the day when people who’ve spent their lives attending anti-war rallies and teaching kids and championing local music and independent films got together via the great big antennae of music and took another shot. I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. In front of the silver broken heart, three workers stab the fresh sod with shovels and fumble with a tape measurer. Flowers dot the dirt surrounding the statue base. I pick up a rock and put it in my pocket. The sprinklers are on, hissing impatiently at the still-stunned-by-last-autumn citizens who work and hope and wait and watch beyond the cemetery gates. The sprinklers shoot horizontal water geysers this way and that. They are replenishing patches of grass that have been browned by the sun. They are telling every burned-out blade to keep growing, and trying to coax life out of death. The Final Debate — Who Disappointed A day late and a couple of billion dollars short, but here’s my thoughts on who disappointed during that final debate and why: Bob Schieffer. Particularly the moral equivalency implicit in this question: “Both of you pledged to take the high road in this campaign yet it has turned very nasty. Senator Obama, your campaign has used words like ‘erratic,’ ‘out of touch,’ ‘lie,’ ‘angry,’ ‘losing his bearings’ to describe Senator McCain. Senator McCain, your commercials have included words like ‘disrespectful,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘dishonorable,’ ‘he lied.’ Your running mate said he ‘palled around with terrorists’...” Please. Barack Obama’s negative ads focus on what’s wrong with John McCain’s proposed policies, and are mostly truthful. John McCain’s negative ads (and stump speeches) focus on what's wrong with Barack Obama, and they are mostly outright lies and innuendo. There is no equivalency. Everyone with an open mind knows who’s muddying the waters. McCain’s camp has even admitted that that’s their strategy. Why should journalists pretend otherwise? I’ve said it time and again: Objectivity is not stupidity. This should be a journalistic mantra. Wake the fuck up. The answers to the “running mate” question. Overall, of course, Barack's my guy, the smartest, most inspiring presidential candidate I’ve seen during my lifetime. And I know he’s preternaturally calm, and that’s part of the reason he is where he is. But when Schieffer lobbed that softball to him about running mates, and why his was better than the other, he should’ve smacked it out of the park. I mean out of the park. Instead, he turned even more factual, more logical. Drove me crazy. I mean, c’mon. At least bring up the fact that Sarah Palin doesn’t even do press conferences, that we’re in the unprecedented situation of possibly electing someone to the second-highest office in the land who hasn’t talked to the press yet. He doesn’t have to say it’s fascist, which it is. He just has to say it’s undemocratic, which it is. I was also a little disappointed that he didn’t take John McCain more to task for McCain’s response to Schieffer’s above question. Which brings me to... John McCain. Yep. After everything we’ve seen from his campaign, how could he disappoint me more? Yet he managed to do it. Kudos. The first time was here: One of [those negative attacks] happened just the other day, when a man I admire and respect — I've written about him — Congressman John Lewis, an American hero, made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace. That, to me, was so hurtful.... I hope that Senator Obama will repudiate those remarks that were made by Congressman John Lewis, very unfair and totally inappropriate. OK. McCain’s campaign implies that Barack Obama is a Muslim, a terrorist, “evil,” and when John Lewis calls him on it, McCain has the nerve to be affronted? But it’s more. If you’d asked me five years, 10 years ago, to name someone who was a hero to me, someone alive and whom I didn’t know personally, I would’ve named John Lewis. He grew up poor in Mississippi. He wanted to be a minister and used to preach to the chickens as he was feeding them in the morning. He wound up going to college in Nashville and became one of the leaders of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, which was the first protracted, organized effort at direct action — confronting an unjust law rather than simply ignoring it — of the civil rights movement. He was one of the leaders of the Freedom Rides, and was among those attacked in Montgomery, Ala., by a white mob who objected to the integrated Greyhound bus in their midst. (There’s a famous photo of him, with Jim Zwerg, a white student from, I believe, Wisconsin: Zwerg has his bloody fingers in his mouth (checking his teeth?), while Lewis looks, well, preternaturally calm, despite the blood splattered on his suit and tie.) He was the first president of SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and he was among the speakers during the March on Washington in August 1963. If memory serves, he even argued with the March’s founders because he wanted to use the term “black” rather than “Negro” but the founder’s thought that too radical. For the past 30 years, he’s represented his district in Georgia in the U.S. Congress. So when John McCain began dragging John Lewis’ name through the mud on national television, I had to restrain myself from battering my own television in anger. Sen. McCain: There’s a reason John Lewis has equated you with some of the worst aspects of the civil rights movement. Look to yourself. Then there was that moment, near the end, during the abortion back-and-forth, when McCain used air quotes around “health of the mother.” I’m not a woman but even I was offended. Can’t imagine how women felt. The mainstream (corporate, idiotic) media. To me the debate was no contest. One guy was cranky, the other was calm. One guy was petty, the other guy had a largeness of spirit. One guy tried to keep us divided, the other tried to bring us together. (Check out, for example, Barack’s answer to the abortion question.) Even on a superficial level: One guy was red-eyed, blinking, with an unnatural smile, the other guy was handsome, cool, with a natural smile. No contest. The polls afterwards indicated it was no contest. Voters preferred Barack Obama overwhelmingly, by the biggest margins in any of their three debates. And yet the pundits. Ah, the pundits. Are they in some kind of vacuum of stupidity? Are they straining for objectivity? Do they want to make more of a contest out of this presidential race? Do they want to give one to poor John McCain? Because they didn’t see it. Either they missed it, or they pretended reality was something other than what it was. So much of the press, even a day later, was about how John McCain “went on the attack,” and “made the debate about...” blah blah blah. They couldn’t get enough of “Joe the Plumber,” yet another ignoramus John McCain has dragged onto the national stage. Here’s a guy, not even a licensed plumber, who owes back taxes, and who, in every interview I’ve heard, reiterates Republican talking points. He almost feels like a plant. He complains that Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise his taxes. It won’t. In fact, he’ll probably get a tax break. And yet “Joe” still won’t admit it. He says Barack tap-danced around the issue “almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.” He said this to Katie Couric when she called him Thursday morning. He said it on national TV. People at CBS laughed when he said it. Jesus Christ. How much more stupid can we get? But for all that disappointment, it was still the debate I wanted. Barack looked good, McCain looked bad, and we’ve got less than three weeks to go. U.S. Presidents on Film I’ve got a piece up on MSNBC today about portrayals of U.S. presidents on film — to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s W. Here’s a quick synopsis of some of the films I had to watch for the piece. Worth the time: 1. Thirteen Days (2000): Focuses on the Cuban Missile Crisis through the eyes of Kenny O’Donnell (Kevin Costner), special assistant to the president, whose biggest worry, at the story begins, is his son’s report card and Jackie’s party list. Then the world nearly ends. Watch the film and you can count the ways it nearly ends: If JFK had listened to the Joint Chiefs or if he had listened to Dean Acheson or if Bob McNamara hadn’t come up with the quarantine alternative or if General LeMay had gotten his way (“The big red dog is diggin’ in our backyard and we are justified in shooting him!”) or if the Russian ships hadn’t turned back or if the administration hadn’t come up with the plan to ignore Khrushchev’s second letter in favor of his first…well, then you might not be reading this. These days, almost everyone on the right, and a few on the left, invoke Neville Chamberlain as the diplomatic bogeyman. Get bullied and World War II results. JFK and his team repeatedly invoke The Guns of August: the book about how misunderstandings between countries led to WWI. Presidents reading. Imagine that. 2. Path to War (2002): John Frankenheimer’s last film, about how, step by step, LBJ got us involved in Vietnam. What’s intriguing about this version of history is how early the designers of the Vietnam War, particularly Robert McNamara (Alec Baldwin, shining), realized a victory wasn’t a sure thing. There’s a powerful scene, just after McNamara talks with his aides about how many losses we’ll probably sustain for such-and-such a period, when a Quaker, Norman Morrison, sets himself on fire outside McNamara’s Pentagon office to remind everyone what a loss of a life is. Ultimately the film is a semi-sympathetic portrayal of Johnson. He listened to the wrong advice, probably against his gut instinct, and stuck us there for 10 years and lost his (and our) Great Society along with 50,000 American lives. It’s another example of the U.S., the most powerful country in the world, getting involved where they shouldn’t, and against their own better instincts, because of a combination of hubris and the fear of appearing weak. Helluva cast: Baldwin, Michael Gambon (as LBJ), Donald Sutherland, Philip Baker Hall (who played Nixon in Secret Honor), Frederic Forrest and one of my favorite character actors, Bruce McGill, who plays CIA Chief George Tenet in W. 3. The Day Reagan was Shot (2001): A surprisingly good Showtime film from the early 2000s. Actors who have to play well-known figures should study Richard Crenna here. He merely suggests Reagan, he doesn’t imitate him. The film is sympathetic to Haig, too, who is played by Richard Dreyfuss, who would go on to play Dick Cheney in W. What I learned: Reagan came close to dying that day in 1981; and the federal government was more or less in chaos; and the White House was unable to even secure outside lines when they needed to. The usual bureaucratic pissing matches are fun to watch: FBI vs. Treasury; Haig vs. Weinberger. The film is both comic and scary. At one point, for example, the “football,” or the briefcase with the nuclear launch codes, goes missing. 4. Secret Honor (1984): I first saw this when it came out, or at least when it came to the University of Minnesota in January 1985, and I wondered if it would hold up. Does. It’s a one-man show, all Phillip Baker Hall, bless him. Nixon, drinking in exile, lurches between defending himself and attacking, vituperatively, profanely, his many enemies. “I was just an unindicted co-conspirator like everyone else in the United State of America,” he rails at one point. As for that secret honor? According to Altman’s Nixon, the people that put him in charge, the Committee of 100, wanted him to continue the Vietnam War, to nab a third term, and to use China against the Soviets and then “carve up the markets of the rest of the goddamned world.” Nixon fell on his sword rather than let this to happen. So Altman’s take was similar to Stone’s later take. Both imply that while Nixon may have been a bastard, the people behind him? Man, you don’t want to go there. 5. Nixon (1995): I got stuck with the director’s cut. Interestingly, the reinstated scenes on an HDTV show up blurry, or blurrier, so let you know exactly what was cut. And why. Because most of these scenes focus on that Oliver Stone paranoia of “the system” being like a “beast.” They deserved the cutting room floor. That said, the theatrical version is quite good and fairly sympathetic to Nixon. So interesting. Hollywood gives us sympathetic Nixons and LBJs but coldhearted Thomas Jeffersons. Love Anthony Hopkins in the title role, but Joan Allen (sorry, darling) is way too sexy to play Pat Nixon. Money quote: “People vote not out of love but fear.” 6. The Crossing (1999): An A&E film. A little slow but a fascinating look at the low point of the American Revolution. It’s the moment when, out of desperation, we went on the attack, the surprise attack, and salvaged our last chance at independence. 1. Truman (1995): Gary Sinese is great but it’s a dull, conventional film (from HBO) about the man who, we’re told time and again, was “as stubborn as a Missouri mule.” Sample line from a speech during his 1948 whistle-stop tour. “I am for the people and against the special interests.” Hey, me too! In the end, too much life to be portrayed in too little time. And, sorry Gore Vidal, but no mention of the creation of the National Security State in 1947. Yeah, big shock. 2. Jefferson in Paris (1995): One gets the feeling the filmmakers wanted to suggest the leisurely pace of 18th century society, as Stanley Kubrick did with Barry Lyndon, but here it just comes off as dull. Nolte’s Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, is a remarkably cold and hypocritical man. 3. Wilson (1944): Another reluctant president. Another pure man. The only presidential biopic to be nominated for best picture. Also helped kill the presidential biopic since it bombed at the box office. 4. The Reagans (2003): Before Josh Brolin played W., his father, James Brolin, played Reagan. All in the family. Good quote from Republican operatives in 1964 talking amongst themselves: “His lack of political knowledge, c’mon fellas, just makes him seem more a man of the people!” Republicans have been following that script ever since: Reagan, Quayle, W., Palin... 5. Sunrise at Campobello (1960): Former Navy secretary and vice-presidential nominee FDR contracts polio but makes his political comeback at the 1924 Democratic Convention. From a popular play, but onscreen (sorry) it just sits there. 6. Abraham Lincoln (1930): D.W. Griffith’s last film. Ponderous, folksy, monumental, dusty. Like Truman in Truman, Lincoln is portrayed as a man without ambition. Here’s an idea of what the film is like: At one point, late at night, Lincoln (Walter Huston) paces in the White House only to stop and proclaim: “I’ve got it, Mary! I’ve found the man to win the war! And his name is…GRANT!” And that, kids, is how presidential decisions are made. 7. DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003): The worst. Two Minute Review: W. (2008) Oliver Stone’s W. is like our 43rd president’s greatest hits. Here he is chug-a-lugging at Yale and here he is finding Jesus and here he is failing at oil rigs, and oil drilling, and running for Congress. Here he is choking on a pretzel. Stone intercuts these familiar incidents with the familiar arguments, dramatized over presidential lunches and Oval Office meetings and cabinet meetings, that led us into Iraq. It’s straightforward storytelling — particularly for Stone. Hell, it’s almost breezy. The two hours go by like that, and Josh Brolin, in the lead, is amazing. He gives us a complex portrait of a very simple man. It’s a father-son film. “You disappoint me, Junior,” Herbert Walker tells him early on. “Deeply disappoint me.” He tells him, “You only get one bite at the apple,” but W. keeps biting and missing. He drinks, carouses, goes after girls. He can’t find himself. Even after he finds Laura, and Jesus, and helps his father get elected the 41st president of the United States, he’s disappointed. Greatness escapes him. Hell, mediocrity escapes him. You go in wondering if Stone’s portrait of W. will be different from our own image of W. and it isn’t. What you see is what you get. Yes, he’s that thick, that muddled, and yet that certain. The film implies that certain Machiavellian types (Rove, Cheney) manipulate W. into going where he already wants to go (into politics, into Iraq), and it feels true, but it’s not like we’re learning anything here. I learned, or re-learned (did I ever know it?) that W. speaks Spanish but that’s the only time I remember being surprised by the title character. Since so much of the story is familiar, since, like the subject, there’s not much there there, we might have to wait years before we figure out if the movie is any good. It really is too close to us to gauge. It’s a tragedy, certainly, and the tragedy is that in trying to win his father’s love, or outdo what his father did, or make up for his father’s great loss, W. — yes, aided and abetted by a motley crew — put us on a calamitous national and international path... and yet still can’t think of one thing he did wrong. That lack of introspection is his tragedy. The rest of it is ours. Canvassing for Obama in Youngstown, OH My friend Andy Engelson, a father of two, an editor in Seattle, and one of the nicest people I know, spent the first weekend in October canvassing for Obama in Ohio. Here’s what he found… After flying into Columbus and driving three hours east, I arrived in Youngstown in the early evening. This is a former steel town, and enormous empty steel mills fill the Mahoning River Valley. Most of the city is perched on the hills above the valley, and evidence of a broken economy is everywhere: boarded-up businesses, crumbling homes, a nearly empty downtown. But the campaign office was a hub of activity—filled with local volunteers with union T-shirts, OSU Buckeye sweatshirts and Obama buttons. The volunteer coordinator (who works long, long hours) was a bubbly college student from Long Island. She quickly put me to work calling volunteers to set up door-to-door canvassing over the weekend. You may have heard about the strength of Obama’s “ground game”—a vast grassroots network of volunteers. It is truly impressive. Both in Philadelphia (where I canvassed for Obama in April), and in Youngstown, everyone who volunteers is quickly trained, put to work and effusively thanked. Every person we call who is voting for Obama is asked to volunteer, and those who say yes get a follow-up call. During the next afternoon, I headed out to the local Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and other big-box stores to register voters. I had done this in Seattle, and in Youngstown I succeeded in signing up about a dozen new voters. Unfortunately, after a while, a cranky middle manager came out of Wal-Mart and told me “You can’t gather signatures here!” I told her I was simply registering voters but she wasn’t sympathetic. Too bad these companies, which profit so much from working people, don’t want them to exercise their right to vote. The next day, it was into the neighborhoods to canvass. I was paired up with Beverly, a woman from Buffalo, who, like me, had arrived for the weekend to volunteer. She told me she has a 26-year old son, also named Andy, once ran for city council as a Republican, but is an avid supporter of Obama. She was particularly impressed with his leadership and speaking skills, and felt the need to convince others. She’d lost her own election, but it had given her experience going to door-to-door and talking to voters. A number of years ago, she was a Buffalo Bills cheerleader, and there’s still a bit of that spirit in her as we went door to door in Youngstown urging people to vote for Obama. Youngstown is definitely in hard times. In many neighborhoods we visited, it seemed as if every other home was abandoned: broken windows, vines growing up the sides of the house or trees fallen in the yard from Hurricane Ike. There are still some jobs in Youngstown—GM has a plant not far from town—and you will find pockets of nice homes. But often, just across the street, you’ll see the burned-out shell of a school or a group of men sitting on a doorstep drinking beer from 20-ounce cans in paper sacks. In Ohio, voters can go to any Board of Elections building and vote anytime between now and Nov. 4. The campaign was pushing this hard in order to get everyone eligible out to vote and reduce lines on election day. You may remember the news from 2004, when in parts of Ohio there were eight-hour lines at polling places. What I enjoy most about canvassing is talking to undecided voters. The conversations we had were positive, instructive and encouraging. Generally, these undecided voters are white, working class and over 60. One woman and I talked a good 10 minutes about the economy, about people not getting medical care because they don’t have insurance, about the situation in Youngstown. People here are amazingly upbeat and friendly despite the circumstances. Occasionally, I’d meet less-than-friendly people. I also had one very negative confrontation. It was late in the day, and I knocked at the second-to-last house on my list. I heard a gruff “WHO IS IT?” from behind the door. I said I was a volunteer with the Obama campaign and inquired about a young voter on my list who lived there. Silence. So I said goodbye and left some campaign literature at the door. As I was walking back to the sidewalk, the man burst out a side door and literally came running at me, red in the face. A young black man was running up behind him, but unable to hold this guy back. Just inches from me, the man, a white man with a beard and shirt with a motorcycle logo, shouted “Who the HELL are you?” He was shaking with rage. I told him again who I was and after a brief pause he yelled at me,“Just keep walking! NOW!” I did just that, moving slowly away. I met up with Beverly, who’d been working another street, and we drove back to the campaign office in the fading light. It was scary to say the least. Had I flinched I think the guy would have struck me. What may have triggered the outburst was an incident in the neighborhood several days before. Two young African American men had posed as campaign workers just up the street, then robbed the home at gunpoint. So frustrating. Two stupid kids had hurt our efforts and inflamed racial tensions in this hard-hit town. Afterwards, we reported the encounter to the campaign office, and they agreed to stop canvassing in that immediate neighborhood. But nothing was going to stop me from going out the next day. On Sunday, I was invited by my hosts to attend a prayer breakfast at their church—the oldest African American church in Youngstown. Everyone was dressed in their finest, and the program featured members of churches talking about what had happened over the past year. There were presentations on what the church was doing in the community for children, for the elderly, and for those who were sick or homebound. A guest speaker joked about being riveted to CNN, and then talked about how many people in the community were worried about the future but were finding solace in the community of the church. There was plenty of singing, clapping, and a huge breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, biscuits, and grits. Afterwards, my host, Goldia, introduced me to the pastor, and, he shook my hand for at least a full minute. I was humbled to be so welcomed. Then back to the neighborhoods. We visited 200 or more homes over the course of the weekend. We talked to many undecideds, most of whom were worried about the economy. Youngstown is already dealing with a recession, they’re already “ahead” of the country in that regard. In fact, many, of the voters on our lists had already moved away. Either they’d been unable to make payments or they’d left Youngstown for good. It’s clear Youngstown’s problems will not be fixed overnight. Perhaps there’s not even much Obama can do outright. But I do think a fairer tax policy, some efforts to boost new energy industries, and getting more folks covered by health care is a start. The last eight years have not been good to this town. It reminded me how much is riding on this election. After a day knocking on doors in brilliant sunshine, Beverly returned to Buffalo and I spent the evening training a new volunteer, Ann, who had driven to Ohio from Los Angeles and would be volunteering in Youngstown until election day. If only I had the time to do that! I can’t say enough about how people respond to one-on-one contact with volunteers. People are appreciative and want to talk about the issues and hear about your personal reasons for supporting Obama. Even Republicans supporting McCain were appreciative. I talked to an older man named Jim while I was registering voters outside Walgreens. We had a friendly conversation. Even though he supported McCain, he thanked me for coming out from Seattle. It was those sorts of conversations that make me realize we are not as divided as the media portrays us. One of the things that draws me to Obama is that “agree to disagree” philosophy that has been missing from the national discourse for some time. And there’s a real satisfaction when you make a connection. That happened back in Philadelphia, when an older woman took me into her home and confessed that she would vote for Obama (rather than Clinton) but didn’t want her neighbors to know. She told me how, as a recently widowed woman, she was struggling to make ends meet. In tears, she told me how heating oil had cost her dearly the previous winter, and how she’d had to keep the thermostat below 60 to afford it. She’d voted for Reagan but was now more excited about the Obama campaign than any since Bobby Kennedy’s in ’68. She felt Obama actually gave a damn about people like her and was excited to see so many young people inspired by the campaign. And she was thankful, I think, that someone had taken the time to listen to her story. More than anything, though, this campaign has helped me. Helped me see what people are going through in places less fortunate than my own. Helped me see what issues are truly important to people. It has shown me that even in difficult times, people maintain a sense of humor and a friendliness that is truly inspiring. It also helped me meet people like Frank and his wife Mary. They are in their late 60s and have lived in Youngstown most of their lives. Frank suffered a stroke a few years ago so Mary asked if Beverly and I would come in and briefly talk to him: “It would mean so much to him. He can understand everything you say, but he can’t say anything.” We came into the home, and Mary introduced us as two volunteers working for the Obama campaign. “Frank, they’ve come here to visit you and ask if you’re going to support Obama. What do you think of Obama, Frank?” Sitting at the kitchen table in a wheelchair with his head cocked to one side, he eyed us for a long moment. Then he slowly raised his hand and formed his shaking fingers into an OK sign. Norman Mailer and the 1964 Republican Convention The excerpts of Norman Mailer’s letters in The New Yorker led me back to his piece, “In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964,” from Cannibals and Christians, which I first read over a decade ago. I remember I didn’t particularly like it. Norman went off on too many tangents, he reduced too many groups — “Goldwater girls ran to two varieties,” etc. Sometimes this stuff felt close to truth and sometimes it just felt hollow and mean. Parts of it still feel hollow and mean but most of the article feels shockingly contemporary. It makes the 1964 election feel like the first half of a bookend whose second half we may be fashioning. So an Arizona senator is running for president by appealing to the worst elements of his party. The Midwestern and western elements of that party viciously attack the eastern establishment, the media, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “Indeed there was a general agreement that the basic war was between Main Street and Wall Street,” Norman writes. There’s a down-home folksiness in the candidate’s voice: “I think we’re going to give the Democrats a heck of a surprise,” he says. There’s a callback to Christianity: “The thing to remember is that America is a spiritual country, we’re founded on belief in God, we may wander a little as a country but we never get too far away,” he says. At the convention, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco of all places, a senator from Colorado, Dominick, gives a speech in which he quotes a New York Times editorial from 1765 which rebuked Patrick Henry for his extreme ideas. Norman writes: Delegates and gallery whooped it up. Next day Dominick confessed. He was only “spoofing.” He had known: there was no New York Times in 1765. Nor was there any editorial. An old debater’s trick. If there are no good facts, make them up. Be quick to write your own statistics. There was some umbilical tie between the Right Wing and the psychopathic liar. Even so, for a time Norman considers voting for Goldwater. There are elements of LBJ and the Democratic party he can’t abide — its modern, clinical quality — and he thinks it may be worse to die a slow, suffocating death than to go out with Goldwater in a blaze of glory. But then: One could not vote for a man who made a career by crying Communist—that was too easy: half the pigs, bullies and cowards of the twentieth century had made their fortune on that fear. I had a moment of rage at the swindle. Cuba comes up, and Norman writes: One could live with a country which was mad, one could even come to love her (for there was agony beneath the madness), but you could not share your life with a nation which was powerful, a coward, and righteously pleased because a foe one-hundredth our size had been destroyed. Again and again, from a distance of 44 years, Norman hits you upside the head with the truth. Goldwater lost that election, he lost big, but in later years even the much-hated media would see that convention, and that loss, as the birth of the modern Republican party; they’d bend to Goldwater and see him through orange-colored glasses. Read this, though, and there’s no doubt about the elements he was stirring up. So it feels like a bookend. Two Arizona senators. The first attacking the Civil Rights Act, the second attacking what may be the culmination of that Act. A friend of mine once said, “When I was a teenager I realized that you could either be successful or you could be right,” and in the early 1960s the Democratic party decided to be right, finally right, on the issue of civil rights and on the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and since then the Republican party has been successful largely on the back of that decision. But maybe not now. Maybe this period, in which I’ve lived my entire life, can finally be bookended. Ended. Maybe. Musical Quote of the Day Swimming like there's no tomorrow Living like there's no regret Looked up and saw the sorrow Too far out Too far out This is what they said would happen We were warned We were warned We were too far out —from the song "Too Far Out" by The Tropicals The VEEP Debate: America's Cocktail Waitress I'm glad people watched. 69.9 million viewers. I wish she'd done worse. I want her off the national stage. She doesn't belong there. She doesn't belong there even if everything is going right, and it sure as hell ain't. We're in the middle of a perfect storm of crises — Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, banking crisis, mortgage crisis, unemployment. Our national debt is surging past $10 trillion, which is twice the amount it was when George Bush took office. Remember that healthy surplus he inherited that he promptly gave away in Santy-Claus checks and tax breaks for the wealthy? $10 trillion! And that's before the bailout. And there's still 40-plus percent who think Sarah Palin should be vice president and possibly president of the United States? To add what? To offer what? A platitude while you lose your job? A wink and a smile while you lose your home? You listened to her hold onto her talking points for dear life and thought, "What kind of ego does it take to be so blinded to your complete lack of qualifications for a job? And not just any job but the job of leading our country through the greatest crises it's faced since the Great Depression and WW II? How dare she? How dare he?" I'll never forgive John McCain for putting her on that stage. Here's what I don't get. Most of us have to suffer through unqualified bosses — the world is rife with them — and yet, given the chance, the American people keep electing unqualified bosses, someone who obviously isn't smart enough for the job. The Republicans keep giving us these people: Reagan, Quayle, W., now Palin. Just when you think it can't get worse, it does. Enough. Enough. Remember when The National Review was run by smart people? Here's what its current editor, Rich Lowry, said about Palin's performance Thursday night: I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. I can think of no better response than what one of Andrew Sullivan's readers wrote: In reaction to Rich Lowry, I'm sure I'm not the only woman who, upon reading his words, sat up a little straighter and said, "Is he kidding? Is he goddamn kidding me?" Is this the kind of reaction the women in this country should want men to have to the possible first female Vice Presidential candidate in history? Holy hell. I thought Palin's performance at the debate was downright embarrassing and on top of that I have to read this clown's blog, stating more or less that Palin gave him an erection? Little starbursts my ass. Here's what I thought when Palin "dropped" that first wink at us: "Did she just wink at us like she was America's cocktail waitress?" Rich Lowry is on the verge of slapping Sarah Palin on the ass and asking her for another of those fantastic whiskey sours. Please. Please. Please. Get her off the stage. Now. People are watching. P.S. Joe Biden kicked ass. The Real Joe Sixpack I first saw this on Andrew Sullivan's site and teared up — particularly at the beginning when everyone starts standing. Oliver Willis calls Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO delivering the speech, his hero for the day. He is, and more. In facing up to our great national horror we may be finally overcoming it. Literary Quote of the Day "George F. Will writes: 'Bush's terseness is Ernest Hemingway seasoned with John Wesley.' "Well, one is hardly familiar with John Wesley's sermons, but I do know that to put George W. Bush's prose next to Hemingway's is equal to saying that Jackie Susann is right up there with Jane Austen. Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves." —Norman Mailer, in a letter to The Boston Globe, March 13, 2002, and reprinted in a section of the Oct. 6 New Yorker. The last sentence in particular made me wonder what Norman would've made of Sarah Palin. We had a good debate party here on First Hill last night, lots of folks, drinks, kids running around and chasing the cat, poor Jellybean, who hid most of the evening but responded well in the quiet afterwards. No ill effects at basically being the tiny Paul McCartney being chased by grasping and clomping Jellybeaniacs everywhere. As for the debate itself, I thought both sides did well, but my guy — Barack, in case you haven’t been paying attention — did better. He was smart, articulate, tough but civil. He looked presidential. John McCain was rude and crotchety and refused to even look at his opponent. And while he demonstrated extensive foreign policy expertise, nothing he said, either about foreign affairs or the economy, indicated any change in the direction we’ve been going in, disastrously, for the last eight years. So basically: Barack refuted the concerns that undecideds had about him (that he wasn’t up to the task) while McCain exacerbated the concerns that undecideds had about him (that, in terms of policy, he was an older and more crotchety version of Bush, and will offer nothing in terms of change). - Andrew Sullivan’s live blogging of the debate - Footage of a Fox News(!) focus group of independents that gave the debate to Barack - An article on why and where Barack won. By a 62-32 margin, voters felt he was more in touch with their needs and concerns. But here’s the bigger number: “The CBS poll of undecideds has more confirmatory detail. Obama went from a +18 on “understanding your needs and problems” before the debate to a +56 (!) afterward. And he went from a -9 on “prepared to be president” to a +21.” - Finally, Michael Seitzman over at HuffPost has a great post about what exactly it is that Barack is bringing that is so appealing and that we haven’t seen in national politics, or even national life, for so long: Grace. NY Times Offers Lack of Leadership Christ, the NY Times editorial did the exact same thing Gail Collins just did. They started off with a good, deserved swipe at Pres. Bush: It took President Bush until Wednesday night to address the American people about the nation’s financial crisis, and pretty much all he had to offer was fear itself. But then they say this about our absent leadership: Given Mr. Bush’s shockingly weak performance, the only ones who could provide that are the two men battling to succeed him. So far, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is offering that leadership. Really? Both? Obama isn't offering leadership? So you keep reading and discover that the brunt of the article is about how badly McCain has handled things: First, he claimed that the economy was strong, ignoring the deep distress of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have already lost their homes. Then he called for a 9/11-style commission to study the causes of the crisis, as if there were a mystery to be solved. Over the last few days he has become a born-again populist, a stance entirely at odds with the career, as he often says, started as “a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution.” After daily pivoting, Mr. McCain now says that the bailout being debated in Congress has to protect taxpayers, that all the money has to be spent in public and that a bipartisan board should “provide oversight.” But he offered not the slightest clue about how he would ensure that taxpayers would ever “recover” the bailout money. Mr. McCain proposed capping executives’ pay at firms that get bailout money, a nicely punitive idea but one that does nothing to mitigate the crisis. And that is about as far as his new populism went. What is most important is that Mr. McCain hasn’t said a word about strengthening regulation or budged one inch from his insistence on maintaining Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Their complaints about Obama, meanwhile, are hardly complaints: Mr. Obama has been clearer on the magnitude and causes of the financial crisis. He has long called for robust regulation of the financial industry, and he said early on that a bailout must protect taxpayers. Mr. Obama also recognizes that the wealthy must pay more taxes or this country will never dig out of its deep financial hole. But as he does too often, Mr. Obama walked up to the edge of offering full prescriptions and stopped there. In other words, McCain is running around with his head cut off, flip-flopping and flop-sweating all over the country, while Obama offers exactly what we need but somehow doesn't go far enough, and this, in the NY Times' mind, equals a lack of leadership from both? Somebody get me rewrite. Please. Bush and the Hail Mary Candidate Gail Collins has a great graf on Bush's speech last night: There is, in a way, a kind of talent required to tell the nation that it’s teetering on the brink of disaster in a way that makes the viewers’ attention wander. Bush’s explanation about how the rescue bill would unclog the lines of credit made the whole thing sound less important than a Liquid-Plumr commercial. Unfortunately, she then goes off and condemns both presidential candidates — as if Barack's level-headed response to this crisis somehow equalled McCain's frenetic and sometimes desperate (and now "hail mary") response. Not sure why she does this. Is she straining for objectivity? She's a columnist; she doesn't have to be objective. Besides, as I've said often and I'll keep saying until the MSM gets it, objectivity doesn't mean stupidity. It also doesn't mean that if one side is constantly and glaringly wrong that you search for some piddly little thing the other side got wrong to balance the report. Sometimes the report is unbalanced. Sometimes, so too is the candidate. Movie Quote of the Day "It would be the easiest thing for me as president to ask for a declaration of war. A man on a horseback is always a hero. But I wouldn't have to do the fighting. Some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some great family would have to do the fighting — and the dying. When I ask them to do that, I want to be very sure that what they're dying for is worthwhile." — Pres. Woodrow Wilson (Alexander Knox) after the sinking of the Lusitania in Wilson (1944) Movie Quote of the Day "I often think of something Woodrow Wilson said to me. 'It is only once in a generation that people can be lifted above material things. That is why conservative government is in the saddle for two-thirds of the time.'" —Franklin (Ralph Bellamy) to Eleanor Roosevelt (Greer Garson), in Sunrise at Campbello (1960) Mark Antony in Oxford Town Good, sad post byJoseph Romm on what people want to hear during the presidential debates and why the Dems always screw it up. It goes back to Mark Antony in the Roman Forum: "I am no orator, as Brutus is/ But — as you know me all — a plain blunt man." Gourevitch on Palin I assume Philip Gourevitch went to Alaska in July to write a piece about Ted Stevens' indictment and attempted comeback — a piece that was subsequently disrupted by the imbecilic vetting from the McCain vice-presidential selection committee. The result, which appears in the Sept. 22 New Yorker, is mostly about Sarah Palin. On the plus side, Gourevitch interviewed Palin before she entered (and then, like a skittish animal, was shielded from) the national spotlight, so he's got quotes that didn't have to be run by or through or into Rick Davis. Palin is surprisingly up front about earmarks, for example, the bete noir (except for You-Know-Who) of the McCain campaign: “The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship. ... There isn’t a need to aspire to live without any earmarks. The writing on the wall, though, is that times are changing. Presidential candidates have promised earmark reform, so we gotta deal with it, we gotta live with it, understanding that our senior senator, especially—he’s eighty-four years old, he is not gonna be able to serve in the Senate forever." Palin's Access: Beyond Disgraceful Andrew Sullivan on the Republican vice-presidential candidate and the press: The press is beginning to resist the incredibly sexist handling of Palin by the McCain campaign. There is a simple point here: any candidate for president should be as available to press inquiries as humanly possible. Barring a press conference for three weeks, preventing any questions apart from two television interviews, one by manic partisan Sean Hannity, devising less onerous debate rules for a female candidate, and then trying to turn the press into an infomercial for the GOP is beyond disgraceful. Fight back, you hacks! Demand access. Demand accountability! It's our duty. If we cannot ask questions of a total newbie six weeks before an election in which she could become president of the country, then the First Amendment is pointless. Grow some! The Big Red Dog is Wanted Dead or Alive Two days later, for the same article, I watched Thirteen Days, the 2000 account of the Cuban Missile Crisis starring Kevin Costner as Kenny O'Donnell, JFK's special assistant, and Bruce Greenwood in an understated and suggestive turn as our first telegenic president. (I should add that, for all the faults of the film, Timothy Bottoms did a fine job as Bush in DC 9/11.) So it's early in the crisis and the joint chiefs are recommending bombing Cuba back to the stone age. Even former Secretary of State Dean Acheson is recommending same with a foreknowledge of consquences that is truly frightening: We warn, we strike, they strike back in Berlin, NATO kicks in. "Hopefully," he says, "cooler heads prevail." On the third day, General Curtis Le May gets into the act with this rationale: "The big red dog is diggin' in our backyard and we are justified in shooting him..." Afterwards, JFK and his advisors, who are looking for the alternative, which, of course, turns out to be the quarantine or blockade of Cuba, joke about the general's language — the reduction to homey metaphor of an act that might end the world — and I realized, for the zillionth time, that for the last eight years we've had the General Le Mays not only running things but giving rationales for our actions: "Wanted: Dead or Alive," etc. We've had no real leadership. We've had no one demanding more evidence and looking for alternatives. We've had no cooler heads. We've rushed in where angels fear to tread. Hell, the General Le Mays of the Bush administration have been the cooler heads. So, as bad as things are, and they're pretty bad, thank God we didn't have Bush and his team in place in October 1962. Why 'DC: 9/11' is the New 'Reefer Madness' I thought of this while watching, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime movie from 2003, written and produced by British-born Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd, which first aired, amid controversy, in September 2003. I know. Life’s short, why waste two hours? Unfortunately I’m writing an article about presidents on film to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s W., and DC 9/11 is part of the price you pay. But I quickly began to see the humor. SNL came to mind when Pres. Bush, on Air Force One, switches to commander-in-chief mode and starts barking orders at Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “Hike military alert status to Delta! That's the military, the C.I.A., foreign, domestic, everything! And if you haven't gone to Defcon 3, you oughtta.” He barks orders at a submissive Cheney. He tells everyone, over and over, that Osama bin Laden will pay: - “We’re gonna hunt down and find those folks who committed this.” - “Whoever did this isn’t going to like me as president.” - “We’re going to kick the hell out of whoever did this. No slap on the wrist this time.” But it wasn’t until Rumsfeld raises the specter of Saddam Hussein that I saw the true brilliance of DC 9/11. This is a movie that actually glorifies the worst foreign policy decisions we’ve ever made. It’s like finding a 1964 film celebrating the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It’s like, dare I say, something by Leni Riefenstahl. Just not, you know, artistic. Here’s the dialogue from the Sept. 13 cabinet meeting after Rumsfeld raises the question of Iraq: Powell: The mission is the destruction of al Qaeda. Hussein isn’t your man.There are more meetings. Bush becomes more certain, more messianic. Rendition and domestic spying are implied. You’re either with us or with the terrorists. In the Sept. 15 meeting, Powell warns Bush that if we go after someone besides al Qaeda our allies may fall away and leave us isolated. Bush replies: Rumsfeld: He is if we’re talking about terrorism in the broadest sense. We know he never stopped developing weapons of mass destruction... Cheney: Al Qaeda lacks weapons. That’s why they used our own aircraft. You put Hussein and bin Laden together...? Bush: Is that an immediate threat? Cheney: The enemy is clearly more than UBL [bin Laden] and the Taliban. If we’re including people who support terrorists, that does open the door to Iraq. But unlike bin Laden, we know where to find them. “At some point, we may be the only ones left standing. And that will have to be OK. That’s why we’re America.”Powell says bin Laden attacked us, not Saddam, and Wolfowitz replies: “Only because he was unable. But he’s got the arms. He’s been developing everything from nuclear weapons to smallpox to anthrax. A whole range of weapons of mass destruction. ... All he’s lacked is the means to deliver those weapons to our shores. Well, UBL has shown him he’s got a system of delivery.” Here’s what’s awful. The reason our foreign policy mistakes were disastrous are there in the script for anyone to see — and they were visible back then. 9/11 did require a new playbook. We were attacked by a loose organization that could hide, rather than a nation-state that couldn’t. Yet our ultimate response was to attack a nation-state because, in Cheney’s words, “We know where to find them.” Which is the very reason we shouldn’t have attacked them. That was the old playbook. It’s still the old playbook. And we still don’t get it. DC 9/11 is either so funny it’s sad or so sad it’s funny. It should become a cult classic like Reefer Madness: a propaganda film that, through its over-the-top idiocy, proves its opposite. It’s also a good reminder of what once constituted conservative spin. Remember Bush as action hero? As cowboy? “[Saddam] is surely developing WMDs,” Bush says. “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” Bush says. We’re going to “rid the world of evil,” Bush says. “This will decidedly not be another Vietnam,” Bush says. "You want to see a REAL liberal media, Otis?" Nicholas Kristof's column this morning on how well the Republican slime machine is working — 13 percent of registered voters think Barack Obama is Muslim, while the "End Times" people literally think he's the anti-Christ — brought back that New Yorker cover controversy from two months ago. I'd argue my post back then wasn't prescient but historical; anyone who paid attention in '04 knew it would happen. Since then the New Yorker has given us their anti-John McCain cover: He's rich, playing Monopoly; his wife carries a glass of wine. So in one cover they dress up Barack and Michelle Obama as what they aren't (America's enemies) and in the other they dress up John and Cindy McCain as what they are (rich bastards) and call it even. Barack becomes who Americans want to kill, McCain who Americans want to be. Thank you, liberal media. Seriously, everytime I hear that phrase, "liberal media," I want to deck somebody. I think of Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in the original Superman, talking to Ned Beatty's dimwitted Otis: "You want to see a liberal media, Otis? You want to see a REAL liberal media, Otis?" Imagine that. The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the network news, CNN, all as politically motivated as FOX News and Rush Limbaugh. As it is, this media, the corporate kind, is still being played by the Republicans, who slime the entire process until you just want to retch. But hold onto these facts: - Republican stupidity and arrogance got us into Iraq. - Republican greed and mania for deregulation got us into our current fiscal crisis. - The Republican slime-machine is destroying our political process. Hold onto these facts and please wake the @#$%&!!!! up. Tom Toles is Genius He's got a good one today on the 180-degree flip-flops of the McCain campaign, but it's the editorial cartoon yesterday, particularly the coda, that got me. Brilliant. Our country in a nutshell: Things to Read Before the Next Great Depression A few bits and pieces collected from the Web: - Chris Kelly has another so-funny-it's-sad piece about the current level of our political debate: specifically, John McCain, who implies the other guy thinks he's messianic, saying he will put an end to both evil (War on Terror) and now greed (banking crisis, uncapitalized thus far). "John McCain will not only take on special interests and Washington insiders, he'll fundamentally alter human nature. ... Or maybe he's just a desperate shell of a man, babbling glorp." - Please read Bob Cesca's piece on why, given the collapse of our foreign policy, our economy, our status in the world, this race is still close. Before I read Cesca, I would've assumed the race was still close becaue of race, but he's got a better point. There's a lot of noise in the right-wing media that never reaches my ears, but that noise is constant and overwhelming and unaccountable. It says what it wants. And right now it's saying some pretty nasty shit. Also known as lies. Often about race. - David Brauer has a piece on MinnPost about my hometown newspaper, and the paper my father worked at for 30 years, that's sad but indicative of the current state of newspapers. Strib editor Nancy Barnes sent staff an e-mail about political coverage, a warning to remain objective, but then added this: "If you are involved in a political story, please look at it from several different perspectives and ask yourself: 'If I were running, would I find this fair and balanced?'" Brauer rightly adds, "I doubt the last thing Ben Bradlee said to Woodward and Bernstein was, 'Ask yourself:"'If I were president, would I find our Watergate coverage fair and balanced?''" Exactly. Being objective doesn't mean being stupid. My Name is Erik Lundegaard and I Approve of This MessageMonday September 15, 2008 Who is Barack Obama? Atticus Finch For most of the year, Republicans have tried to negatively define Barack Obama. They compare him to the most empty aspects of our own society and the most violent aspects of global society. They twist everything, and lie about anything, and in doing so reveal exactly who and how desperate they are. In the face of these attacks, Barack has remained calm, articulate, resolute. His anger, when it comes, is not the anger of a man with a hair-trigger temper, like John McCain, but the righteous anger of someone who knows that not only he, but our entire system, is being wronged. And it got me thinking about who this reminds me of. We know how John McCain defines himself — as a maverick — but anyone who’s been paying attention knows how empty that slogan is. He’s a follower at this point. He’s following the lead of Steve Schmidt, his campaign manager, who once followed the lead of Karl Rove. Whatever smear works, whatever lie works, no matter how sleazy, that’s what they’ll do. So regardless of what John McCain once was, he has now been reduced to the role of a not very bright man surrounded by extremely malicious people. The same malicious people, I should add, who have surrounded another not very bright man, George W. Bush, for the last eight years. But they keep pumping out the myth. The chest-thumping, Paul Fistinyourface myth of the stupidly aggressive American. In a magazine interview, John McCain even compared himself to TV hero Jack Bauer of “24,” until he was reminded that Bauer’s main (and suspect) means of gathering information — torture — is what John McCain suffered under for five years. But I guess torture is good as long as we’re the torturers. I guess bullying is good as long as we’re the bullies. That’s what half the country seems to think anyway. Barack, it’s true, is no bully. Here he is after the Republicans mocked him for his community service: And here’s his response after Gov. Palin suggested that habeas corpus and the U.S. Constitution don’t matter: Barack Obama is tough but ethical. He’s someone who can make friends out of our enemies rather than — as the Republicans keep doing — enemies out of our friends. So who does Barack remind me of? He’s a civil rights lawyer who taught Constitutional law and is bringing up two girls the right way. When bullies gather, he stands up for what’s right, he stands up for the rule of law, he stands up. He’s an honorable man running an honorable campaign. You’ve already read the headline so you already know my answer. Barack Obama reminds me of Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and, according to the American Film Institute, the greatest hero in American movie history. Here’s Scout on Atticus: “There just didn't seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn't explain.” Here’s Atticus to Scout: “If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” This is the very lesson that chest-thumping Republicans have mocked for the last seven years. And where has it gotten us? Wasting billions pursuing the wrong people in the wrong places. Republicans aren’t interested in understanding. They’re not even interested in talking. You can almost imagine this bit of dialogue between Atticus and Scout taking place between Obama and a certain Republican vice-presidential candidate: Atticus: Scout, do you know what a compromise is? Scout: Bending the law? Atticus: Um, no. It’s an agreement reached by mutual consent. We’re still in this midst of our own mythic internal struggle, aren’t we, between the violent and often lawless aspects that John McCain represents, and the tough but ethical rule of law that Barack Obama represents. I would’ve thought this battle was over by now. I would’ve thought rule of law triumphed long ago. Apparently not. Even Atticus, that great hero, lost his case. He proved his case but the trial was rigged from the start by our own overwhelming prejudices, by our need to see things as they are not, by our need to buy into the lie. Are we a better country now? Or do we still need to see things as they are not? Do we still need to buy into the lie? Up to you. OK, Everyone Read Andrew Sullivan Everyone. The full piece is here. This is merely the overture: For the past two weeks serious commentators and columnists have been asked to take the candidacy of Sarah Palin for the vice-presidency of the United States seriously. Formerly sane people have written of the McCain campaign’s selection of this running mate as if it represents a new face for Republicanism, an emblem of can-do western spirit, a brilliant ploy to win over Clinton voters, a new feminism, a reformist revolution, and a genius appeal to the religious right. I’m afraid I cannot join in. In fact I cannot say anything about this candidacy that takes it in any way seriously. It is a farce. It is absurd. It is an insult to all intelligent people. It is a sign of a candidate who has lost his mind. There is no way to take the nomination of Palin to be vice-president of the world’s sole superpower - except to treat it as a massive, unforgivable, inexplicable decision by someone who has either gone insane or is managerially unfit to be president of the United States. When, at some point, the hysteria dies down, even her supporters will realise that, by this decision, McCain has rendered himself unfit to run a branch of Starbucks, let alone the White House. Movie Quote of the Day "His lack of political knowledge, c'mon fellas, just makes him seem more a man of the people." Palin: Worse than We Thought Perhaps restoring my faith in the mainstream media, The NY Times has a front-page story today on the style of politics Sarah Palin has practiced both as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska. It ain't pretty. It's actually worse than we thought. She fires professional people for personal reasons and hires unqualified friends in their place. Her cronyism makes George W. Bush look like a stern judge of character. Examples: - When there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency. Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages. Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people. “I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ " The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend. “I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one. In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters. And this doesn't even get into the firing of Wasilla's Police Chief, Irl Stambaugh, because he intimidated her, nor the 'Troopergate' scandal currently being investigated in Alaska, in which Palin and her husband allegedly pressured state officials into firing a state trooper who was divorcing her sister. Some woman of the people. More bad news. She "puts a premium on secrecy and loyalty" and "is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated" and unavailable. Again, she's out-Bushing Bush here: - Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that his request would cost $468,784 to process. When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show. And this is the woman John McCain thinks is good enough to be a heartbeat away from the most important job in the world?? At a time when we need the smartest, most open and most diplomatic person possible to steer us through the various crises, both domestic and international, the Bush administration is leaving us??? You talk about bad judgment. Let's hope the American electorate's judgment is better. Fallows on the Toxic Traits of Palin/Bush Here's a great post by James Fallows on why Gov. Palin's ignorance abou the Bush Doctrine could have dire consequences for this country. Highlights: Sarah Palin did not know this issue, or any part of it. The view she actually expressed — an endorsement of "preemptive" action — was fine on its own merits. But it is not the stated doctrine of the Bush Administration, it is not the policy her running mate has endorsed, and it is not the concept under which her own son is going off to Iraq. How could she not know this? For the same reason I don't know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era. A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was: 2) Lack of curiosity That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness. We don't know for sure about #2 for Palin yet -- she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3. Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role. Lies, Damn Lies and John McCain Like the Best Show Ever My friend Craig, below and in the New York Times, discusses how most Americans reacted to 9/11 as if it were just something that happened on TV, which, for most of them, is exactly what it was. We seem to be reacting to the presidential election in the same way. As if it’s just a show. As if there’s no connection between us and these characters except in how they entertain us. The Biden pick? So boring. We saw that coming. Yeah, six terms in the U.S. Senate. Yeah, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he talks too much, doesn’t he? That’s kind of funny. Let’s make a joke about that. Otherwise get him off stage. The Palin pick? How exciting! Boy, did that jazz things up! Did you see how everyone was against her, and saying shit about her experience and all, and then she gave that speech and showed them? Wow, that was great! Such twists and turns in the storyline. It’s like “Lost,” you know? I gotta keep watching to find out what happens. And her family? Who knows what’s going on there? We can talk about them forever. That great line she had about selling the plane on e-Bay? What do you mean it was a lie? And how she fought the Bridge to Nowhere? What do you mean she supported it? Wow, this woman will say anything to stay on! I gotta keep watching. And now this interview thingee with Charlie Gibson. Yeah, she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is. Who does? Yeah, when she sent her son off to war, she said 9/11 was responsible for Iraq or whatever. But how cool was that when she started talking about a war with Russia! Like, a real war! Take those commies, man. I mean, Obama’s all blah-blah-blah about the Constitution and shit, but she kicks ass! Seriously, I thought they were gonna kick her off the show weeks ago, and now she might even win it? This is like the best show ever. John McCain and Steve Schmidt are going to burn in hell for all eternity Did you read this? Did you see the new McCain ad? It's called “Education” and it slams Barack Obama for not doing enough about education; then it delivers the whopper. In the real world, in Illinois, Barack Obama supported legislation to educate kids about pedophiles. The McCain ad calls this “sex education for kindergartners.” From Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton: “It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls — a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why.” Begala and Willis to Media: Just State the Facts, Jack Paul Begala on the media's he said/she said problem. When it comes to facts, demonstrable facts — i.e., Gov. Palin supported the bridge to nowhere, she was up to her ears in earmarks as mayor — it's part of the media's job to state these facts. It's not a matter of partisan debate. Or, if you want, we can go back to the John McCain-has-no-genitalia discussion. That was a fun one. Obama to Palin: “Don't Mock the Constitution” I’m the editor of several Super Lawyers publications around the country, including those in Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Wisconsin, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and New York — and in the New York issue, which comes out later this month, we’ve written profiles of three of the big civil liberties lawyers in the city: Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Arthur Eisenberg of the NYCLU and Manuel Vargas of the Immigrant Defense Project. The piece, written by Jessica Centers, mostly focuses on their work post-9/11. The various attacks on civil liberties that they’ve fought. The attacks that they keep fighting. So I’ve been immersed in this stuff, at an editorial remove, for a few months now. Which is why Sarah Palin’s line in her acceptance speech about how Barack wants to “read terrorists their rights” really pissed me off. At first I didn’t get it. What was she talking about? Then it hit me. Oh my god, she’s talking about the Guantanamo Bay detainees. She’s talking about how the Bush administration, and apparently Gov. Palin herself, or at least her (former Bush) speechwriters, feel it’s OK, and in fact demand, that the U.S. military have the right to grab any foreign national, in any place, put them in military prison, and deny them the right to meet their accusers: To know why they’ve been grabbed. To know why their life has been reduced to a life inside a small box. In a perfect world this wouldn’t matter, because everything would be perfect: The suspects would be the right suspects, the military would make no mistakes, everything would be fine, And America would be safer. But it’s not a perfect world, and this entire fiasco is making America less safe. Today Sen. Obama struck back, as eloquently as ever. First he said that to read terrorists their rights, you have to catch them first, and the Republicans haven’t been very good at that. Then he launched into a defense of habeas corpus, which has been around at least since the Magna Carta. From the Washington Post: Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'” The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because we don't always have the right person.” “We don't always catch the right person,” he said. “We may think it's Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it's Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.” ”The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting,“ Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. ”Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years." God, I love this man. McCain: Reckless, Nutty, Irresponsible Check out Andrew Sullivan's piece for the Times online. Highlights: There is one reason the job of vice-president exists. In a system with a single executive, you need someone to fill in if the president is incapacitated or dies. ...The pick is also the first presidential-level decision a candidate has to make. You learn a lot about the candidate... In Joe Biden, Obama revealed his core temperamental conservatism. It was a safe choice of someone deeply versed in foreign policy, and with roots that connected to the working class white ethnics he needed. It wasn't flashy; and was even a little underwhelming; but it was highly professional. What we have learned about John McCain from his selection of Sarah Palin is that he is as impulsive and reckless a decision-maker as George W. Bush. We know this not because of what we have learned about this Pentecostalist populist since she exploded on the scene last Friday morning (and God knows we have learned more than we ever wanted). We know it because of how McCain made the decision. He wanted his best friend, Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate for Al Gore. That pick would have been remarkable for its bipartisan nature, would have impressed independents, and signaled a centrist presidency centered on foreign policy. It would have been bold while not being rash. But McCain is in charge of a party that is now, at its core, religiously motivated. Joe Lieberman, for all his political talents, is Jewish, pro-choice on abortion, gay-inclusive, and domestically liberal. McCain faced an insurrection in his party base if he picked him. Without the evangelical base, he wasn't going to win. So last week, McCain picked someone he had only met once before. I repeat: he picked someone he had only met once before. His vetting chief sat Palin down for a face-to-face interview the Wednesday before last. It's very hard to overstate how nutty and irresponsible this is. Would any corporate chieftain pick a number two on those grounds and not be dismissed by his board for recklessness? The Easily Intimidated Sarah Palin But the brunt of the article is her clash with Wasilla’s Chief of Police, Irl Stambaugh, who created Wasilla’s police department a few years earlier. Stambaugh was in favor of two things that got him into trouble with Palin: - He backed an ordinance requiring Wasilla to close their bars at 2:30 a.m. (weekdays) and 3 a.m. (weekends), instead of the usual 5 a.m., because folks in nearby Anchorage, where the bars closed at the earlier hours, often drove to Wasilla to keep their buzz on, and drinking and driving, as we know, don’t mix. The Wasilla City Council rejected the ordinance by a 3-2 vote. Palin, then with the Council, voted with the majority. - Stambaugh opposed an NRA-backed state legislative proposal that would allow concealed weapons in banks and bars. He called the proposal (which was vetoed by then-Gov. Tony Knowles) ridiculous. “Bars, guns and booze don’t mix,” he said. So did Palin fire Stambaugh at the bidding of the NRA? Probably not. The article implies that she fired him for a more troubling reason: He intimidated her. He’s 6’2”, 240. He always tried to sit, and use a soothing voice, when talking with her, but when he finally got canned, this was part of her official rationale: “When I met with you in private, instead of engaging in interactive conversation with me, you gave me short, uncommunicative answers and then you would sit there and stare at me in silence with a very stern look, like you were trying to intimidate me.”I hope voters realize that if she feels intimidated by Putin, or Ahmadinejad, or new Pakistani President Zardari, all of whom won't try to use a soothing voice around her, firing them won’t be an option. McCain: Rash and Not Bright. Sound Familiar? As always, Frank Rich is worth reading and today he focuses on the haste with which John McCain makes his decisions and declarations. Here’s the money graph in easy-to-read list form: - In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. - That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. - He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Rich then asks, as if it needed asking, "Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain." How Palin was for Obama before she was against him Interesting piece by Philip Gourevitch on an interview Sarah Palin gave two weeks ago...back when her name had dropped off the list of potential veep candidates and she was freer to speak her mind. Overall, her talk is less doctrinaire and more bipartisan than the speech (written by former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully) she gave Thursday. She talks about how she's fine with the fact that Barack Obama was doing so well in Alaska, how his campaign themes echoed hers, and how she "always looked at Senator McCain just as a Joe Blow public member, looking from the outside in." She's still a hard-right Republican — pro-life even in the case of rape or incest — but she's somewhat open-minded on other issues. Now a lot of people are saying that it doesn't matter that Gov. Palin didn't write her own acceptance speech — that that's how politics works, and has worked, for decades. But here's the difference. Professional speechwriters tend to tailor speeches to the tastes and beliefs of the politician they work for. The politician usually has a hand, sometimes a firm hand, in what's being said. One gets the feeling that didn't happen with Palin. All you have to do is compare her open-mindedness two weeks ago with the Rove-like nastiness in her acceptance speech to realize that, with the exception of her personal story, she was basically a broadcaster, broadcasting someone else's words, on Thursday night. It wasn't her. It's almost a cliche now, particularly in political circles, but you gotta ask: Which is the real Sarah Palin? Drill Now! Drill Now! Drill Now! Here's a link to Andrew Sullivan's live-blogging of McCain's speech last night. It's good stuff. These entries in particular: 10.39 pm. His speech makes me feel a lot better as a depressed old-fashioned conservative. But it's striking how all the things that make me feel good seems to go down flat with this crowd. 10.46 pm. Drilling for oil gets the biggest applause. This is why I can't feel at home in this party. I mean: I'm actually open to this policy and agree with McCain on the all-of-the-above approach, including nuclear — but this obsession with more domestic oil just seems weird to me. I guess I'm a cosmopolitan. I'm also reminded of their flat reaction to McCain's comment near the end about how, knowing war, he hated war. They seemed disappointed. For all their supposed hatred of Hollywood (huglely misplaced), they wanted the Hollywood ending. Good guy triumphing amid blood and guts. Instead he handed the audience a flower. What a downer. The Shakers (Hopefully Not the Movers) Sen. McBush/Gov. Earmark First, R.J. Eskow has a good piece on "The 15 Counterpunches" to the various lies and hypocrisy of the RNC. The key elements: 2. She's Pork Barrel Palin. She's always been an expert in draining earmark money off the hardworking taxpayer. She submitted $197 million in earmarks — more per person than any other state — in her current budget. And the citizens of her little town got fifty times as much federal pork as the average American! How'd she do it? She hired a DC lobbyist. That's right: A K Street shark to fill her Main Street coffers — and advance her career in the bargain. ... If you don't like the way Washington does business, you don't like her. What's the difference between Sarah Palin and an old-style GOP crony? Lipstick. 5. McCain's economy will be more of the same. If you like the economy we've got, vote McCain. Every time a Republican runs for office he pretends he'll do things differently. Bush said the same things in 2000. Look at McCain's voting record. Wonder what McCainonomics would look like? In the words of the old ad, you're soaking in it right now. I also like John Seery's piece, same site, about Sarah Palin's speech. The key thought: What I saw on that stage was the personification of small-minded smugness, an utter lack of humility, a kind of self-righteous entitlement based on little more than puffed-up narrowness. She struck me not as plucky but, rather, as stunningly immodest — to the point of arrogance... Finally, from Oliver Willis' excellent site, there's this reader comment regarding Barack's response (see below) to the various right-wing attacks on his "community organizer" background. It really hits the nail on the effin' head: All smart responses to dumb attacks. And we need to return Smart to the White House. The Community Organizer This is great. This is exactly what he should be saying. Comments came during a speech to factory workers in York, Pa.: "You wouldn't know that this is such a critical election by watching the convention last night. I know we had our week, and the Republicans deserve theirs, but it's been amazing to me to watch over the last two nights. "You're hearing a lot about John McCain, and he's got a compelling biography as a prisoner of war. You're hearing an awful lot about me, most of which is not true. What you're not hearing is a lot about you. "The thing that I'm insisting on in this election is we can't keep playing the same political games we always play where we attack each other and we call each other names. They've had a lot of speakers. And if they had a bunch of ideas, you'd think they would have put 'em out there by now. And so the question is, what's their agenda? What's their plan?" Things to read and watch while the culture wars start up again If you need to laugh at the hypocrisy of the Republican party, The Daily Show is there for you. Also Gail Collins has a good column on Palin's speech. And just came across this guy: Oliver Willis. Here's his 10 Things You Need to Know about John McCain. No. 7 is particularly scary: Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.” Meanwhile, a reminder of Barack's original rationale for opposing the Iraq War in 2002, and why we need smart back in the White House: “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” – Barack Obama, 2002 Talkin' RNC Blues Sounds like a great show last night at the Parkway Theater near Lake Nokomis in South Minneapolis. My friend Jim Walsh hosting Billy Bragg, Tom Morello, Ike Reilly, others. David Carr taking notes. Read about it here. I'll post Carr's stuff when it arrives. UPDATE: As promised, Dave Carr's piece. Who's Whining Now? So the McCain camp says that criticisms of Sarah Palin are sexist. Here. So John McCain pulls out of a CNN interview with Larry King because earlier CNN anchorwoman Campbell Brown asked McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds about Palin's command experience, and kept pressing when he didn't answer, and McCain felt this was "over the line." Here. Quick question: When did the GOP begin to exhibit all the traits they've publicly deplored over the last three decades? Talk about a nation of whiners. The Smart Candidate Here's the bad news: the experts agree that you can’t patrol it all. They live in fear of the nightmare scenario, “The Armageddon Test,” for which the second part of the book is named: Terrorists exploding a nuke in a large western city. The Brits have their experts trying to prevent this, the U.S. has theirs. One gets the feeling that an undue burden has been placed on these men while the rest of us dick around. Never have so few done so much for so many watching “American Idol.” At one point, Suskind interviews Saad al-Faqih, a surgeon from Saudi Arabia, who is on the U.S.’s list of those who have provided material support to al Qaeda, and who says that the goal of 9/11 was “always to create deep polarization between America and the Muslim world,” and that 9/11 mastermind Ayman Zawahiri “understood precisely the cowboy passions of the American establishment.” Another money graph: Of course, not everything went as planned. The swift fall of the Taliban and the elimination of nearly 80 percent of al Qaeda’s manpower in Afghanistan surprised both bin Laden and Zawahiri, who expected America to fall into a quagmire as the Russians had in the 1980s. By the middle of 2002, they were both dispirited, on the run, living in caves, with their top lieutenants scattered. “Which is why Iraq was the greatest gift,” Saad says. “It proved to the world that it was, in fact, always America’s mission to get Muslims, especially when your stated reasons for that invasion were shown to be hollow.”As for the future? Al Qaeda’s goals include what Zawahiri calls “the pacification stage,” where the U.S., disconsolate, withdraws from the world. Suskind doesn’t really buy the possibility of this, although the U.S. has always had its isolationist elements; then he asks himself this key question: “I wonder what bin Laden and Zawahiri are hoping the United States won’t do?” Exactly. What is the smart response? So far, our response hasn’t been smart at all. Which leads me to the “60 Minutes” broadcast last night. Steve Kroft interviewed Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Kroft came at them, and specifically at Barack, with a lot of frivolous questions — beer and bowling — and then he came at him with some frivolous but volatile questions. Was he tough enough for the job? Why didn’t he mention that he was black during his acceptance speech? Shouldn’t he be further ahead in the polls than he is? For this last, Obama said: This is gonna be a rough, tough battle. The Republicans don't govern very well but they know how to campaign. And, you know, what I would expect is that it's gonna take-mid-October before a whole lot of people start making up their minds. And there's nothing wrong with that. This notion that somehow this should be a cakewalk and I should just walk into the election with a 10, 15 point lead, I think doesn't give the American people enough credit. They wanna get this thing right.To the black question: Yeah, I think people noticed that.As for tough enough?: The fact that I don't go out of my way to call people names, or try to take cheap shots, and that I try not to throw the first punch, but to see if I can find a way to work together with people, sometimes leads people to underestimate what I've got. I think it's fair to say that if I couldn't not only take a punch, but occasionally throw one, I wouldn't be sitting here.And I came away thinking: This man is so smart. No matter what Steve Kroft threw at him, he turned it into a smart response. Which is exactly what we need. During the next four years, when the worst elements of the world throw what they can at us, we need the smart response, instead of the response, full of cowboy passions, that plays right into al Qaeda’s hands. "F**k it. We're going in." The cover story in this morning’s New York Times Magazine, by Peter Baker, presumably an excerpt from his upcoming book, concerns Bush’s final days in office, and the beginning of the article focuses on the McCain campaign’s attempt to distance itself from this most unpopular president. At the end of the first section, Mark Salter, McCain’s campaign advisor, says this about the President: “You feel bad for the guy if you think about it.” This leads to the first line of the second section: George Bush does not want anyone feeling bad for him. Allow me to back up for a second. Yesterday I came across the money portion of Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World. Suskind is writing about all the end-arounds the Bush administration performed in the lead-up to the Iraq war: ignoring George Tenet and the CIA to get the 16 words into the State of the Union address; using the CIA chief of station for Germany to muzzle German fears about the unreliability of Rafid Ahmed, or “Curveball,” who was feeding the administration misinformation about Saddam’s biological weapons operation; and, finally, not just ignoring but actually reversing the findings of the CIA Paris chief, who was told, in a clandestine meeting with Naji Sabri, Saddam’s last foreign minister, that Saddam didn’t possess WMD. Then Suskind gets to the big one. In a casual conversation with an American intelligence officer in a Washington restaurant, and subsequently confirmed in face-to-face meetings with the former director and current assistant director of MI6, Suskind discovers that the Bush administration knew Saddam didn’t possess WMD before they went to war. They didn’t suspect. They knew. In the months before the war, it seems a British agent, Michael Shipster, met with the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, who confirmed everything we subsequently found to be true: Not just that Saddam didn’t have WMD but why he was unwilling to say so publicly. And it all made sense. Here’s Suskind talking with the unnamed American intelligence officer: I ask if the intelligence was passed to CIA and the White House. “Of course. Passed instantly, at the very highest levels.” “And what did we say,” I ask. “Or, I guess, what did Bush say?” “He said, Fuck it. We’re going in.” Don’t know if that’s a direct quote or not. Either way, it’s probably a good thing George Bush doesn’t want anyone feeling bad for him. 38.4 Million Obama Fans Can't Be Wrong Meanwhile, Barack’s acceptance speech, before 38.4 million people Thursday night, was about nothing but the serious business of getting us out of the serious mess we’re in. I had friends call me from California and Minnesota to talk about the speech. They were pumped. Here’s the part that got me: We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.Amazing. He talked about bridging our divisions and then gave concrete examples. And not just any concrete examples. He gave examples involving four of the most volatile issues in our country: abortion, gun control, same-sex marriage and immigration. And I agreed with every one, every comment. This is a serious, common-sense response to the absolutism that has infected our country, not just over the last eight years, but over the past several decades. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in a hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. You know, passions may fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. For my brother-in-law, Eric, who is deeply involved in community projects, this was the big moment: What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me; it's about you. It's about you. ... You have shown what history teaches us, that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.Both excerpts hearken back to why Obama originally (and immediately) appealed to me. Unlike 99.9 percent of the politicians out there, including John McCain, he’s not saying, “Here’s what I’ll do for you.” He’s saying, “Here’s what we can do together.” I think that’s hugely appealing. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want their life to have more meaning, and Barack is offering a path to that. He’s all about unity, no matter how divisive the issue. He’s all about what we can do when we work together. He’s a serious man for a serious time. John McCain? I’m sorry, but he feels like a clown in comparison. Trotting out the same old divisive B.S. Sputtering the same old catchphrases. Injecting the same old fears. Focusing on everything that doesn’t matter: Britney, Paris, Sarah. There’s no doubt who’s taking this presidency business seriously. The big question is: How serious are the rest of us? If It's "Thrusday," McCain Must Be Speaking My colleague, Garth, pointed out this error on the Republican Web site. I'm sure it'll be fixed soon, if not already, and obviously it doesn't have much to do with McCain himself since he barely knows about the Internet let alone how to write for it. But if there's a perception out there that you're the "dumb" candidate, and "dumb" isn't as heartwarming as it was in, say, 2000, before we saw the kinds of shit "dumb" could get us in, then this isn't the kind of error you want to make. As Garth says, maybe he opted for "Thrusday" because Thursday is the start of football season and he knew his acceptance speech couldn't compete. UPDATE: Saturday, 8:00 a.m.: Still not fixed. UPDATE: Sunday, 9:00 a.m.: Still not fixed. UPDATE: Monday, 7:20 a.m. Still not fixed. Is no one going to the GOP site? Can't anyone in the GOP spell? I don't think William F. Buckley is rolling over in his grave over this, but he's definitely rolling his eyes. UPDATE: Monday, 10:21 a.m.: Fixed! And it only took 72 hours since Garth first noticed it. It's this kind of attention to detail, this kind of speedy, tech-savvy recovery, that makes the GOP the party that it is. "We're Amazingly Incompetent or We Lied" Related to the post below, here's a quote I read over lunch from Ron Suskind's The Way of the World. The speaker is an FBI man and a conservative Republican. He's talking to the author in June 2007: "People don't realize in America how little underlying credibility the United States now has in the world, espcially on this matter of WMD, which, of course, has been driving everything. We went to war—the most important thing a country does—based on WMD, and we were wrong. That means either we're amazingly incompetent or we lied. Take your pick. Now, I think we lied, most people do, because no one could be that incompetent. But until we come clean—and here we are years later and we don't even care enough as a country to figure out what really happened—we're sunk." Pages 169-70. We get to the lying later. The Power of Our Example But, I admit, I’ve been blown away by both Bill and Hillary Clinton at the DNC this week. Listening to her, I thought, “If she’d been this good during the campaign, she might’ve been the nominee.” Listening to him, I thought, “I’d vote for him again in a second.” Her speech was good, but this bit put her over the top: This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up. How do we give this country back to them?The electricity that infused the convention center at that moment was overwhelming. I could feel it through the TV set and into my home in Seattle. I got shivers. My friend, Jim, another Obama supporter, called it “Obamaesque.” By following the example of a brave New Yorker, a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad. And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice. If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If they're shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going. Even in the darkest of moments, ordinary Americans have found the faith to keep going. Bill, meanwhile, did what every good writer, and every good lawyer, does: He boiled his case down to the specifics and presented them with charm. But, from all that, this was the line. Whoever came up with it deserves a raise: Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are strong at home. People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.That’s it, isn’t it? The U.S. has spent most of its history, from “Shining City on a Hill” through the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps, relying on the power of our example. There’s a lot of grime beneath that myth but it’s a myth worth adhering to. We do what we do; if others follow, that’s up to them. Since 9/11 we've acted the opposite, and those seven years have shown us the limits of our power. We’re exhausted, deeply entrenched, trapped. We’ve made more enemies than ever before. The more we use the example of our power, the more we have to use it. And the world’s a big place. The power of our example? That’s an unlimited power source. Why you can't take toothpaste on an airplane The day is July 27, 2006, when, in a move calculated to win some iota of support from African-Americans for the upcoming mid-term elections, Pres. Bush signs the Voting Rights Act reauthorization a year early in a ceremony on the White House lawn. It’s also the day Khosa is taken into custody by the Secret Service for fiddling with his iPod while waiting for a car to pass through the White House gates. He’s dragged into an interrogation room inside the White House, made to give up the names of friends and acquaintances, then let go with warnings. His friends and acquaintances will all be checked out. So will he. “We know everything about you and where to find you,” one Secret Service agent tells him. His crime? Fiddling with his iPod while Pakistani. But the bigger issue, in the first two chapters, involves the backstory to the British government’s capture of a major terror cell in the suburbs of London, which was plotting to hijack airplanes and head for the U.S. East Coast. “The second wave,” Bush and Cheney had been warning us about. MI-6 was cautious. Suskind writes: “The Brits, after their experience in Northern Ireland, were starting to believe that the key was to treat this not as a titanic ideological struggle, but rather as a law enforcement issue. This required being patient enough to get the actual evidence —usually once a plot had matured — with which to build a viable case in open court.” Bush? Not so open. Not so cautious. Suskind implies that when Tony Blair refused to speed up arrests to suit Bush’s timetable — that is, the August before midterms — Bush nodded to Cheney, who dispatched the fourth-ranking CIA officer to Pakistan to alert the authorities there to Rashid Rauf, the Pakistani contact for the terror cell. Once Rauf was arrested, the terror cell panicked, and the Brits, who were apoplectic that their carefully constructed strategy had been knocked over, had no choice but to round them up... before they had enough evidence to put them away forever. And The White House got to say how they had been right all along “about everything.” Suskind gets us into the heads of both Bush and Cheney, which is a little odd, you wonder which sources could possibly get us there. But these early chapters make you realize both a) how real the terrorist threat is, and b) how politically motivated and short-sighted the Bush administration response has been. It’s a scary world, but all the scarier for who we elected to protect us. "Bush II" by William Shakespeare That’s not the main reason I bought his book, though. I bought it because Ron Suskind is the guy who wrote the 2004 New York Times Magazine article that, through a smug Bush aide, introduced the phrase “the reality-based community” to the world. I remember how the article stunned me. I remember how it made me better aware of what we were up against. That certain Republicans were willing to overthrow centuries of rational thinking to keep winning elections. The money quote: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” ... “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Gotta be Rove, right? I’ve only read the prologue of The Way of the World but I’m already glad I bought it. In the first pages Suskind gives a better reading of the presidential failures of George W. Bush than I’ve read anywhere else. And I’ve read a lot about the presidential failures of George W. Bush. Bush came to power, Suskind says, relying on his gut, his instinct. “What he does,” Suskind writes, “is size up people, swiftly — he trusts his eyes, his ears, his touch — and acts… Once he landed in the Oval Office, however, he discovered that every relationship is altered, corrupted by the gravitational incongruities between the leader of the free world and everyone else.” Other presidents have fought against this corruption, this alteration. Ford arranged Oval Office arguments between top aides. Nixon ordered subordinates to tell him something their superiors didn’t want him to hear. There was good old-fashioned eavesdropping and wire-tapping and polling. But W. continued to rely on his instinct, making him, to Suskind, a tragic figure worthy of Shakespeare: “A man who trusts only what he can touch placed in a realm where nothing he touches is authentic.” Or more brusquely: “...you can’t run the world on instinct from inside a bubble.” "Dear Fellow Republican" The Republican National Committee sent me a census the other day addressed to a “fellow Republican.” I know. I assume they sent it to as many people as possible. Maybe they even want people to fulminate against the enclosed “Republican Party Census Document” and its leading questions. It’s not a census, after all, but a push poll, so the goal is to get the words repeated, to get them out there, so they can reside in the brains of unsuspecting passersby. Here’s my version. Has the same basic gist with half the calories: HOMELAND SECURITY ISSUES 1. Should Republicans do everything in their power to make you so scared of the world that you’re willing to give up your most basic rights? 2. Do you support the use of force against any country chickenhawk Republicans say shit about? Shit to include: WMDs, smoking guns, underage gymnasts. 3. Should guffawing Republicans continue to make you scared of Mexicans? And Negroes? And the Irish? 1. Should greedy Republicans continue to use the phrase “massive tax hikes” when referring to taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthy (i.e., Republicans)? 2. President Bush’s idiotic tax cuts for rich bastards (known as the “Idiotic Tax Cuts for Rich Bastards” law) is set to expire. Should we make it permanent? Should we put in the Constitution? Should we make it the 11th Commandment? 3. Shouldn’t we balance the budget already? And by “we” I mean “your great great grand-children.” Ha! 1. Are you still scared of Mexicans? Good! 2. Do you still hate trial lawyers? Yes! 3. Red tape? The other side likes it! You and I know better. Here’s a beer. 1. Homos? The worst! 2. What if we implied the other guys wanted to serve partial-birth aborted fetuses in government-run school lunch programs? Would it make you rent Soylent Green again? 3. You know what those other guys want to do? Ban God. But look at this muscle. Me stop them. 1. Hey, isn’t that a Mexican right outside your house? Vote now! 2. The United Nations? Losers! 3. The seeds of democracy? Yum! 4. Yes or no: All countries not the U.S. are alike. (Answer: Who gives a shit?) 1. Look at this penis. Should we pass a law that says it's the best one ever? 2. I can run faster than you. Yes, I can. I already ran around the world, you just didn’t see me. 3. Would you join the Republican National Committee by making a contribution today? Like, a zillion dollars. OK, $35. OK, Other. 4. Look at this muscle. No, wait. No, look from this side. The questionnaire includes a business reply envelope with the following printed on the outside: “By using your own first class stamp to return this envelope, you will be helping us save much needed funds.” So if you get one of these, do what I did. Mail it back. Without the stamp. Empty. Reagan v. Founding Fathers Another good observation from Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter: As John Patrick Diggins, a Reagan biographer, astutely observes, the Founding Fathers believed that "The people are the problem and the government the solution" while Reagan convinced us that the people are virtuous and that government's the problem. "It worked," Diggins notes. "Reagan never lost an election." G.O.P.: The Party of Stupid Everyone needs to read Paul Krugman's column today, particularly this graf: What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratificatio

SURF BETTY CAMP 2006, Oct. 7th-8th! 11102006 The 2windy.com sponsor .SrfSnoSk8. are organizing a Surf Betty Camp October 7th to 8th, 2006 at Borestrand south of Stavanger. This is party of the ".SrfSnoSk8.Endless Summer Weekend" on the West Coast of Norway with the National Championship in Windsurfing Wave and Freestyle. Also demo of 2007 windsurfing equipement from NorthSails, Fanatic, Mistral and F2. On Saturday night everyone are invited to a party. The head instructor of the camp are the best female Surfer in Norway and .SrfSnoSk8. teamrider, Inger-Elin Knappskog.Organizer of the Camp is Lill Bente Hollstedt of 2windy.com and .SrfSnoSk8. The Surf Betty Camp is open to all girls. Link til story og bilder... SUMMER CAMP 2006 - WE ARE READY! 05052006 We have put together a really nice program for this years WindSurf Summer Camp 24th - 25th of June. This years location is just 15 km south of Oslo, in Tonsberg. We also want to invite all Swedish and Danish girls that would like to meet the most smiling girls in windsurfing. This years sponsors and partners are extraordinary and the girls will be treated like the princesses they all are... more... END OF SUMMER WEEKEND 2005! 24092005 16 girls from "WindSrf Girls Norway" visited Varberg, Sweden for a windsurfing weekend! Lots of sunshine, lots of laughs, new friends, lots of time on water… in a little to little wind. But nothing can stop such a happy crowed from making the most out of a windsurfing weekend. more... WHAT DID YOU DO THIS SUMMER? 13092004 out the window it tells me (Lill) that fall is arriving again to us unfortunate enough to live far away from anything remotely tropic. But up here in Norway the Diva-girls are keeping it going for a little while longer into the (always to small) winter suits to welcome the heavy storms in the weeks to come... A message arrived into my mailbox from our world champion Dorota asking for girls to come to Sylt, and promised no racing in heavy shorebreak! Our dear friend Amara (picture) from Thailand keeps "terrorising" my mailbox with pictures like this one. She is lucky enough to be a Starboard importer and a couple of weeks ago got to try out all the 2005 boards! For those who don't already know, she runs a nice windsurfing operation in Pattaya (link). Myself I have been working with windsurfing all summer and finally(!) got some sailing last week... tuning my FW equipment(!), consisting of one board, one sail, one bom, one mast and the perfect fin... this is embarrassing, but true. But don't be to hard on me. I have worked very hard with the young sailors and actually had 22 kids from 8-15 year attending a Rookie-Camp in August and is the "official aunt" of the Norwegian FE juniors... It would be just great to hear what Lucy, Amy, Dorota, Gina, Margit, Christine, Katarina, Shelly, Karen, Marliess have been up to this summer! Carrie I know has been out on the water a bit lately, and rumours has it she found it to be a good date-activity... and she also is doing downhill mountain biking! Why don't you send a few words and/or some pictures and we can share some cool moments, even breath some life into the women-windsurfing again - I think we look pretty dead at the moment! DIVA WINDSURF NORWAY SPRING CAMP 2004 We are happy to announce DIVA WINDSURF NORWAY SPRING CAMP 2004, May 22nd – 23rd. We got GREAT sponsors and lots of things ready! Last year was a big success and inspiration! Our network is growing fast and we are really looking forward to this year! THE NORWEGIAN DIVAS CHALLANGING WINTER... 22022004 Norwegian winter always feels much to long for the 55 girls in the Norwegian east-coast windsurfing network. But the girls are finding suitable challanges during wintertime. You will be sure to meet one or more blasting downhill or in the fun-park of any ski hill at any time. And most important they are keeping in touch! And we are happy to report that on February 21st one of our most active girls Solveig Larsen joined the Saab Salomon crossmax series and took home a respectable 3rd place and 120 Euros. Congratulation! INVITATION TO THE PAN AMERICAN FE EVENT MARCH 18-20TH Rodriguez is full speed ahead for the 2004 season. She now invites all raceloving girls to her island for the Pan American Formula Experience event March 18-20th. She promises nice wind and plenty of sunhine for everyone. Charterboards are available for those wanting to travel light or don’t own a Formula Experience board. For more info on the event look at the website www.caribbeanformula.com or send a mail NEWSLETTER #1 2004 09012004 first 2004 newletter for "Diva Windsurfing Norway" has been mailed out. It is in Norwegian (sorry). If you didn´t recive it, it just means that your e-mail is not in our file. If you want to recive future news on mail, please let us know. more... THE STORY FROM "LADIES CHALLANGE", PATTAYA, THAILAND sea, nice wind and hard working organizers welcomed the 8 girls from 4 nations that in the end made it to the Ladies Challenge in Pattaya, Thailand. The Formula Experience Charter boards already waiting on the beach made traveling a breeze. more... READY FOR THE "LADIES CHALLANGE" DECEMBER 5-9TH, PATTAYA, THAILAND the days before the event there will be a training camp at the Amara Sailing Center. Then on Dec 5th in the afternoon the racing will start. In the days following the women-event is the Formula Experience Asian Championship. Lill are looking forward to leave the cold winter behind and enjoy the beach and wind! Follow the event on the StarBoard site. more... RANKING FOR WOMEN CUP 2003 PUBLISHED 20112003 second season of the Formula Windsurfing Woman Cup shows an incredible 53 names on the ranking. The 2003 season has been a big step in the right direction for the girls taking the big jump into international racing. The organizers have treated the fleet with respect. What we dreamt of just last year, like having our fleet alone on the water, moving the racing out of Europe, and more have come true! The level of racing has increased and the challenges on the water for the girls in the top and the rest of the fleet has been great. See the comments from the girls on the official Women Cup page. In our eyes not only the winner Dorota, but all the girls on the ranking are winners - 116 PICTURES FROM THE CANADA EVENT… 02112003 slides Lill brought home from Canada are now scanned. Have a look! WOMEN´S WORLD FORMULA CUP JULY 23-27 2003, SQUAMISH, CANADA the time to bring the Women Cup out of Europe is here and we are looking forward to showing even more of the world what great fun women windsurfing is. Latest news is that everything is ready in Squamish and the girls have started to arrive. You can follow the girls on the official event-page and hopefully also on will try and post reports on our page during the event. Or in worst case lots of stories and pictures will be published right after and final reports when Lill goes back to Norway. DOROTA GOT A NEW CAR… just shows how attractive women windsurfers can be for the sponsors… Congratulation Dorota and we all just love the décor! And drive safe! Dorota is sailing the Polish Open Nationals in Jurata before flying to Canada. Follow this event with 9 girls attending on: WOMEN CUP MIEDZYZDROJE JULY 9-13 Follow the event with the largest numbers of girls this season on the official Women Cup page! Both Carrie and Lill was ther last year and the event was great fun and amazing racing for all the girls. We know it will be just the same this year. Follow the event on update women cup in canada Carrie has an update for the girls that are coming to the Women Cup in Vancover, Canada, July 23rd-27th. This event will be a fantastic and we hope YOU have booked your ticket! 100% SUCCESS FOR THE DIVA CAMP 2003 Nielsen again did a fantastic job, with the support and help from sponsors StarBoard and NeilPryde, coaches Brian Røghild and Nikolaj Kruppa, she managed to gather 23 girls from 9 countries at Lake Garda. CONGRATULATION from the 2windy.com girls on a job well done, and the inspiration this gives girls all over the world! Read the story! THE 2003 WOMEN FORMULA CUP IS “ROCKING”… 03052003 Tune into the official Formula Women Page and keep up with what is happening! LADIES CHALLANGE PATTAYA, THAILAND. THE RACE WE ARE NOT GOING TO MISS... 4th - 7th 2003. Imagine: A women's only event on the warm waters of the South China Sea. Competing in a very relaxed atmosphere (it is Thailand after all) with a mild steady breeze, tropical sun, 30 degrees. Wet suits not WONDERING WHAT FORMULA IS ALL ABOUT? The CNWA.CA site has published a really cool video. Take THE OFFICAL WOMEN FORMULA PAGE IS BACK 18032003 News, events, ranking, photos, gossip... Minimum 10 women needed to make a fleet in 2003 EuroCup More information can be found under "General www.euro-cup.org. The girls have started a string on the StarBoard Women Forum to find out who is planning to do what events this year. Please let us know YOUR plans for 2003. Preliminary Notice of Race 2003 Trident Canadian National Windsurfing Championships North American West Coast Series Event and Formula Windsurfing (IFWC) Women’s Cup. 2003 WOMEN CUP CALENDAR 01032003 IFWC approved new calendar of 2003 Women Cup and it is here officially published. The 2003 Canadian National Windsurfing Championships June 24th - 27th in Squamish, British Columbia 25022003 Canada, Trident Performance Boards and Roberts High Performance Sailboards invite windsurfers to the Canadians, the national windsurfing championships, which will crown the top Canadian Man and Woman sailors in combined Formula, Slalom and Freestyle. The Canadians is also the Canadian qualifier for the IFCA World Championships in Hyeres, France in October. The Canadians also qualifies as a Women's Cup event which means some of the world's best women sailors will be testing the wind at the national in Squamish. The results obtained by current USW members in the NRT Classes will count toward the USW Back again - the Diva Camp 2003 Neil Pryde/Starboard Women’s International Formula Windsurfing Camp 2003. 2006 CAMP - READ ALL ABOUT IT... 31012007 38 girls in perfect contitions was the headline from the 2006 Windsurf Girls Camp in Norway... Read the story and look at the great prictures! more... 33 girls, ready, set, go..! 11062006 33 girl have signed up for the 2windy.com Windsurf Camp 2006. So far this season the number of girls on the beaches around the "Oslofjord" have been higher than in many many years... The organizers have been down at the location of the camp for a final inspection and are just "stoooked" to see how good everything looks. And if no wind... (will not happen) our sponsor have in store about 10 tonns of water toys, wakeaboard, waterskies etc. Maximum numbers of participants will be 40 girls! So we have extended the deadline.. out this week! HURRY if you want a spot... 18 girls, ready, set, go..! 18 girls have signed up for the 2windy.com WindSrf Girls Norway trip September 9-11. Destination is Varberg, Sweden. A great place for wavesailing south of Goteborg. Small cottages has been rented right on the beach and the girls are ready to rock... We are looking forward to present prictures and more when we come back! Hopefully we will also meet up with some local "windsurfing sisters"... DIVA WINDSURFING NORWAY WEEKEND 2004 – LOTS OF WIND! 30082004 Lots of wind welcomed the girls that found their way to Torkildstranda, Drøbak, 30 minutes south of Oslo. During the two days the girls spent as much time on the water as possible and on Saturday they had a fun relay race to win some great prizes… DIVA WINDSURF NORWAY weekend aug 28-29 25082004 of our Diva Girls in Norway are asking about a little help to learn more advanced techniques like waterstart, jibing etc. At Torkildstranda in Drøbak, 30 minutes south of Oslo on Saturday and Sunday between 12.00 and 16.00 there will be instructors to teach the girls some secrets. Everyone that are on the board and can sail back and know the absolute basics will have something to learn. There will be no official program in the evening, but if the weather is nice bring your BBQ and we will enjoy the sunset. For those who want to stay the night in Drøbak, there is several hotels. First of all the focus of the weekend will be on sailing together and T.OW (time on water)! To spice up the weekend the leading junior Formula Experience sailors are also invited. These young boys will show how much it is possible to learn in a short time! The weekend is hosted by 2windy.com in collaboration with SeaSport! DIVA WINDSURF NORWAY SPRING CAMP 2004 – A HUGE SUCCESS! 08062004 many girls that had taken the trip to Larkollen, a bit more than one hour south of Oslo had a fantastic time. 2 days with good and sunshine. Theory on land and instruction on the water, competition, nice lunch, dinner and a really nice party on Saturday night… We are impressed! thanks to everyone for all the help and participation! NORWAGIAN WINDSURFING GIRLS IN FULL FORCE FOR THE DIVA-CAMP 17052004 With still 5 days left to the start of the second windsurfing spring camp in Norway just for women there is an amazingly 44 girls signed up. This is nothing less than impressive. A small country of just 4 ½ million people and most of the girls are from the capital Oslo and surrounding areas. At last years camp 28 women attended. This year for two full days girls on all levels will have fun on water and land. It will be instruction, party, BBQ and also a fun-race with three divisions. All the girls are looking forward to the camp! THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN THE We have published 2 new clips from the 2windy.com adventure 2003. From Vancouver Island and The Gorge. Plug in your high speed modem and enjoy! more... 55 NORWEGIAN DIVAS… 20112003 calendar shows November and Lill has to tell the world that the “Diva Windsurf Norway” mailing list now contains the names of 55 girls! And this just from Oslo and the surrounding areas. Throughout the season the feedback from the stores, beaches and the girls themselves has been incredible! The ones that stepped on the board for the first time in spring are flying, several girls nailed their first jibes, water starts and JUMPS! And 3 more girls are now ready to challenge Formula racing and even more are looking into the WE HAVE OPNED OUR TUTORIAL Our articles are aimed towards the girls who are transferring from short board and are recreational sailors who want to get involved in racing. We are not world champions but in total Carrie & Lill have windsurfed for more than 30 years (shocking…!) and believe we have some good not to technical advice to get you a bit on your way. PS: If you have any comments, we hope you drop us a mail! WHAT AN ADVENTURE WE HAD… Lill have crash-landed back in Oslo after 4 weeks “over there” and Carrie just reported in that she has put on the suit to start her new job! Lill can’t blame the slow progress on this page behind a jet-lag anymore and has started to write on the story - just because we want to tell everyone else what a great time we had this summer! Who knows how long she will use to get the words down, but there is so much to say and so many pictures to show! There was so much wind, super locations, amazing hospitality, exiting racing, so many girls (and cute boys) and King Louis… We felt like we where 24 again… Just please show a little patient and LILLS FLYING TO CANADA TO MEET UP WITH CARRIE 16072003 It is finally time to start this year 2windy.com girl’s adventure. First we do the Women Cup in Squamish, then August 2-4 WIRED (Formula, Slalom & Freestyle)/USW N.R.T. event, Nitinat Lake, Vancouver Island, B.C. And if we have any energy left we will drive down to The Gorge, to do an 2 day event and also test our the 3.5 sails and really small boards. Reports and pictures and later even some film will be published on this page. Have a good summer everyone! Please drop us an e-mail if you want to tell us something. SOME PICTURES FROM WOMEN CUP MIEDZYZDROJE JULY 9-13 16072003 flue hit Lill in Poland and sent her straight to bed looking at the ceiling of the room for most of the event. The event was perfect, with lots girls on the water, well organized, proper attention for the sailors by TV, media, audience etc. Lill have published some pictures from the event. And also sends out a hello to all the new girls joining the Women Cup! PS: Hope to see all the Danish girls at the Nordic Championship in fall! THE GIRLS ARE GETTING READY FOR THIS YEARS ADVENTURE… 04072003 Carrie took a well deserved long weekend to get some good sailing down in The Gorge. Last weekend she also got the chance to take a fresh look at the race-site for the up-coming Women Cup in Squamish. She reported home about good conditions and also is amazed about the SB 147s downwind speed! Lill are packing it up for Poland and the Women Cup in Miedzyzdroje She is complaining loudly about little sailing lately. Feeling totally out of shape already. There just has not been any wind! She is leaving for Poland on Monday July 7th. Happy that she got all her equipment in order after a long wait. We will be back with a reports from The Gorge and Poland before the girls finally meet up in Vancouver July NIGHT” JUNE 17th 17062003 10 girls and a dog named Smith, showed up at the sailing spot Torkildstranda in Drøbak. A small town 30 kilometer south of Oslo, Norway. It was a windy DIVA WINDSURF NORWAY- THE CAMp story 09062003 A fantastic 28 girls turned up to the first ever "Diva Windsurf Norway. It was a packed weekend with lots of sailing, sun and wind. The report is still only in Norwegain but we urge everyone to take a look at the 100 pictures of some fantastic girls! DIVA GIRLS ON THE FRONTPAGE OF OSLOS LARGEST EVENING NEWSPAPER! 05062003 In front of the “Diva Windsurf Norway” Spring Camp 2003 Lill got the opertunity to demonstrate to a journalist what girls do best! Together with her windsurfing friend Eli they inspired the text that resulted in front-page and also 2 pages inside. If you don’t know Norwegian, then just check out the pictures and click on all the links! DIVA WINDSURF NORWAY... har lagt ut program og pressemelding for campen på Ringshaugstranda i Tønsberg 7-8 juni 2003. Rundt 20 jenter er påmeldt og vi vet at helgen blir supermoro! THE WAY A 2WINDY.COM GIRL LIKE IT… On her short trip to Rønbjerg in Denmark, Lill had lots of wind and sailed everything from 11m2 Formula down to an overpowered 4.0m2 wavesail. The sport-center she stayed at www.danparcs.dk offered everything an active person could possible desire. But most important: After a hard day sailing on the water you could sit down and relax in the newly opened SPA. Lill is going back there and will let these two small pictures tell the rest…(until she gets the rest of the picutres developed)! She also broke her last FS 6000 490 mast and have since returning home been holding the 9.8 in way to much wind, also tried out 510 North Viper with a pretty bad result! Hopefully the wait for the new Gaastra Ingniton 490 mast will not be to long! Braking equipment is just NO fun when the 9.0 is what saves a small girl on a windy day!

People used to ask if I'd read the dictionary. Go figure. Note: this is a cross-posted article that Erica wrote for Go Girl Magazine. A few years ago, a friend and I were talking about language and gender balances. I don't remember how we got on that subject, except we were both undergraduate English majors and this was normal for us. At any rate, he brought up the word brethren: what, he asked, would be its feminine counterpart? Even today, I'm still stumped. Sisters, or sisterhood, don't carry the same level of formality as brethren, and both already have their counterparts (brothers and brotherhood). What would we use as a counterpart to brethren? Being multilingual myself, I'm used to the fact that languages are an expression of a worldview; my turns of phrase, the things that make me self-expressive, differ depending on the language I'm using at the time (I'm far more poetic in French, and less direct in Irish, than I am in English). For example, Irish doesn't really have a phrase for "I" the way we do in English. There's mé, which is joined with a verb to describe myself doing something, or mise, which is roughly translated as myself. But Irish doesn't have the same unitary concept of "I" that can be found in English, French, or Spanish. Similarly, those of us who grew up speaking English are all familiar with the confusion we felt when we learned that other languages give gender to basic nouns like tables, chairs, and plates. Even worse, different languages gender these nouns differently! For a long time, I thought that the gendering of nouns was silly. Did French really need to distinguish between le and la for basic household items? Old English used to distinguish between things, though seemingly arbitrarily (the roots of the words wife and woman carried two different grammatical genders), and we managed to give these up to use the much-more-neutral the. If I'd become a true linguist, I would've delighted in sorting out the genders of various nouns to see if there was a broader pattern of discrimination. Were all feminized nouns, for example, the ones that could be associated with house, hearth, and home? Why not generate a new neutral way of saying le and la, the way German did? The more I've thought about it, though, the more I've realized that simply gendering the form of "the" that a language uses isn't the only way to distinguish patterns of gendered thought. Many native English speakers are probably familiar with the unofficial gender of ships, cars, and other machines ("she," in case you were wondering), but there are other colloquial examples as well. What about slut and its increasingly-popular counterpart, man-slut? Purse and man-purse? Or what about the other terms we so often feel the need to specify: doctor and female doctor, captain and female captain, and others? In English, we pretend at neutrality, but often we have to address the cultural assumptions behind the vocabulary we use. Slut is assumed to refer to a woman, while a captain is presumably male. I don't think that French gendering necessarily highlights a history of discrimination, but I think that English gendering might indeed. To come back to the brethren point, consider what it implies. It's an archaic plural form for brother, and yes, sistren (a plural for sister) is its binary counterpart. However, brethren is still a term used today to refer to a formal body of comrades, while sistren just sounds silly. Brethren still fits in particularly formal contexts, especially religious and Masonic ones, where the term really found footing as a formalized way of recognizing group membership. To me this begs the question: where were the formal groups of women at that time? Oh right. The survival of one term but not the other, while clearly more complex than just this analysis, nevertheless points at the disparate conditions that men and women faced when forming and maintaining formal groups back in the day. Another example: look at the colloquial terms for husband and wife in French, mari and femme. Both come from the Latin terms for man and woman, though the Latin for man (maritus) carried the connotation of being married. The French words for man and woman, however, are now homme and femme, homme being derived from the Latin for human or man (marital status going unmentioned). Again, the complexity of etymology means that I need to specify that these are simple inquiries that leave a lot of variables untouched; however, do other readers notice that a French man's identifier changes based upon his marital status, while a woman's does not? This could go in a couple of different ways: either the woman is constant and unchanging while her husband must adapt to his new status, or the woman, historically being the property of various men, is unchanged by marriage because she gains nothing while her husband gains control of her fortune. Did either of these interpretations of archaic French social structure play a role in the development of these modern French words? I have no idea, but it's fun to speculate. As I continue these lines of thought, I find myself wondering what other languages might indicate about their previous and current social interpretations of sex and gender. As noted, not all grammatical genders bear any relationship to social genders, but I firmly believe that language and culture do inform each other in some capacity (again, just think about the word slut and you'll see what I mean). When you think about the languages you've encountered, and the cultures using these languages, have you ever noticed historical or behavioural parallels? Even when you take it down a notch and just look at a word's history- for example, bonfire, which comes from the Irish Oíche Samhain tradition of setting tine cnamh, or bone fires- you learn so much about the culture that generated it (Oíche Samhain, by the way, is the origin of Halloween). What are some of the funny, interesting, sexist, cool, horrifying, or just plain bizarre linguistic things you've noticed in your travels?

TV and film's finest actresses stepped out for the Screen Actors Guild Awards in LA this evening. White was a huge theme with Glee's Lea Michele and Eva Longoria both donning neutral gowns — who do you think wore the trend well? Best actress winner Natalie Portman covered her bay bump in a fitted Azzaro while Amy Adams got wrapped up in a tight Hervé Leroux dress. Jane Krakowski upped the glamour with sparkle in her one-shoulder Badgley Mischka sheath. The accessories added a bit of sparkle to every ensemble, and Fab's taking a closer look at the amazing earrings. The night wasn't all about neutrals though, with other stars stepping out in a spectrum of color. Tina Fey looked red hot in Oscar de la Renta and Mila Kunis was a standout in a similar hued Alexander McQueen. Modern Family's Sofia Vergara showed off her figure in a bright blue Roberto Cavalli while Claire Danes wore Louis Vuitton to accept her best actress statue for Temple Grandin. Lots of ladies wore black for the event, but their looks were anything but basic. Mad Men's January Jones was ladylike in a lacy Carolina Herrera and Dianna Agron and Nicole Kidman also showcased the delicate detail in their dresses — who wore it best? Christina Hendricks, in L'Wren Scott, looked dramatic on her way into the show while funny woman Amy Poehler kept it simple in a short LBD. Make sure to weigh in on your favorites with all of Fab and Bella's Love It or Leave It polls! To see more from the carpet, just read more.

Fashioning the ‘70s Everyone who was anyone was outfitted in Yves Saint Laurent and Halston in the 1970s. Walk through The Museum at FIT to see many accessories and outfits popular during the glitz and turmoil of the decade. NYC Restaurant Week Enjoy cuisine that delights the palate and defines the New York City dining experience during this winter’s Restaurant Week. Dine at premier restaurants around Manhattan with special pix fix menus for this week. NYC Craft Beer Week Join the NYC community in celebrating craft beer all around Manhattan. Attend festivals, beer dinners, special tastings and pairings to discover the myriad of flavors in craft beers. The Orchid Show Chandeliers Step out of the city that never sleeps and into the Florida Keys where the elegance of a tropical garden is highlighted by the conservatory’s luminous architecture. Different programs are offered for viewing the flower show including Orchid Evenings which offer music and cocktails to complement. Asia Week New York World-renowned museums, major auction houses, and top tier Asian art specialists collaborate to put this week together. It began as an open house for 16 galleries and in a short 6 years, it has grown to 47 dealers presenting museum-quality exhibitions. Don’t miss out on what this year’s shows have in store. Spend a day at Penn’s Landing to re-live the holiday cheer. Seasonal drinks and bites warm the soul after a couple times around RiverRink, Philadelphia’s premier outdoor ice skating rink. Represent: 200 Years of African American Art @ the Philadelphia Museum of Art Learn the stories of African American artists through the variety of pieces in this expansive exhibition. Experience creative expressions of identity, 200 years of powerful artworks and the legacies of the artists who made them. Noël Coward’s PRIVATE LIVES Perhaps one of the wittiest comedies ever written, Private Lives will allow you to indulge without feeling guilty at the curtains close. Become engulfed in the story of two ex’s rekindling their love in a whirlwind of glamor and recklessness. Craft Beer Trail of Greater Philadelphia GQ named Philadelphia one of The Best Beer Cities in America, Frommer’s named it one of the 14 best beer cities globally, and it’s won medals at the annual Great American Beer Festival – It’d be a shame to not take advantage of this famous beer city. Awfully Nice Tours If you’re new to the Philadelphia area, Awfully Nice Tours is the outfit for you - they create the perfect tour for each audience based on your wants. Driving tours, walking tours, food and beer tours, even Segway tours: you choose, they create, everyone enjoys. Building Philadelphia Lecture Series This 10-part lecture series investigates the social, political, economic, and design trends that contributed to Philadelphia’s development. Washington DC Chocolate Lover’s Walking Tour Set aside time for this special trip through the historic Georgetown neighborhood and visit seven shops with creative chocolate treats. Take a break from the museums and monuments to experience some of DC’s most beloved local establishments. Be delighted by the longest running play in the history of the United States, Shear Madness. Unlike any other, this unique comedy-whodunit engages with the audience who spot clues, question suspects and in the end solves the mystery. National Cherry Blossom Festival Events range from parties and fundraisers at famous buildings in DC to fitness on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Live at 6 Enjoy local, national and international artists at this weekly concert at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Explore The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display Explore The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display, an interactive exhibit at the Getty Center and gain a better understanding of how the pieces in the collection are so informative about the time they were popular and coveted. Enter Laughing – The Musical Enjoy this engaging Off-Broadway musical and hear the story of David, a Bronx born messenger boy who, against his parents’ wishes, would prefer to be a star and not a pharmacist. LA Fashion Week Independent designers located through the city curate the shows for buyers, media, and the public. Enjoy a show where a number of international fashion collections are presented during this lavish week. Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting Artists have used their exposure to other art and images to create variations of well-known works in LACMA. Rubens and His Legacy Rubens’ work was influential to many other fabulous artists who followed in his footsteps. Divided into six themes: power, lust, compassion, elegance, poetry and violence, this show exudes sensuality and color like many of his works. Changing Britain: 1945-2015 The astounding transformation that Britain has made is visible through this eclectic exhibit. View this ambitious project that examines decades of history through politics, culture and society. The many and impressive technological advances of World War II are on display at the Science Museum. After viewing the expansive exhibit’s cutting-edge inventions and scientific developments, you’ll understand why the Prime Minister was so invested in the research. Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern Learn why photography is not only an art but a wonderful form of documentation. Visitors are encouraged to consider the different perspectives that the photographer brings to the iconic moments in history that they record. WOW –Women of the World Festival Celebrate the achievements of woman and girls (with and without public profiles) who all have done extraordinary things globally at this weeklong festival.

To the horror of parents and the delight of just about everyone else, the TV drama Skins blew the lid off what untamed teenagers get up to when let off the leash. With the second series due, Cassandra Jardine went behind the scenes to meet the show's surprisingly sensible cast and its frighteningly young writers. If you don't want to know the score, look away now… The average age for losing virginity is 13. That's what my 18-year-old son's friends make out. Gulp, I thought, when he told me, looking at my daughter of that age. And I had been worrying about her spending too much time plucking her eyebrows. Boasting and exaggeration apart, teenagers have always got up to much more than parents know about and, mostly, ignorance is bliss. It prevents us being either shocked or consumed by envy. But, for the past year, there has been no excuse for innocence, not since Skins was broadcast - a series with the unique claim to authenticity of being written, and acted, by teenagers. The opening shot set an eyebrow-raising tone: it showed a teenage boy in bed with a naked man and woman - his bedmates were only printed on his duvet cover, but it took a while for that realisation to dawn. From then on, through nine episodes, this bunch of middle-class Year 12s at a Bristol sixth-form college could be seen masturbating, trashing houses, throwing up (either because of drink or eating disorders), having it off with teachers, and getting into revenge dramas with drug dealers. This was neither the gleaming-teeth sanitised version of teenagerdom conveyed by American prime-time shows such as The OC, nor the downbeat documentary view that suggests all teenagers are gun-carrying crack addicts living on rundown estates. Skins was a new idea for young people who don't like to be treated like kids: an f-word-laden comedy drama shown after the watershed when its target audience of under-18s is supposedly in bed, with a book rather than (as in Skins) the psychology teacher. Ironically, the cast - led by About a Boy star Nicholas Hoult - were mostly too young to attend the cast parties without chaperones, yet they could portray on screen acts that made watching with mother a red-faced affair. Predictably, there was outrage. 'The characters are so drug-addled, sex-obsessed and vacuous that most parents would consider them a parody of modern youth,' harrumphed one reviewer, while advocates of grittiness questioned why some of the 'OK, yah, totally' characters sounded posher than Prince William. Yet despite/because of the criticism Skins took off. The first episode was watched by 1.6 million, then a record audience for Channel 4's fledgling offshoot E4. Seventy-five thousand signed up as 'friends' of Skins on MySpace; extra shorts were eagerly watched on the internet; thousands applied online to attend a Skins party and, last Easter, some unlucky parents in Durham were landed with a bill for £20,000 worth of damage after their house became the venue for an unofficial Skins party. Their daughter said someone hacked into her MySpace account. More surprisingly, the series found an audience outside its teenage target. The adults in the show are an unattractive, libidinous, grumpy bunch - Harry Enfield makes a devastating control-freak dad - but it became a weekly must-see for parents seeking insights. I was among them. Curiosity became addiction when Skins turned out not to be a mindless shockfest, but funny, clever and often moving. It conveyed how complicated, not to say agonising, it is being a teenager, but also what fun. As such, it also found favour with twenty- and thirtysomethings who enjoyed a reminder of their not-so-distant past. There was someone for everybody to identify with or cringe over among the group of friends, led by alpha-male Tony (Hoult): Sid, his shy beanie-wearing sidekick; Chris, the party animal; Michelle, Tony's alpha-female girlfriend; Jal, the clarinet-playing swot; Cassie, the angel-faced anorexic; Maxxie, the gay dancer; and Anwar, the second-generation Muslim. Now this engaging but troubled crew are back for a second series, and aficionados will soon learn whether the good-looking but arrogant Tony survived the car crash that concluded the last episode. Some things must remain secret, but Hoult looks thoroughly alive when I visit the Bristol warehouse where filming takes place. The lanky, owl-browed 18-year-old, who already has a long list of credits to his name - recently the films Kidulthood and Wah-Wah - is lying on a bed, having a nightmare for one of the mini-episodes made for the Skins website. (The idea is not just to reflect teens but to address them through their favourite medium.) It's early December, the last day of filming after a six-month stint and the mood is one of heightened emotion. With the exception of Hoult and two others, casting was done by audition at local schools and colleges, whereas teens in other dramas are often played by babyfaced twentysomethings with more acting experience. The green room they hang out in certainly has the air of a sixth-form common room, with table football, darts, jokily captioned pictures, and a half-read copy of a Philip Pullman book. As the actors enter, singly or in groups, their good manners are striking. Each one shakes hands and, unlike their counterparts in Skins, they utter not a single swearword. When I throw one into the conversation, they react with shock. They relate to their characters, they say, but they seem considerably less wild. Hoult, Dev Patel (Anwar), 17, and Joe Dempsie (Chris), 20, who don't come from Bristol, have been staying in the local Marriott: while their Skins personas would have drained the mini-bar, seduced the waitresses and been evicted for taking drugs, this lot seem scarcely to have ordered a soft drink. 'We're too tired to do anything much after 12-hour days,' Hoult says. The programme's non-moralistic take on teenage problems and dilemmas is a source of pride. 'Soaps can't deal with issues properly because they are daytime TV,' says 19-year-old Mike Bailey, who plays Sid. 'I don't know anyone who has stolen a car and crashed into a canal, but I have aspects of Sid in me, everyone has aspects of Sid. He has a good family but he's misunderstood by his dad, and he's so self-conscious that he can't go out without his best friend Tony.' Other characters appear equally grounded in truth. They may be shy or show-offs, but that's how teenagers are, driven by anxieties about their bodies and their image. They are foolish and reckless, but also scared. They fight against their parents - annoying authority figures - yet love them really. And as they explore themselves and the world, falling in and out of love and trouble, they gradually discover who they are and what they want to do. Some of the scenes are heightened, even over-the-top - this is television after all - but it works because Skins offers an underlying reality. There has been plenty of drama, less of the essential sensibleness of most teenagers. Adults might expect that if you threw a dozen attractive teenagers together sex would raise its alluring head, but there appear to have been no cast romances. 'None at all,' they say one after another, apparently surprised by the suggestion. When they aren't filming most have been studying for their A-levels. Hannah Murray (Cassie), 18, who is unworldly to the point of not knowing how to use an iPod, managed three As and has just got into Cambridge to read English. Hoult is relatively unusual in having given up the academic chase - he has been filming Coming Down the Mountain, Mark Haddon's story about two brothers, one with Down's syndrome. Perhaps they are putting up a time-honoured smokescreen of demure behaviour because they are talking to someone of a parental generation, but I don't think so. It's not that they aren't normal teenagers who get drunk and silly, angry and sad, but that this subset of the breed is in the unusual position of having jobs to do. If they perform well, they could be set up for life, so why blow it? Such is their fledging professionalism that they have pulled off some acutely embarrassing scenes. Bailey, as Sid, was shown masturbating over an Asian Babes magazine, about which his grandmother remarked, mildly, 'From now on you will go to bed wearing boxing gloves.' Dempsie, as Chris, has to run naked through town after a hard night. 'I thought it would be an empty street,' he says, 'but it was the high street, in the rush hour.' Whether they are filmed having sex with umpteen partners or high as kites, they don't blanch. Mitch Hewer (Maxxie) is straight but he has to play gay snogging scenes. He says it doesn't bother him: 'You've got to be open-minded.' April Pearson (Michelle) laughed when she saw a huge poster next to her school gates that showed her sitting on the loo with her pants and tights around her ankles: 'And I'm the head girl,' she marvels. The first series has sold to 30 countries and several others are contemplating licensed versions adapted to their own culture. No one is more surprised than the producer/writer Bryan Elsley who, from long experience in television and theatre, says he expected Skins 'to be watched by 250,000 and disappear without trace after one series'. As he puts together the third series, he reflects that, 'The nice thing is that we've tempted kids back to TV from the internet and computer games. They watch because we tell stories that speak to their lives and that are not moralistic. Most savvy 16-year-olds are beyond a discussion about whether or not to have sex, take drugs or drink. These days kids are subtle in their understanding of family, even when it's dysfunctional, because they have the time and money to reflect on relationships. They don't want drama with a helpline tag at the end of it.' If he got it more right than he dared hope, it is because he brought together a team of writers with an average age of 22 - and they weren't there only to adjudicate on whether cannabis should be called 'spliff' or 'weed'. Elsley wrote five of the nine episodes in the first series but, as the team grew more experienced, he has increasingly stepped back, providing just three of 10 episodes in series two. His role is to set the rules and, despite its eagerness to shock, Skins is essentially very old-fashioned. 'My belief is that TV drama has been nervous of boring people so directors create a spurious level of excitement through shaky cameras, flashbacks and zooms. This is a traditional drama. We avoid tricks. We follow a character through sequentially. Writers can only include scenes without the main character if he is just joining or has just left. Beyond those rules, anything goes.' In the basement of Company Pictures' offices in London, summaries of the plots for series two are scribbled on a white board: 'James and Maxxie meet at a bike-shed', etc. This is the writers' den. But for the bowl of fruit on the table, it could be a student seminar room. This week's essay topic for the four assembled young writers: Does Skins give an accurate picture of teenage life? Curled up on the sofa is Daniel Kaluuya, 18, who is retaking his A-levels, having turned down drama school to work on Skins, both as writer and actor. He describes himself as coming from a 'normal African background' while his teachers described him as 'a waste of space', although he was writing from the age of nine. Skins is too middle class for his set - 'My boys are not really abiding by the law' - but when given the episode about Jal, the black girl, to write he was keen to avoid cliches. Jal loves music, but it's Mozart that she plays, not soul, and her family are rich. 'Black kids don't sit around talking about being black - that's boring,' he says. 'I introduced her family making pancakes.' To his right in short dress and hoop earrings is Lucy Kirkwood, 24, from east London. She wrote her first play, Grady Hot Potato, while studying English at Edinburgh. It caught the eye of an agent and her work has now been produced on both sides of the Atlantic. She wasn't a 'massive fan' of the first episode of series one that set the outrageous tone - 'I wish my drug dealer would give me weed on tick… only joking,' - but she knows introductions are hard to get right; also, because Hoult was the only known name, he was assumed to be the hero, not a flawed character. Drafted in for the second series, her mission is to beef up the girls' parts. 'I've been giving them real friendships, like those between the boys.' Next to her, long legs clutched under his chin, is Jack Thorne who, in between bites of banana, apologises for his advanced age and thinning hair. He's 29, and started writing, he says, as an antidote to the nervousness that leaves his speech littered with 'y'knows': 'I wanted to rewrite the conversations I had during the day and win them.' Already his sensitive portrayals of young people have attracted notice from theatre and television producers and his first feature film, The Scouting Book for Boys, is being shot this year. When he unveiled a lurid drug-and-sex nightmare for his episode about Tony's younger sister Effy (played by Kaya Scodelario, 15) in the first series there was alarm, but it topped the popularity ratings. 'I have a tendency to write dark stuff,' he says. Jamie Brittain is a commanding presence. He's 22 but he talks about scriptwriting like an old hand, as well he might since the boss figure he refers to as 'Bryan' is his father. 'Bryan asked me what programmes he should be pitching and I told him that I had these characters that I'd been writing about since I was 16. Sid and Tony are the two sides of my character: Sid is the nervous anxious virgin, Tony the nasty scary clever side of me. With Sid, I thought I'd put a version of myself on TV that everyone would love - and then they would love me.' That grounding in the writers' own fantasies and emotions shows through in the more powerful scenes, such as the devastating rows between Sid and his father, played by Peter Capaldi. 'Don't tell Dad, but it's about our relationship,' Jamie confided to Jack; soon after, Jack was taken aside by Bryan who whispered, 'Don't tell Jamie, but it's about him and me.' Vulnerable and impulsive, but essentially good and loyal, these are loveable characters - but after this series we won't be seeing much more of them. Skins may be a British rival to Friends but the drama is set in a sixth-form college, so when this lot leave at the end of this year, the focus will switch to the new intake, led by Effy. Soon it's goodbye to Sid, Jal, Maxxie et al. The actors must now go their separate ways. All now have agents. Dev Patel has the lead role in Danny Boyle's Slum Boy Millionaire, but for the rest it's an agonising time of waiting and hoping. Adventures don't always turn out as well in real life as they do in Skins, but emotionally literate, worldly wise contemporary teenagers know that. Wherever they go next the class of 2008 will look back knowing that they were involved in a groundbreaking experiment. Programme makers have discovered that teenagers will watch television if they are portrayed as rounded human beings. Parents are a little wiser, too. And over coming years, I suspect, Skins will turn out to have been the launchpad for a whole generation of young actors and writers. - 'Skins' returns to E4 on February 11 (and on Channel 4 on February 14) - The official Skins website is www.e4.com/skins

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Awhile back, The Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating and deeply saddening article exploring the reasons behind the Kennedy Family’s staunch pro-abortion position. Believe it or not, Ted Kennedy used to be pro-life. So how did he and all the other prominent Kennedys swing so far in the wrong direction? For that matter, what about some of the other Catholic pro-abortion zealots in (or recently in) high public office, such as Nancy Pelosi, Mario Cuomo, and Tom Daschle? What happened to them? (NB: I originally posted this blog entry on January 2, 2009. Given all the chattering right now from Catholics who feel they can vote for pro-abortion candidates with impunity and without compromising their Catholic identity (and without committing sin), I post it again because of its pertinence to the late Ted Kennedy’s life and legacy, such as it was.) This article alleges that it was was an intentional, systematic, concerted effort on the part of a group of dissenting Catholic theologians (including Fr. Richard McCormick, Fr. Charles Curran, Fr. Joseph Fuchs, Fr. Robert Drinan, and Fr. John Courtney Murray), who spent a good deal of of time with the Kennedys in the mid 1960s employing bogus moral theology arguments to convince them they could “accept and promote abortion with a clear conscience.” Once this was accomplished, these same Judas priests undertook to literally coach the Kennedy’s on what to say and how to vote in favor of abortion in their public lives. Given the Kennedys’ enormous influence over American politics, it’s diabolically logical for those dissenting Catholic theologians to have targeted this renowned and respected Catholic family for “conversion.” They were in the perfect position to persuade other Catholics, and even many Protestants, that it’s okay to be pro-abortion. And this strategy worked so well that, today, it is virtually impossible to find a Catholic politician holding national public office who is pro-life. Thanks to these dissenters and those Catholics they duped, “Catholic” is synonymous with “pro-abortion” in politics. Read here how this hideous transformation was accomplished: Ms. [Caroline] Kennedy’s commitment to abortion rights is shared by other prominent family members, including Kerry Kennedy Cuomo and Maryland’s former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Some may recall the 2000 Democratic Convention when Caroline and her uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, addressed the convention to reassure all those gathered that the Democratic Party would continue to provide women with the right to choose abortion — even into the ninth month. At that convention, the party’s nominee, Al Gore, formerly a pro-life advocate, pledged his opposition to parental notification and embraced partial-birth abortion. Several of those in attendance, including former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had been pro-life at one time. But by 2000 nearly every delegate in the convention hall was on the pro-choice side — and those who weren’t simply kept quiet about it. Caroline Kennedy knows that any Kennedy desiring higher office in the Democratic Party must now carry the torch of abortion rights throughout any race. But this was not always the case. Despite Ms. Kennedy’s description of Barack Obama, in a New York Times op-ed, as a “man like my father,” there is no evidence that JFK was pro-choice like Mr. Obama. Abortion-rights issues were in the fledgling stage at the state level in New York and California in the early 1960s. They were not a national concern. Even Ted Kennedy, who gets a 100% pro-choice rating from the abortion-rights group Naral, was at one time pro-life. In fact, in 1971, a full year after New York had legalized abortion, the Massachusetts senator was still championing the rights of the unborn. In a letter to a constituent dated Aug. 3, 1971, he wrote: “When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.” But that all changed in the early ’70s, when Democratic politicians first figured out that the powerful abortion lobby could fill their campaign coffers (and attract new liberal voters). Politicians also began to realize that, despite the Catholic Church’s teachings to the contrary, its bishops and priests had ended their public role of responding negatively to those who promoted a pro-choice agenda. In some cases, church leaders actually started providing “cover” for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a “clear conscience.” The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion. Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that “distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue.” It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians “might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order.” Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: “The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion.” But can they now? There are signs today that some of the bishops are beginning to confront the Catholic politicians who consistently vote in favor of legislation to support abortion. Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Denver, has been on the front lines in encouraging Catholics to live their faith without compromise in the public square. Most recently in his book “Render Unto Caesar,” Archbishop Chaput has reminded Catholic politicians of their obligation to protect life. The archbishop is not alone. The agenda at November’s assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops included a public discussion of abortion and politics. The bishops’ final statement focused on concern about the possible passage of the “Freedom of Choice Act,” and referred to it as “an evil law that would further divide our country.” The bishops referenced their 2007 document, “Faithful Citizenship,” which maintains that the right to life is the foundation of every other human right. In it, they promised to “persist in the duty to counsel, in the hope that the scandal of their [Catholic congregants’] cooperating in evil can be resolved by the proper formation of their consciences.” You’re invited! Join me on a grace-filled Catholic pilgrimage to the historic California Missions, this October 2-9. We’ll journey in the footsteps of Saint Junipero Serra. Most Rev. James Wall, Bishop of Gallup, NM, will be our chaplain for this trip, and I’ll be giving special presentations on the life of Saint Junipero, the history of the California Missions, and the miraculous apparition of Our Lady of Guadelupe. Come and enjoy a peaceful, relaxing, thoroughly Catholic, educational, and spiritually energizing exploration of the very foundations of the our Faith in Old California. Travel Package includes: † Pilgrimage Chaplain with Daily Mass and Devotions offered along the pilgrimage route † Roundtrip Airfare from most Major USA cities (incl. airport taxes, subject to change) † Hotel accommodations 4 star for 7 nights (such as the Hampton Inn by Hilton or similar) † Breakfast & dinner daily – 16 meals † Professional English Speaking Tour Escort & local Guides † Daily sightseeing as per itinerary † Deluxe motor coach transportation † Entrance fees per itinerary † Service charges, gratuities, and luggage handling Fictitious Garage Band Names from the “Patrick Madrid Show” The Kentucky Clerks 5 Dudes and a Chicken The Gender Binary Artificial Vomiting Machine Full Blown Trolls Battle of the Buns Sausage Biscuit Rage Incident The Meat Bees The Swedish Toddlers Sandwiches of Shame The Metallic Cage Fighters Monkey Head Transplants Puppets of the Patriarchy Bobo Doll Experiment Blame the Robot (album cover) Nacho Thief (Nacho Thieves) Ultra Cool Dwarfs Ethical Permission Slip (Album Cover) Amish Haircut Attacks (Originally posted in early 2011) A claim made in this article doesn’t surprise me a bit: “A survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that Facebook is cited as evidence in 66 percent of divorces in the United States. Also, more than 80 percent of divorce lawyers reported they “have seen an increase in the number of cases using social networking evidence” during the past few years.” In fact, this may even understate the extent to which Facebook, like other useful and entertaining new-media communication platforms, is contributing to marital infidelity and other marriage problems. Rather than restate what these articles say about what happens when married men and women develop private (or, worse yet, clandestine) online relationships with members of the opposite sex, I’ll just offer three common-sense suggestions that seem to me to be a set of bare-minimum rules of prudence for those who (like I) use Facebook regularly and who don’t want it to cause problems for their marriage. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Facebook can be a great thing when used wisely, or a stick of dynamite when used foolishly. Rule 1: Your Facebook should be a completely open book for your husband or wife. You need to “password-protect” your marriage. No joke. This means that your husband or wife should be able to log onto your Facebook account at a moment’s notice, any time of the day or night, especially when you are not there. Aside from, perhaps, planning a surprise party for your husband, if you are keeping anything “secret” from him in terms of your online interactions with other men, you are heading down a slippery slope. How to avoid it? Simple: He should know your password and, of course, if he has a Facebook account, you should know his. This rule isn’t intended to foster “snooping” or paranoia, but it will help you ensure transparency and honesty with your husband or wife when it comes to your dealings with others online. Guys, knowing that your wife can at any time read anything you write on your Facebook page will have a very clarifying effect on what you write. In other words, abiding by this rule will help you avoid situations in which you might be tempted to say something you wouldn’t want your wife to see. One solution (aside from cancelling your Facebook page altogether) is to simply share one Facebook page between the two of you. Doing this can help fire-proof your marriage against an unscrupulous old flame. Rule 2: Don’t flirt on Facebook. Not even a little bit. Not even in jest. What you think of as harmless could actually be a stumbling block of temptation to someone else. We all know what it’s like when something we’ve written in an e-mail, something intended to be completely innocuous and friendly, is misconstrued by the recipient as snarky or mean. Correcting negative miss-impressions resulting from misunderstood text can be tricky. Just imagine how much more difficult it can be to fix a problem caused be someone who thinks you’re flirting with her, especially if she is receptive to it and starts reciprocating. And ladies, my hunch is that this is even more true in reverse. Your intentions may be entirely innocent, but under the rightwrong circumstances, a man could easily misconstrue your witty repartée in a way you didn’t intend it. Don’t be brusque, of course, but do be circumspect in what you say. We all have to remember that Big Things start out small. When it comes to temptations to flirt on Facebook, the safest course by far is simply to refuse to let the small things get started in the first place. Rule 3: Don’t waste time on Facebook. This doesn’t mean don’t use Facebook, but definitely don’t waste time on it. And as someone who uses Facebook, I know this is easier said than done. Most of us in the modern digital age know from experience the temptation to fritter away valuable time online. Facebook can be a huge and even dangerous time-drain. Why dangerous? Because if you aren’t careful, wandering aimlessly from page to page, profile to profile, picture to picture, can quickly lead down the path of undue curiosity that can just as quickly lead to lustful thoughts, which can, if you’re not careful and willing to discipline yourself, lead to worse things. The old adage is certainly true: “Idleness is the devil’s workshop.” Or, as the famous wit wit Samuel Johnson once wrote: “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.” To elaborate on this growing problem of Facebook-caused marriage troubles, here’s a sample from the first article. It’s well worth reading, sharing with your spouse, and then implementing rules like the ones above in order to help yourself avoid potentially disastrous problems. If you’re single, Facebook and other social networking sites can help you meet that special someone. However, for those in even the healthiest of marriages, improper use can quickly devolve into a marital disaster. A recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that Facebook is cited in one in five divorces in the United States. Also, more than 80 percent of divorce lawyers reported a rising number of people are using social media to engage in extramarital affairs. “We’re coming across it more and more,” said licensed clinical psychologist Steven Kimmons, Ph.D., of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill. “One spouse connects online with someone they knew from high school. The person is emotionally available and they start communicating through Facebook. Within a short amount of time, the sharing of personal stories can lead to a deepened sense of intimacy, which in turn can point the couple in the direction of physical contact.” Though already-strained marriages are most vulnerable, a couple doesn’t have to be experiencing marital difficulties in order for an online relationship to blossom from mere talk into a full-fledged affair, Kimmons said. In most instances, people enter into online relationships with the most innocent of intentions. “I don’t think these people typically set out to have affairs,” said Kimmons, whose practice includes couples therapy and marriage counseling. “A lot of it is curiosity. They see an old friend or someone they dated and decide to say ‘hello’ and catch up on where that person is and how they’re doing.” It all boils down to the amount of contact two people in any type of relationships –including online – have with each other, Kimmons said. The more contact they have, the more likely they are to begin developing feelings for each other. “If I’m talking to one person five times a week versus another person one time a week, you don’t need a fancy psychological study to conclude that I’m more likely to fall in love with the person I talk to five times a week because I have more contact with that person,” Kimmons said. . . . (continue reading) The Crusades = Jihad? Nice try, but no dice. Maybe you saw or heard about that notorious National Prayer Breakfast speech in which Mr. Obama attempted to equate the Catholic Crusades with violent, murderous Muslim jihad (watch video specifically at 2:00 mark). Well, nothing could be further from the truth. He said, “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Maybe you aren’t sure how to explain why there really is no moral equivalence — ZERO — between the Crusades and violent jihad. #fact Well, this powerful 5-minute info-graphic video does it better than anything I’ve seen yet. Please watch this video, have your children watch it, and share it far and wide on your social media sites. It’s that important. We need to set the record straight for the sake of truth. Also, I explained in greater detail what the Crusades actually were (and what they weren’t) on my radio show this morning (February 6, 2015). Over the last 25 years or so, I’ve noticed with bemusement an unfortunate trend in the United States in which an increasing number of lay people arrogate to themselves the title of “spiritual director.” I regard this as unfortunate because, except in certain rare exceptions, lay people are simply not qualified or competent to serve as spiritual directors. Even lay people who have some formal training in theology do not, by virtue of that fact, have the requisite qualities necessary to be spiritual directors. I’ve seen some real messes result from lay people attempting to give spiritual direction to others. For example, Regnum Christi (RC), the lay movement associated with the embattled Legionaries of Christ religious order of men, had for years appointed numerous goodhearted, sincere, and wholly unqualified RC lay women to be “spiritual directors” for other RC lay women in the absence of a priest. As you might imagine, problems and misunderstandings ensued. Eventually, at least here in the U.S., the Legionaries and RC leaders abandoned the moniker “spiritual director” in favor of the less dubious “spiritual guide.” My guess is that virtually all lay people who style themselves as spiritual directors (including those who are regarded as such by others, even by some deacons and priests), are really just confusing spiritual direction with counseling. That such a benign confusion is prevalent these days shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, upwards of three generations of Catholics nowadays are, by and large, woefully under-catechized in the doctrinal and spiritual teachings of the Catholic Faith. This is not to say that those goodhearted and sincere lay men and lay women who present themselves as spiritual directors are necessarily themselves woefully under-catechized (although some may very well be), but their laudable service to others, insofar as they seek to offer helpful advice of a spiritual nature, does not make them spiritual directors in the classical Catholic sense of the term. Don’t get me wrong. By all means, Catholic lay people should strive to offer good counsel and spiritual advice when the need and opportunity arises. Counseling can be done informally or formally, such as in the case of a man or woman who is properly trained in the art of counseling (for example, having earned a master’s degree in that field). But counselling and spiritual direction are not the same thing. It’s proper and good for lay people to engage in the former though, in my view, not the in latter. Now, since I am confident that my remarks here will elicit some push back from those who are convinced spiritual direction is indeed suitable for lay people, I’d like to advert to the wise and erudite advice on this question from the late Father Jordan Aumann, O.P. (1916-2007), who wrote Spiritual Theology, a masterful explanation of the ways and means of the spiritual life, including what to look for in a spiritual director. While he doesn’t come right out and declare that spiritual direction is not a suitable domain for lay people (except, as I’ve said, under certain, rare circumstances), I think you’ll see that the cumulative force of his explanation militates inexorably toward that conclusion. PERHAPS NO WRITER HAS OUTLINED with such clarity and precision the technical qualities of a good spiritual director as have St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. She states that a good spiritual director should be learned, prudent, and experienced. St. John of the Cross also maintains that a director should be learned, prudent, and experienced, and he places great emphasis on experience. Learning. The learning of a spiritual director should be extensive. In addition to having a profound knowledge of dogmatic theology, without which he would be exposed to error in regard to matters of faith, and of moral theology, without which he could not even fulfill the office of confessor, the spiritual director should have a thorough knowledge of ascetical and mystical theology. He should know, for example, the theological doctrine concerning Christian perfection, especially regarding such questions as the essence of perfection, the obligation to strive for perfection, the obstacles to perfection, the types of purgation, and the means of positive growth in virtue. He should have a detailed knowledge of the grades of prayer, the trials God usually sends to souls as they advance from the lower to the higher degrees of prayer, and the illusions and assaults of the devil that souls may encounter. He also needs to be well versed in psychology so that he will have an understanding of various temperaments and characters, the influences to which the human personality is subjected, and the function of the emotions in the life of the individual. He should also know at least the basic principles of abnormal psychology and psychiatry so that he will be able to recognize mental unbalance and nervous or emotional disorders. A priest should realize that, if he is not competent to direct a particular soul, he should advise the individual to go to someone who possesses the necessary knowledge. A priest incurs a grave responsibility before God if he attempts to direct a soul when he lacks sufficient knowledge. In recent times, with the wider dissemination of knowledge of mental illness, the priest must especially be warned that, as regards the field of psychiatry and the therapeutic methods proper to that branch of medicine, he is a mere “layman” and is incompetent to treat mental sickness. If he suspects that a penitent is suffering from a mental illness, he should direct that individual to a professional psychiatrist, just as readily as he would expect a psychiatrist to refer spiritual problems to a clergyman. Prudence. This is one of the most important qualities for a spiritual director. It comprises three basic factors: prudence in judgment, clarity in counseling, and firmness in exacting obedience. If a spiritual director lacks prudence, he is usually lacking several other virtues as well. Prudence enables an individual to do the right thing under given circumstances. Spiritual direction is not concerned with the general doctrine of spiritual theology, nor with theoretical situations that one may imagine, but with the individual soul placed in concrete circumstances at a given moment or in a given phase of spiritual growth. The director is not called upon to make decisions regarding general doctrine; most people could find such answers in any standard manual of spiritual theology. The director’s role is precisely to recognize the particular circumstances of a given situation and to give the advice needed at that moment. In order that the advice be prudent, a spiritual director must have the empathy by which he is able to place himself in the given circumstances and must have the patience to listen attentively. Of the various factors that militate against prudence, the following are especially common: lack of knowledge of the various states of the ascetical and mystical life, lack of understanding of human psychology, prejudice in regard to particular states of life or particular exercises of piety, lack of humility, excessive eagerness to make a judgment. The second characteristic of prudence in the spiritual director is clarity in the advice given to the one directed and in the norms of conduct prescribed. In order that he may be clear in his direction, he must. possess clarity in his own mind. In speaking to the soul he is directing, he should avoid any vague or indecisive language, but should always express himself in concrete and definite terms. He should resolve problems with a yes or a no and, if necessary, he should take the time for further deliberation before making his decision. If a soul perceives that the director is not sure of himself, it will lose confidence in him, and his direction will lose all its efficacy. Moreover, the director should always be sincere and frank, without any partiality or selfish motives. It would be a serious fault if a director were to avoid offending the person directed lest that person should go to some other priest for direction. Those priests who place great importance in attracting and retaining a large number of followers are, by that very fact, disposing themselves to failure as spiritual directors. The director should never forget that he acts in the name of the Holy Spirit in directing souls, and that he must endeavor to treat those souls with kindness and- understanding, but with firmness and utter frankness. The director must also take care that he does not become the one who is directed. Some persons are extremely competent in’ getting their own way in everything, and even the director is in danger of falling under their power. For that reason, once the director is certain of his decision and the course that should be followed; he should state his mind with unyielding firmness. The individual must be convinced that there are only two alternatives: to obey or to find another director. But the director should not forget that he should never demand of a soul anything that is incompatible with its state of life or vocation, its strength, or present condition. He should realize that there are some things that can be demanded of advanced souls but could never be required of beginners; that some things would be perfectly fitting in dealing with a priest or religious but not with a lay person. Excessive rigor does nothing but frighten souls and may cause them to abandon the road to perfection. There is, therefore, a world of difference between firmness in demanding obedience and an excessive rigidity that discourages the soul of the penitent. Experience. This is one of the most precious qualities of a good spiritual director. Even if he is less perfect in knowledge and somewhat deficient in prudence, experience can make up for these deficiencies. This does not mean that the experience of the director must necessarily flow from his own spiritual life, for he may obtain the benefits of experience from his observation and direction of others. As regards the personal experience of the director, if it is a question of the guidance of the average Christian, he needs little more than the experience any priest can obtain from the faithful fulfillment of his duties in the sacred ministry. If it is a question of advanced souls who have already entered the mystical stages of the spiritual life, it is desirable that the priest himself have some experience of those higher stages. If he lacks this, a delicate sense of prudence, coupled with competent knowledge of the mystical states, will suffice in the majority of cases. But personal experience alone is not sufficient to make a spiritual director as competent as he ought to be. There are many different paths by which the Holy Spirit can lead souls to the summit of sanctity. It would be a serious mistake for a director to attempt to lead all souls along the same path and to impose on them his own personal experiences, however beneficial they may have been for himself. The spiritual director should never forget that he is merely an instrument in the hands of the Holy Spirit and that his work must be entirely subjected to the Holy Spirit. If, through a lack of understanding of the variety of divine gifts and the multiplicity of roads to perfection, he were to force all souls to travel by the same road, he would become a veritable obstacle to the workings of grace in the soul. Moral Qualities of a Spiritual Director . . . (continue reading) Here are the musical pieces by Karl Jenkins that I’ve been playing on my Morning Show today. Something truly great to enjoy as you proceed through the sacred Triduum on the way to Resurrection Sunday. Over the last couple of months, more or less out of the blue, many people began contacting me to ask what I think of a gentleman named Charlie Johnston, a Catholic who’s made some startling predictions about dire events in the near future. Is he authentic? they asked. What do you think of his predictions? etc. Some express skepticism, some seem gripped by fear and anxiety, and still others seem calm and convinced. A few days ago, I was able to spend about half an hour on my radio show chatting with Charlie. He strikes me as down to earth, low-key, congenial, credible, and sincere. As you’ll hear in our on-air discussion (see link below), he says he has received countless instructions and warnings about the future from a holy angel. I’ve only recently become aware of Charlie and his message, and though I’ve read several of his blog posts and watched a video of an informal presentation he gave recently to a small group of Catholics in which he elaborates on his predictions, but I haven’t met him in person and, therefore, can only draw conclusions from what I’ve read and heard thus far. This is why I asked him to discuss things further on my radio show. I wanted to know more and, to the extent possible, see more clearly into his message of a coming global “storm” of strife and upheaval with which God will chastise and purify mankind. I’ll be candid. Whenever someone pops up claiming to be a “seer” or to have “visions” or receive “locutions,” my default reaction has always been (and remains) one of firm skepticism. Self-proclaimed seers and loctutionists abound, and my practice has been simply to pay them no attention. There have been countless false prophets (see Matthew 24:24), but there are also authentic prophets, which is why I also believe that careful, prayerful discernment is always required whenever the possibility arises that a given message may be authentic. Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1) If someone indeed is blessed by God with supernatural interventions, that fact will become evident in due time in his/her life and in the messages themselves, just as a false prophet will be found out in due time for the same reasons (see Deuteronomy 18:20-22). More importantly, the truth will eventually become evident through the Spirit-guided discernment of Holy Mother Church. As the Rabbi Gamaliel declared of the nascent Catholic Church in the book of Acts 5:38-39: [I]f this plan or this undertaking is of men, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God! In Charlie Johnston’s case, I remain open and willing to hear more. Only God knows. I do not trust in my own meager powers of discernment. So, anyway, here’s my interview with Charlie. “As soon as worldly people see that you wish to follow a devout life they aim a thousand darts of mockery and even detraction at you. The most malicious of them will slander your conversion as hypocrisy, bigotry, and trickery. . . . “Philothea, all this is mere foolish, empty babbling. These people aren’t interested in your health or welfare. ‘If you were of the world, the world would love what is its own but because you are not of the world, therefore the world hates you,; says the Savior. We have seen gentlemen and ladies spend the whole night, even many nights one after another, playing chess or cards. Is there any concentration more absurd, gloomy, or depressing than this last? Yet worldly people don’t say a word and the players’ friends don’t bother their heads about it. “If we spend an hour in meditation or get up a little earlier than usual in the morning to prepare for Holy Communion, everyone runs for a doctor to cure us of hypochondria and jaundice. People can pass thirty nights in dancing and no one complains about it, but if they watch through a single Christmas night they cough and claim their stomach is upset the next morning. Does anyone fail to see that the world is an unjust judge, gracious and well disposed to its own children but harsh and rigorous towards the children of God? “We can never please the world unless we lose ourselves together with it. It is so demanding that it can’t be satisfied. “John came neither eating nor drinking,” says the Savior, and you say, “He has a devil.” “The Son of man came eating and drinking” and you say that he is “a Samaritan.” “It is true, Philothea, that if we are ready to laugh, play cards, or dance with the world in order to please it, it will be scandalized at us, and if we don’t, it will accuse us of hypocrisy or melancholy. If we dress well, it will attribute it to some plan we have, and if we neglect our dress, it will accuse of us of being cheap and stingy. Good humor will be called frivolity and mortification sullenness. Thus the world looks at us with an evil eye and we can never please it. It exaggerates our imperfections and claims they are sins, turns our venial sins into mortal sins and changes our sins of weakness into sins of malice. “‘Charity is kind,’ says Saint Paul, but the world on the contrary is evil. “Charity thinks no evil,” but the world always thinks evil and when it can’t condemn our acts it will condemn our intentions. Whether the sheep have horns or not and whether they are white or black, the wolf doesn’t hesitate to eat them if he can. “Whatever we do, the world will wage war on us. If we stay a long time in the confessional, it will wonder how we can have so much to say; if we stay only a short time, it will say we haven’t told everything. It will watch all our actions and at a single little angry word it will protest that we can’t get along with anyone. To take care of our own interests will look like avarice, while meekness will look like folly. As for the children of the world, their anger is called being blunt, their avarice economy, their intimate conversations lawful discussions. Spiders always spoil the good work of the bees. “Let us give up this blind world, Philothea. Let it cry out at us as long as it pleases, like a cat that cries out to frighten birds in the daytime. Let us be firm in our purposes and unswerving in our resolutions. Perseverance will prove whether we have sincerely sacrificed ourselves to God and dedicated ourselves to a devout life. Comets and planets seem to have just about the same light, but comets are merely fiery masses that pass by and after a while disappear, while planets remain perpetually bright. So also hypocrisy and true virtue have a close resemblance in outward appearance but they can be easily distinguished from one another. “Hypocrisy cannot last long but is quickly dissipated like rising smoke, whereas true virtue is always firm and constant. It is no little assistance for a sure start in devotion if we first suffer criticism and calumny because of it. In this way we escape the danger of pride and vanity, which are comparable to the Egyptian midwives whom a cruel Pharaoh had ordered to kill the Israelites’ male children on the very day of their birth. We are crucified to the world and the world must be crucified to us. The world holds us to be fools; let us hold it to be mad.” — — Saint Frances de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life The Real (and Imaginary) Pagan Roots of Halloween By Brian Saint-Paul THE FIRST THING I NOTICED ABOUT JAY was that he was dressed like a woman. I also saw he was wearing combat boots and carrying a bag full of candy. But then I went back to that part about him being dressed like a woman. Jay had always been a curious fellow. Like the time he lost his pet tarantula, sending the neighborhood kids into an arachnophobia that would last for generations. But Jay had outdone himself this time, standing at our door, dressed in what appeared to be an army nurse’s uniform, and slathered in enough makeup to make Tammy Faye Bakker wince. Being a sensitive 9-year-old, I tried mightily to stifle my laughter (key word: tried), as I handed him a Snickers bar. Nevertheless, Jay was unfazed, marching off satisfied into the night, his candy bag a little bit fuller. For many of us, Halloween is an anomaly: a celebration without a discernible purpose. Other holidays make sense. Labor Day offers some respite for workers, Veterans’ Day honors those who fought for their land, Presidents’ Day recalls those who have led our nation. Yet Halloween seems to do nothing more than guarantee a steady clientele for children’s dentists and give folks like Jay an outlet for exotic behavior. A brief glance into the history of the celebration, however, raises a troubling question. Many Christians, when confronted with the pagan background of Halloween, wonder if it’s the kind of thing in which they should be getting involved. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help that Christian bookstores (usually Fundamentalist) are full of inaccurate, sensationalistic accounts of the origins of the celebration. Jack Chick, author of numerous anti-Catholic tracts, and hysterical Fundamentalist par excellence, gives his version of Halloween’s history in his tract, The Trick: “[Halloween] came from an ancient Druid custom set up for human sacrifices on Halloween night. Druids offered children in sacrifices. They believed that only ‘the fruit of the body’ offered to Satan was for the ‘sin of the soul.’ The trick or treat custom was created by the Druids. “When they went to a home and demanded a child or virgin for sacrifice, the victim was the Druids’ treat. In exchange, they would leave a jack-o’-lantern with a lighted candle made of human fat to prevent those inside from being killed by demons in the night. When some unfortunate couldn’t meet the demands of the Druids, then it was time for the trick. A symbolic hex was drawn on the front door. That night Satan or his demons would kill someone in that house.” There are about as many errors here as there are vowels. First, human sacrifice, despite the shrill claims of some, was rare if not nonexistent in Druid practice, and played no part in the Halloween tradition (Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, “Druids”). This goes for the candles “made of human fat,” as well. Second, the Druids didn’t worship Satan. Theirs was a nature religion centered around the seasons, similar to modern day Wicca. Satan is a figure in Christianity, not paganism. Third, the popular use of jack-o’-lanterns had absolutely nothing to do with the human sacrifice exchange program that Chick describes here. So, with the fantasy aside, what’s the real history of the celebration? Halloween comes from the pagan feast of Samhain. From the evening of October 31 to the end of November 1, the ancient Celts would celebrate the beginning of winter and the conclusion of the harvest. During this time, it was believed, the curtain between the living and the dead was temporarily lifted, and the spirits of the past would roam the countryside, getting into mischief (Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, Jack Santino, University of Tennessee, 1994, XV). These supernatural creatures could be placated with edible treats or frightened off with bonfires and carved turnips. All the while, the people paid homage to Samhain, the god of the dead. As time passed, the feast lost its religious significance and became the secular holiday we have today. It’s true, some of the old vestiges remain. Kids dress up like ghosts, goblins and Power Rangers, and go out looking for candy. The carved turnips have become pumpkins, and the bobbing for apples, an ancient method of divination, has become a popular party game. Nevertheless, October 31 is no longer widely held to be a day of religious observance. So, how did the feast of Samhain become Halloween? For hundreds of years, Christianity was persecuted by the pagan officials of the Roman Empire. Catholics were routinely rounded up and killed or tortured for the Faith. Over time, the persecutions ended and Christianity was recognized as a legal religion with the Edict of Milan in 313. A few years later, Catholics actually gained the upper hand, becoming the official state religion near the end of the fourth century. With this new situation, the Catholic Church sought to demonstrate in a dramatic way the victory of Christ over the false gods of paganism. The old shrines were emptied of their statues of pagan deities, replaced with symbols of Christian worship. The temples became churches and the practices of the former religion either discontinued or Christianized. Finally, the holidays and feasts celebrating pagan gods were replaced with days recognizing the victory of the True God. One well-known example of this is Christmas, where the feast of the sun god on December 25 was replaced with a celebration of God the Son. It’s difficult for us nowadays to appreciate the powerful statement this Christian-ization process communicated. Imagine if, in the most frigid days of the Cold War, the United States had been invaded and defeated by the Soviet Union. Destroying the Statue of Liberty certainly would’ve been a blow to the American people, but the Soviets had a still more dramatic action available: they could bedeck the statue in the red and yellow of the Soviet flag, replacing American symbolism with that of the USSR. What stronger way to demonstrate the victory of one system over the other? Such was the case with the Church’s conversion of pagan shrines, temples and holidays. And so it was with Samhain. As Christianity spread throughout the British Isles, it encountered this strange celebration of the dead. Following in the tradition up to that point, the Church chose to replace it with a Catholic holiday. So, by the ninth century, All Saints Day had become a feast-day to be celebrated by the entire Church. Instead of honoring the dead spirits of pagandom, All Saints Day was a time to remember the faithful Christian departed of past ages. In fact, according to Pope Urban VI, the day was intended to make up for any deficiencies in the celebrations of the various saints’ feast days throughout the year (Catholic Encyclopedia, “All Saints Day”). The night before All Saints was known as All Hallows Evening, which became shortened to Hallowe’en. While Christians took part in the festivities of the evening before, the primary focus of the celebration was November 1, the feast of the saints. In this way, the pagan core of Samhain was stripped from the event, and replaced with solid Christian practice. The conversion of pagan holidays is actually quite biblical. The Jews, under the direction of God, appropriated numerous pagan feasts: feasts of the New Year, combined with the harvest (Numbers 29:1-6; Leviticus 23:23-25), the feasts of the New Moon (1 Kings 20:4-29; Numbers 28:11-15; Nehemiah 10:33-34), grain and fruit harvest feasts (Deuteronomy 16:9-12; Exodus 23:14-16, 34:22) and the rite of new branches (Nehemiah 8:14-15). The people of God have often planned their Jewish and Christian celebrations to coincide with pagan feast days. Obviously, as the verses mentioned above indicate, God didn’t think this was corrupting true worship, or giving into paganism. So the Christian who takes part in Halloween and All Saints Day is just following in the footsteps of God-approved practice. No problem there. A few objections are often raised at this point. A claim is sometimes made that Halloween is the most important day of the “Satanic calendar,” and that Christian participation is tantamount to taking part in the Devil’s high holy day. In fact, Jack Chick, in another one of his tract masterpieces, Boo!, says, “to Satanists and witches, Halloween is no joke. It’s their most solemn ceremony of the year.” Bob (1951-2003) and Gretchen (1953-2014) Passantino, Evangelical Christians and experts on Satanism, reject this argument, pointing out that the Satanist’s own birthday is, to him, the most un/holy day of the year (“What About Halloween?” a paper produced by their ministry, Answers in Action). Next, we’ll hear that Halloween so trivializes evil, demons and the devil, that they are reduced to mere fairy tales — imaginary beings used to frighten and titillate children. While the danger of this is certainly present, it nevertheless can be remedied by a good Catholic upbringing. We ignore the real existence of Satan at our own peril, for he “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). The reality of evil forces should be foundational in the catechesis of every Christian. We can hardly blame Halloween if it isn’t. Far from being a threat to the Christian faith, Halloween actually provides an excellent opportunity for witnessing to it. On what other day is one’s attire the subject of so much attention? Imagine a group of kids going out not as Barney or some sports hero, but as their favorite characters from the Bible or Church history. An army of Davids, St. Marys and St. Josephs can make an awfully big impression at a costume party. Another possible avenue for evangelization is at the doorstep itself. Try handing out a good Catholic tract along with the candy (just don’t forget the candy part, or there might be rioting). As Catholics, we are called to use every opportunity to share the Gospel, “in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2). In the end, the issue of whether or not to let one’s kids participate in Halloween comes down to personal discretion. The celebration in itself is fairly harmless: kids go out (under supervision, hopefully) dressed up as their favorite superhero/monster/politician and gather candy. Obviously, things can get out of hand. If a child wants to go trick-or-treating dressed as the Antichrist, it’s probably time to draw the line. This is where the parents’ guidance is essential. Nevertheless, whatever meaning Samhain used to hold as a pagan observance, it has no longer. Time has turned October 31 into a secular event, and Christians can take part with a clear conscience. But we’re not done yet. Our brief look into the history of Halloween has uncovered some interesting dirt on the methods of some anti-Catholics. Numerous enemies of the Church charge that the Catholic Faith as a whole has been corrupted by paganism. Loraine Boettner, author of the odiously inaccurate Roman Catholicism, writes: “After Constantine’s decree making Christianity the preferred religion, the Greek-Roman pagan religions with their male gods and female goddesses exerted an increasingly stronger influence upon the church . . . Many of the people who came into the church had no clear distinction in their minds between the Christian practices and those that had been practiced in their heathen religions. Statues of pagan gods and heroes found a place in the church, and were gradually replaced by statues of saints. The people were allowed to bring into the church those things from their old religions that could be reconciled with the type of Christianity then developing” (Roman Catholicism, Grand Rapids: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1964, p. 136). Fundamentalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others argue similarly today in trying to demonstrate the alleged pagan corruption of Catholicism. In looking at the methods by which they reach their conclusions, three prominent errors are found again and again: 1. Their scholarship is often poor, making their conclusions largely or even completely inaccurate. 2. They assume that if a Catholic doctrine or practice is similar to a pagan one, the Catholic Church must have taken it from paganism. 3. They neglect the fact that some pagan practices (like Halloween) can be Christianized and used in the service of the Cross. Let’s look at examples of each error. Fundamentalists like Jack Chick aren’t exactly known for their academic excellence. Too often, they begin with a conclusion and then go looking for historical or Biblical confirmation. We saw an excellent example of this earlier with Chick’s history of Halloween. Critics of the Church will often misrepresent Her beliefs in order to show a connection between Catholicism and paganism. Alexander Hislop, author of The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife (Loizeaux Brothers, 1959), does this very thing with the Catholic understanding of justification. In order to link the Catholic Gospel with that of paganism, he wrongly claims Catholicism teaches one is justified by works in the chapter entitled, “Justification by Works”). Not content to merely misrepresent Catholic belief, he also lapses into some rather amusing blunders: “Will any one after this say that the Roman Catholic Church must still be called Christian, because it holds the doctrine of the Trinity? So did the Pagan Babylonians, so did the Egyptians, so do the Hindoos [sic] at this hour, in the very same sense in which Rome does” (Ibid, 90). Anyone with even a light familiarity with the pagan triads Hislop alludes to knows that they consisted of three different gods, not one God in three persons. The various pagan religions held a position very similar to modern day Mormonism, that there are three primary gods, distinct from one another in being, but joined in purpose. This is a form of polytheism, a view the Catholic Church has always condemned. Hislop’s statement that pagans held to the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity is laughable. This claim would, incidentally, also condemn as pagan the Trinitarian doctrine of Evangelical Christians and the mainline Protestant churches. Oops. One error that occurs over and over again is the faulty assumption that a similarity between Catholic and pagan practices implies a connection between the two. Ralph Woodrow’s book, Babylon Mystery Religion, is full of such “parallels,” one of which links the roundness of the Eucharistic host to the roundness of the sun, which pagan Mithraists worshipped. Add to this the apparent sun beams shooting out of some monstrances and you have a fine example of Catholics inadvertently worshipping the sun god. (Babylon Mystery Religion: Ancient and Modern, Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, Inc., 1966, p. 121). (Note: Interestingly enough, Woodrow has recently come out with a new book, The Babylon Connection, wherein he recants much of his former material, showing the inaccuracies in the first book. For this, he should be given much credit.) This method of finding parallels, if followed consistently, ends up coming back to haunt those who use it. For example, among some of the ancient pagan tribes of the middle east, there was a fascinating ceremony performed by the nomads. They would slaughter a lamb and smear its blood on their tent posts, so that those who slept inside would be protected from the destroying angel who came in the night (A Feast in Honor of Yahweh, Fides Publishers, Inc., 1965, p. 37). Sound familiar? Of course, this ceremony bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Passover, where the blood of the pure lamb would be poured onto the door posts of the Jewish homes, so the angel of death would pass over onto the homes of the Egyptians (Exodus 12:1-13). According to the methodology of our Fundamentalist friends, this must mean the ancient Jews stole their Passover ceremony from the pagans. If Passover is corrupted by its apparent pagan origins, then down comes the whole notion of Jesus as the perfect Passover sacrifice. You see where faulty methodology takes us? But there’s more. The famous comparative religionist, Sir James George Frazer, in his classic work, The Golden Bough, found some interesting similarities between Christianity and paganism. Apparently, numerous pagan religions have a god who dies and is resurrected. One notable example is the Egyptian god, Osiris, who is murdered, buried and resurrected from the dead (The New Golden Bough: A New Abridgment of the Classic Work, Sir James George Frazer, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961, pp. 183-185). Does this mean the Christian Faith derived its belief in the death and resurrection of its God from the pagan religions of Egypt? Of course not. Despite what some anti-Catholics would tell us, just because two beliefs are similar doesn’t mean there is any relationship between the two. Another excellent example of this is the symbol of the swastika (also known as the gammadion). This symbol has been found to exist in the ancient cultures of India, Denmark, Greece, Belgium, Tibet, Gaul, Macedonia and just about anywhere else where people had hands with which to write. However, in each place, the symbol was understood differently. The meaning behind the swastika of the Third Reich is vastly different than that understood in ancient Tibet. Just because these cultures share the same symbol doesn’t mean they’re interrelated. Nazi Germany had very little to do with ancient India. We cannot, then, assume that just because Catholicism shares some symbol or practice with paganism, that the thing necessarily has a pagan beginning. Still, while it’s true that some Catholic practices do have pagan precursors (we’ve already seen how the early believers Christianized the pagan holidays and temples, just as the Jews did in the Old Testament), this was born out of Christian victory over paganism, not compromise with it. Additionally, there are other Biblical precedents for God endorsing the use of some pagan practices. Among the Jewish people, we see the casting of lots (1 Chronicles 25:8; 1 Samuel 14:40-45; Nehemiah 10:34) and the offering of water libations (1 Kings 18:33-36), both prominent in the paganism of the time (Maertens, 28, 72-74). If indeed God frowned upon any practice that was pagan in origin, He wouldn’t have prescribed them for His people. But, as the Bible proves, He did prescribe them. For Christians, paganism is a dirty word, and it should be. Any religion that denies the One True God in favor of idols, nature-worship, or self-worship is a religion to be avoided. But this is all the more reason to bring paganism to the foot of the Cross. Jesus has won the victory over the false gods of this world, and so their practices and traditions should be brought into service for Him. Those who disagree do so in the face of the Scriptural and historical evidence. It’s time to let God use whatever means He wishes to further His own glory. Our God is sovereign, and He can do whatever He wants. [N.B.: This article originally appeared in the Sept./Oct. 1998 edition of Envoy Magazine and is reposted here with permission of the editor of Envoy, who happens to be me.] I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period. I do not understand why it is part of the church year.Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the Church Catholic; on the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure, or at least horror, as part of our church year. We do, after all, go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly if the Reformation is to be narrated rightly, it is to be narrated as part of those dark days.Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success. But when we make Reformation a success, it only ends up killing us. After all, the very name ‘Protestantism’ is meant to denote a reform movement of protest within the Church Catholic.When Protestantism becomes an end in itself, which it certainly has through the mainstream denominations in America, it becomes anathema.If we no longer have broken hearts at the church’s division, then we cannot help but unfaithfully celebrate Reformation Sunday.For example, note what the Reformation has done for our reading texts like that which we hear from Luke this morning. We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God’s free grace. And therefore we are better than the Catholics because we know they are sinners. What an odd irony that the Reformation made such readings possible.As Protestants we now take pride in the acknowledgment of our sinfulness in order to distinguish ourselves from Catholics who allegedly believe in works-righteousness.Unfortunately, the Catholics are right. Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of — or perhaps better, because of — the world’s fragmentation and divisions. Unity, after all, is what God has given us through Christ’s death and resurrection. For in that death and resurrection we have been made part of God’s salvation for the world so that the world may know it has been freed from the powers that would compel us to kill one another in the name of false loyalties. All that is about the works necessary to save us.For example, I often point out that at least Catholics have the magisterial office of the Bishop of Rome to remind them that disunity is a sin. You should not overlook the significance that in several important documents of late, John Paul II has confessed the Catholic sin for the Reformation. Where are the Protestants capable of doing likewise? We Protestants feel no sin for the disunity of the Reformation. We would not know how to confess our sin for the continuing disunity of the Reformation. We would not know how to do that because we have no experience of unity.The magisterial office — we Protestants often forget — is not a matter of constraining or limiting diversity in the name of unity. The office of the Bishop of Rome is to ensure that when Christians move . . . (continue reading)

In the 1860s Charles Wells decided that the only way to see the world was to go to sea. So at the age of 14 he joined the frigate Devonshire as cabin boy on his first trip to India. By 1868 he had become qualified as a steamship captain, and had seen some great sites having sailed to Australia and around the Cape of Good Hope. However, during one of his infrequent trips home he went to a party in Oxford and met the woman of his dreams, a Miss Josephine Grimbley. Love blossomed and before long Charles asked for her hand in marriage. She was delighted, he was delighted, Mr Grimbley senior wasn't! No daughter of his was going to marry a seafaring man who would spend so long away from home. So he gave Charles an ultimatum. His daughter or the sea. Fortunately his love for Josephine was too strong and he agreed to hang up his sea boots. He then had to find a way of supporting his bride. In 1875, a two and a quarter acre site came to auction on the banks of the River Ouse as it ran through Bedford. The site contained a coal depot and a brew house round the back. Included in the price were 35 pubs, most of which were in Bedford and the surrounding area . It was this that caught Charles' imagination. Beer. Charles figured beer would always be in demand, even in the hardest of times. So with the help of his father, Charles bought the site and began work turning the small brew house into a fully fledged brewery which could serve the county. Founded in 1876 to provide beer to the local Bedfordians.Water is an absolutely vital ingredient and has a huge impact on the beer's flavour. So to produce the best beer you need the best water. In 1902 Charles climbed a hill, just a couple of miles from the brewery and sank his own well to tap into an underground reservoir of water, purified through layers of chalk and limestone. Today all Charles Wells beer is still made with water drawn from the well sunk by Charles 90 years ago. Charles Wells is now the largest independently owned, family run brewery in the country and is in fact the UK's fifth largest brewery. Over five generations the Wells family have worked at the brewery, and there are currently three members of the Wells family involved on a day to day basis. Charles Wells First Brewery Early Delivery Trucks By 1976, the growing demand for Charles Wells beer meant the original Charles Wells site was just not big enough to allow for any expansion. The move to the Eagle Brewery in Havelock Street, Bedford gave the company the opportunity to install the most up to date brewing equipment. Return to people page Last Updated on: 15 March 2000 For comments about this webpage, please email Martin Edwards. ©1999. EnglandGenWeb and WorldGenWeb Project.

Comfort Film Presents: 2016 Chicago Paranormal Film Festival 2016 Festival Schedule (You are free to enter in and out of screenings throughout the day.) 10:00AM DOORS OPEN 30min 10:30AM BLOCK A 90min CAUSE OF MY DEATH 80min "Paranormal Activity" meets "Quarantine". Two girlfriends, one hunted condominium complex, zero normal people. Girls are trapped in building with no exit, no chance to escape. After few hours of total mess, one of the girl disappears and become crazy just like other tenants. 12:00PM INTERMISSION 15min 12:15PM BLOCK B 90min ANGEL BACK 7min Two young people, Alex and Marina, feel in love and discover they can’t live with one another. A strong connection is developed between them and they decide to marry. Alex dies in an accident while abroad and Marina struggles with the loss of her boyfriend even as she grows old, trying to get in touch with his spirit. WHAT HAPPENS IN THE WOODS 7min A man's obsession drives him into the heart of the forest to confront the beast that dwells within. HUMAN RESOURCES 75min In this ghost story for the 99%, a young woman who lands a new job discovers that the skyscraper she works in is haunted by victims of the corporation's cutthroat pursuit of profit. Unable to ignore injustices embodied by the disembodied, she sets out to reveal the truth and stop her bosses before their seemingly benign business operations kill again. 01:45PM INTERMISSION 15min 02:00PM BLOCK C 90min WILD MEN 90min The inept cast and crew of a surprise hit reality-tv show travel deep into the Adirondack mountains for their second season to find proof that Bigfoot exists. Any remaining skepticism they have is ripped to pieces. 03:30PM INTERMISSION 15min 03:45PM BLOCK D 90min SHELF ELF 9min Hang your stockings. Say your prayers. This is Shelf Elf. A home invasion horror/comedy based on that little creep that floods your Facebook and Twitter feeds every December. This Christmas, all will be shelved! BLACK WIDOW 2min A Passionate Kiss with fatal end WHAT GOES UP 6min When a man wakes up in a mysterious place, he is forced to face his demons. HEART OF DUST 6min A former psychiatric patient returns to the now abandoned and decaying asylum to reflect upon his memories as a patient, struggling to free himself from feelings of institutionalization. He recalls a female patient who would play the piano, lifting the spirits of the other residents. Based on true stories. After being buried alive as a heretic in the 17th century, Carmilla awakens from her grave in northern Iowa and begins her conquest of a small town. 05:15PM INTERMISSION 15min 05:30PM BLOCK E 90min THEIR DREAMS OF LISBON 25min Douglas Runnicles is struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife Fiona and his gay son Neil in a car accident. One day, he sees a young gay man, Simon, at Portobello Beach who looks strikingly like his dead son. Douglas becomes obsessed with the young man. A GHOST STORY 24min Follow Carl, a tenacious opportunist and self-proclaimed ghost-hunter, through his heart-stopping venture in this dark comedy. Ghost tours deliver scary stories, and that’s about it. However, if the tour happens to bill itself as a special engagement involving the year 1954, then you can expect an experience that exceeds expectations, including those for survival. THE HALLOWEEN GIRL 19min Ten years after her tragic death on Halloween night, Charlotte begins to reappear to her mother, Marie, in a series of nightmares - or are they? Only adding to her distress is the news that her young son, Luke, now has a mysterious teenage friend he calls ‘The Halloween Girl’ - and her name is Charlotte. Has Charlotte really returned - and is Marie’s dark secret now in danger of being revealed…? 07:00PM INTERMISSION 15min 07:15PM BLOCK F 90min INTO THE OTHER SIDE 16min A man and his paranormal group try to uncover what is lurking at a haunted manor in Indiana. SUPER DOG 15min A sweet movie about a young boy with post traumatic stress disorder who struggles to let his imaginary dog go. A unique twist reveals what caused his disorder while intertwining supernatural and spiritual influences. Recently awarded "Best of Show" at the Tupelo Film Festival" and stars the famous boy who wrote the viral White Boy Privilege. SILENTLY WITHIN YOUR SHADOW 14min As their relationship grows, Lucette's obsession for ventriloquism and her dummy Hugo starts to strain her relationship with Jace. To Luctette Hugo is more than just a dummy, he’s her best friend and represents her ambition as an artist, to her, he’s very much real. But to Jace Hugo is just a puppet, or is he? ghost-hunter, through his heart-stopping venture in this dark comedy. THE MIDNIGHT SHIFT 14min A man on the run takes cover as a taxi driver on the midnight shift. Soon he discovers that things are not what they seem when he picks up a mysterious figure as a client... DEMONIC ATTACHMENT 13min Jennifer Ryan is sick. After seeing countless doctors and specialists without getting any answers, she turns to her last resort. But what she finds out may haunt her forever... In the art exhibition, a southern woman designer Juan Zeng(cast：Yao Zhang) won the first prize by a Yulan flower endshield which is entitled "the life beyond" . As the leading character in the story suddenly died, the truth behind the endshield and the change under the bodhi tree during the last 50 years both became unveiled with Juan Zeng's way back home. A young Irish mobster struggles with the harsh realities of his brutal profession. 08:45PM INTERMISSION 15M 09:00PM AWARDS 60M 10:00PM END OF EVENT The Chicago Paranormal Film Festival is an annual event featuring all independent films of the supernatural / paranormal genre including reality documentaries. The event also features special guest speakers, workshops and vendors relating to the paranormal! chicagoparacon.com You are free to enter in and out of screenings throughout the day. Film screenings happen every Wednesday at 8pm Outdoor Film screenings are at dusk (sundown) out on the Comfort Station lawn. Music performances happen every Thursday at 7pm Art openings happen the first Saturday of every month, and are displayed for the entirety of the month All other events happen intermittently Comfort Film Presents:

Overcoming jealousy and the underlying fear and insecurity that causes it is crucial if you want a happy and healthy relationship. Experiencing jealousy is a sign that you do not have control over your emotions and that your emotions have control over you. Jealousy is a reaction to external circumstances that make you feel threatened. If another man is moving in on your woman you feel threatened. You fear what you might lose. This makes you jealous and that often leads to anger. This is all because of an underlying insecurity that you are not good enough. If you are secure and confident in your relationship there is no reason to be jealous. And if you are secure and confident in yourself then you do not fear the loss of the relationship. If you are an insecure person however a large portion of your identity will have been placed in the relationship and you have a grave fear about the relationship ever disintegrating. This makes you insecure about the relationship and you fear external threats at every turn. So when you notice any potentially threatening behavior you get instantly jealousy as a way of protecting the relationship. Embrace The Jealous Feelings You have to be aware of your behavior in order to understand it. Therefore you shouldn't try and bury the jealous feelings when they emerge. The key to overcoming jealousy is to listen to your feelings, understand them and then overcome them. Ask yourself why you feel threatened. What do you feel like you have to lose? Why are you so afraid of losing that thing? The jealousy is trying to tell you something, you just have to figure out what it is. Understand Jealousy Is Well Intentioned Jealousy is not a hateful reaction. It often results in anger and many men use that anger as a tool to wield control over their partners and punish them for their perceived indiscretions that led to the jealousy. But ultimately the jealousy is a defensive reaction that an insecure man uses to protect his territory. Overcoming jealousy is done by removing the fear of loss. Instead of living with a constant fear and insecurity you live at peace because you have a high level of trust in the relationship and enough security in yourself that the things that used to be perceived as threats no longer phase you. What you really need to understand is that none of this is achieved by changing the world "out there." It is done by you changing the beliefs you hold in your mind which drive the way that you perceive your external surroundings. How To Overcome Jealousy Uncover The Underlying Insecurity That Is Causing The Reaction Forget about trying to combat whatever trigger causes your jealousy because it won't solve your problem or help you in your mission of overcoming jealousy. If her talking to other men makes you jealous then you may think that preventing her from doing that will solve the problem. It won't. All it will do is send you into a spiral of controlling behavior and drive her away. You need to deal with the underlying problem so that you won't get jealous when she talks to other men. If you see jealousy as an isolated feeling then you will never be able to overcome it. It is merely one step in the chain of negative emotions. It is emerging because of deeper insecurities that you are experiencing. If you want to deal with it you have to uncover what is driving it. This is going to be slightly different for each person but at the core is a fear of loss. You are afraid to lose the relationship and therefore you perceive threats and develop negative emotions around them. You Don't Have To Change Anything, Just Your Perceptions A jealous man tries to change the world around him. He tries to get his partner to act differently. He tries to get in the way of any one he sees as a threat. He wants to control others so they conform to his belief of how the world should be. The jealous man will never be satisfied until everyone is under his complete control. This of course is impossible. And the more you try to control the more others rebel, which makes you try and control even more. The way to overcoming jealousy is to relinquish this control freak behavior. Because you do not need to change anything other than your perceptions. Jealousy stems an insecurity about not being good enough. If you are happy and secure in who you are then there is no need to ever feel jealous. Understand that it is the way you see the world and not the world itself that is at fault. This means taking responsibility for the problem and responsibility for the solution. Self acceptance is a crucial piece of the overcoming jealousy puzzle. The insecurity that leads to jealousy stems from low self esteem and belief that you are not good enough. This is what you really need to examine. Pay attention to this and ask yourself why you cannot accept yourself. This is a bigger problem than just jealousy and will be causing many problems in your life and relationships. The more you can accept yourself the less you need validation and love from other people for your own self worth. If you derive self worth from you then it diminshes the fear of losing your partner, because you know you can survive without her. This in turn diminishes the need to feel jealous. It is counter intuitive but if you don't fear losing your women you are more likely to end up keeping her. The fear is what drives her away. Don't Compare, There Is Always Someone Better And Worse Our society has developed in us a constant habit of comparing. We measure everything including ourselves. The more you compare yourself to others the more insecure you feel. Overcoming jealousy means letting go of constant comparisons. Part of accepting yourself for who you are is to reduce the amount you need to compare. There is nothing wrong with looking at someone for inspiration. But do not look at someone in order to make yourself feel small. There is always someone better and worse at anything you do. So there is no point wasting time agonizing over comparisons. Just Let It Go So some other man is hitting on your woman? Just let it go. There is no problem with a little bit of harmless flirting. She has chosen to be with you so just trust that she will act with integrity. Life is a whole lot easier when you just let it go and assume the best. The chances that she is going to cheat on you or leave you if you are in a happy relationship are slim to none. And if it isn't a happy relationship then perhaps it is like that because your jealousy is driving her away. Again just let it go. Give up the self righteous victim act because in the end it doesn't help anybody when overcoming jealousy - neither you nor her. If you are committed to dealing with jealousy I recommend a self hypnosis program called "Overcoming Jealousy." This is part of a larger program called "10 Steps To Overcoming Insecurity In Relationships." - Overcoming Insecurity - How To Stop Being Paranoid About Your Woman - Why Men Display Insecurity In Relationships - Jealousy And Insecurity - What's The Difference - Dealing With A Jealous Girlfriend - The Causes Of Jealousy Free Ebook: How To Be A Confident, Secure and Badass Man Download this ebook to learn how to be the type of man who succeeds in a long term relationship.

This is a guest post by Alma Katsu, author of The Taker and The Reckoning. As I mentioned on my review of The Taker, the cover is just gorgeous. It is a pleasure to hear more about how a book’s cover comes to life. Thanks to Ms. Katsu for this blog post. Cover Art: A Portrait For Your Book There are few things as important to a book’s success than it’s cover. If the cover doesn’t entice you, chances are you’ll never read the first few lines of jacket copy or pick it up from the shelf at the local bookstore, and you’ll never know if the story inside is the one that’s going to change your life. Readers are often surprised to learn that publishers control what the cover will look like. The author will be shown the final version and can ask for changes, but only best-selling authors be able say what ultimately goes on the outside of her book. That’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. My publisher has experience in this area, not me. I can tell you what I prefer but I have no idea if it will resonate with all the potential readers of my book. Covers send all kinds of subtle messages to readers through color, font, placements of blurbs and icons and all that. I think that selecting a cover is twice as hard for books like The Taker and The Reckoning, ones that don’t fit neatly into one genre or another. We wanted something that conveyed the book’s mystery and sinister, dark mood but also wasn’t too hard-edged and would still appeal to women readers. The hardcover of The Taker was meant to convey a Gothic feeling, softened with the golden scrolls. The trade paperback cover with a woman’s face wearing an ornate Venetian mask is quite different, and definitely more feminine. While it is a departure, it’s pretty common for the paperback cover to be less abstract than the hardcover. I think this artwork gives readers a sense of the heroine’s character, that she’s a woman of mystery, but so much more. The Reckoning’s cover is even more of a departure. It still features a woman’s face and the heroine’s trademark blue eyes, but perhaps favors glamour over a more sinister feel. I’ve been told that it’s very striking and stands out, whether on a bookshelf or as a thumbnail online. So far, readers’ responses have been quite positive. And now it’s your turn: what are your favorite book covers of all time? Have you ever bought a book for its cover? BONUS: If you’re interested in what goes into designing a book cover, you might be interested in this video showing how one of Gail Carriger’s covers was put together. ((http://youtu.be/yoDCiTsS7dU)) Alma Katsu is the author of The Taker and The Reckoning, the first two books in a supernatural trilogy about a dark, obsessive love that spans centuries. The Taker has been published in English worldwide, and translation rights have been sold in ten languages. The Taker was also picked by Booklist/American Library Association as one of the top ten debut novels of last year. You can find out more about the novels at http://www.almakatsu.com

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Been there, done that – there wasn’t much that Eli Walker hadn’t experienced as a cop. Even working in one of the better precincts in New York City didn’t help dispel the depravity he saw on a daily basis. It was all part and parcel of his mantra of living life in the now, not worrying about the future. And especially with women. No strings, no attachments, and he made that perfectly clear before he ever bedded them. Relationships were not on his agenda – not now, not anytime in the near future. Women flocked to him and he could take his pick; himself exiting the encounter with what he’d wanted and leaving them aching for more, left dreaming of his curly locks and bronze body. A chance encounter pulling a mugger off of a woman changed his whole world. She was blonde and beautiful – Eli didn’t care about any of the interracial politics that would surround any serious relationship. He just knew he had to have Ainsley, like an alcoholic needs his next drink. This was all new territory for Eli and could he stay to the path, all the way to its end? Or would she be like all the others in his life . I received a copy of this book for a honest review This is A Love and Order Novel and can be read as a standalone. I have not read any of the others in this series and I wasn’t lost when it read this one. Eli Walker is a detective for NYPD when he is called to Annalise Bernett’s family shop for a robbery and assault. From what I can gather Eli isn’t a man whore he just isn’t looking for a relationship and isn’t one to turn down want is offered. No one woman has really snagged his attention, until Annalise who is the total opposite of the women he has been with. Annalise isn’t looking for a relationship either having gotten out of a abusive one two years ago, but she can’t stop thinking about the handsome Detective Walker. Since Eli can’t stop thinking about her either he just sucks it up and asks her out. These two fit together so well, he is the exact opposite of her ex and makes her feel safe, even if he is bossy, and she is the exact opposite in that she’s not aggressive and she makes him feel level headed and calm. Even though they fit together they have things going against them, they are a mixed race couple and even though it’s 2016 there are still people out there that give them crap about it and Annalise’s ex is stalking her. I enjoying getting to see Eli in is element as a police officer with the cases that he works and seeing Annalise in her element as a writer when we see her having to dealing with traveling for book signings. The fear that Annalise feels when her ex has her and the pain that she and Eli feel in the hospital is so real it brought tears to my eyes!! I will say it again, these two belong together!! He is her savior and she is the calm in his storm. Jeanine Binder grew up in a small town in California on the outskirts of Palm Springs, where the Hollywood celebrities liked to vacation. After thirty years, she packed up, moved to Arkansas where she still lives today. Her hobbies include her writing, reading good books, and seeing exotic places (loves to go on cruises). Writing has always been a passion and hoping the next twenty years will bring many enjoyable books for others to read.

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Friday, November 10, 2006 A continuation of my last post. As the hounds came back to our vehicles, the 3rd member of our party arrived with her Deerhounds. Karen has a very keen Deerhound bitch with her that is just under a year of age and the second Karen with her Deerhounds then arrived. With this many hounds on the ground I lost track of who was with who, but I believed we had an additional 4 Deerhounds with us. They too are magnificent hounds, truly built for running and sturdy enough to negotiate the hard ground. They were each adorned with their colored jackets to be able to identify them individually from a good distance away, often more than a mile. We strapped on our daypacks and got moving to a large patch of sage brush. Weather was nearly perfect for coursing as it was in the low 40's. Broken cloud cover and almost no breeze. The population of hares is approaching ridiculous as we were not walking for more than 30 seconds and several hares bolted away from us. In our freecoursing walk, the hounds are all loose and so the whole pack was after them. The Staghounds and Deerhounds were up in the lead with the Wolfhounds close behind. Half the pack went after 1 hare that made hard turns bearing straight down toward the lowland that was sage covered. Once to cover the hounds would become unsited and he would be home safe. The second hare was going for open ground hoping to outrun his pursuers, which he indeed did do. As I had mentioned in a previous post, it is not the taking of the game which is important, but the quality of the course. These hounds were hard driving and did a great job of going after their quarry. They forced numerous hard turns by the hares and were terrific to watch. My next trip, I am going to walk the hounds on a slip lead to prevent them from launching off after these hares that bolt a 1/4 mile in front of us. This uses up huge amount of energy that could be more beneficial to save for hares that bolt nearly between their front feet. After running a dozen different hares during the course of the morning my hounds were spent. All their energy was gone. They were not lacking desire as they wanted to run after more and more hares that we came across on the way back to the vehicles. I needed to leash them up so as not to run them past the point of complete exhaustion. Weather permitting, I am going to go back out this Sunday. It is supposed to remain cool and maybe have some snow fall. Here in the States, we are celebrating Veterans Day. Let us all take a moment and give thanks to our military forces that have sacrificed a great deal and in some cases, their lives in order for us to enjoy the lives we have today. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 12:43 PM Monday, November 06, 2006 Had the pleasure of getting up to my favorite place in Wyoming to hunt the Longdogs last Saturday. Went up with several groups of hounds in addition to my Staghounds. First was a pack of Irish Wolfhounds. I hear all the time that these hounds have lost their hunting drive. To those people I say you have never seen or been out with my friend Karen's Wolfhounds. They are the fittest and most prey driven Wolfhounds I have ever been out with. They just go and go like the energizer bunny that we are coursing. The second group of hounds we went with were Scottish Deerhounds. They too still have some strong hunt drive in them. When Karen and I pulled up to our hunt location, she unloaded her Wolfhounds. I was not even able to get my Staghounds unloaded before her hounds bolted the first Jack Rabbit. They are going into their winter coat color which is a mottled white. They were off and running and I was holding my hounds in place until they returned. Within just moments while on their way back to the trucks, the Wolfhounds had bolted a second hare. My Staghounds were going mental wanting to get loose. I was patient and waited. We gathered up most of the Wolfhounds and started off to our north. I would say not more than 30 seconds later, the chase was on. For those of you that have not experienced watching these hounds explode into motion after a quarry, it is one of the biggest adrenaline rushes there is for me. Out in the wide open West, we have views that extend for sometimes 20 to 30 miles. No fences, treelines roads or highways to get in the way. These hounds streaching out to maximum strides and coursing a truly worthy opponent, the White Tailed Jack Rabbit, which is not a rabbit at all, but a hare. This hare was off and running full speed with the hounds in hot pursuit. They were about a half mile out and the hare was nearly grabbed by my Scorch. My young hound, Mace was very close to her and made an attempt to get teeth into this hare. A couple of hard turns in a circle of about 10' and the hare straight lined it out and managed to get into a badger sette. A great run. All of this has taken place in the first 20 minutes or so. More of the story tomorrow Posted by Mike Bilbo at 7:35 PM Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Here is Strike at 4 months. He is just full of himself. I have had him out on excursions with the adult Staghounds on 2 occasions thus far. He has been cautious about these first outings. When Scorch and Mace coursed a hare a week ago, Strike stood by me and watched in apparent amazment. When they returned, he was very excited and jumped all over the girls and ran around in big circles. Can't wait until he is older. He is going through his teething stage and chews up everything he can get his mouth on. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 9:20 PM I was fortunate enough to have been a guest of the Opening Day of the Arapahoe Hunt. I know what you are thinking, "These are not sight hounds" They are Scent Hounds. Foxhounds are very exciting to watch and they hunt coyotes in this part of the country. Each season starts with an old tradition of Blessing the Hounds by a Priest from the local Parish. He prays for the hounds, the riders and the quarry. This day was quite typical for the Rocky Mountain Region as it was quite cool with a constant mist in the air with overcast weather. I was lucky enough to get a ride with a lovely young woman named Dahlia who happened to be a world class "Bloody Mary creator" She and I along with another equally lovely young woman named Libby did the Hilltopping, watching the riders and hounds at full cry galloping across the countryside. Dahlia asked "Another Bloody Mary?" Who am I to refuse such a request... Of course The hounds and riders covered a good deal of ground that day. One of the riders that had a hand held GPS said it was 18-1/2 miles. I was exhausted just thinking about it. Quite a nice day overall. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 8:29 PM Monday, September 25, 2006 People often comment or inquire about how many times my Staghounds actually catch game. I tell them that the sport of the actual course is more important than having game in hand everytime the hounds are slipped. It is exhilarating beyond description to watch these magnificent hounds get sighted on target or game and race off in it's pursuit. With fewer and fewer people participating in this ancient sport of kings, I can tell you with absolute certainty that coursing hounds have no affect on either the hares or coyote populations. If I were to do this everyday for the rest of my life, it would have no affect. With hares, either Whitetail or Blacktail Jack Rabbits, depending on the openness of the terrain they are hunting in, the catch ratio seems to be about 1 out of 4. With coyotes, it seems to be slightly higher depending more upon the experience level of the quarry being perused. The younger sub adults are not able to fool the hounds or have the physical stamina to outlast them until they can give them the slip in a heavy brush area where the hounds become unsighted. Again, I would like to emphasize that the sport of the course is the most important part of the hunt and not the retrieval of game. That is a large bonus to a successful hunt but not the endall. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 9:26 PM Thursday, September 07, 2006 It is interesting that in the past week, I have had 3 phone calls from people involved in 3 separate dog breeds that expressed a serious concern that their breed of dog was likely to be extinct within the next 10 years because of genetic problems. The problem seems to stem from an absolute closed and locktite registry by the Kennel Club organizations that will not under any circumstances allow for an occasional outcross. Over the years I have heard of almost no health problems with Staghounds that were not self inflicted or caused by hunting or quarry confrontations. I feel the need to explain that in spite of a number of people that I have heard of trying to get the Staghound recognized by some of these Kennel Club groups that I am adamantly opposed to this in principle. Staghounds are not a breed at all but a type of hunting sighthound. I would like to emphasize this again. They are a TYPE of hunting sighthound and NOT a breed at all! The inclusion of these hounds into any breed type will surely be the end of them and they will be condemned to the fate of great running dogs like the Irish Wolfhound, Scottish Deerhound, Great Danes, etc. These large running dogs tend to have an average life span of 6 to 8 years. I have a friend that bred her Staghound when it was 8 years old and had a large healthy litter. This hound is still actively hunted each season and it will likely live to be 14 or 15 years old. If you care anything about your breed of hound, it is time to wake up before the gene pool is so small that it will be impossible to produce a litter of pups that are not destined to die at a ridiculous young age. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 5:17 PM Tuesday, August 22, 2006 It was 2 seasons ago when I had my first opportunity to hunt with some people that take coyote hunting seriously. A friend that is a wheat farmer was talking to me about a guy that came to his farm to hunt occasionally with the Staghounds. I was all ears. He passed along his name and number and I gave him a call. Suspecting that I might be an anti, he was cautious in our conversation at first. We visited awhile and at the end of the week, he surprised me by calling me to tell me that he was planning a hunt early that Saturday morning. Even better, he asked if I would bring Scorch, my smooth coated bitch along to see how she would do hunting from a drop box on a truck. At the agreed upon time that Saturday, I was there bright and early. It was a late Fall day and had rained and snowed a bit the night before but not cold enough to freeze the ground. Unfortunately, that made things pretty muddy, which is not what you want as the ground was very slippery. I loaded my girl in the box with 3 of his males and I am sure she though I had lost my mind making her get in the box with all the males. His males were a grizzled pack with scars from a few seasons of hunting evident on their muzzles and faces. We were loaded and in the truck we got. I noticed a big grab bar like you would see in a handicapped bathroom someplace. He said hold on and I was likely to need that bar before long. We set out across a wheat stubble field slipping and sliding in the mud. We were driving toward a shallow draw that ran some 2 miles along side the wheat field we were in. About half way up this draw a coyote just jumped out of the draw and was running flat out across the wheat field. The driver stood on the gas and was after it. To my astonishment, we were not catching this coyote but in fact were loosing some ground in the chase. We were pursuing this amazing canine for about a mile listening to the hounds in the back screaming with excitement as they were watching the coyote running from us and were anxious to get loose when the driver uttered a few choice words and stood on the brakes. When the truck had nearly stopped he pulled a lever at the top of the cab and out came the hounds. They exploded out of that truck like a group of Stinger missiles with a radar lock on a Bogie. To my pleasant surprise, Scorch was right in there with them. They were closing on this coyote at incredible speed. The coyote made some good moves and had the lead hound overrun him twice but then he caught up and rolled the coyote. Within a second the rest of the hounds were on him and he was finished very quickly. All four hounds, including mine had this animal and the whole event which seemed to take place in slow motion was actually over within 45 seconds or so. This was a young dog coyote about 40 lbs in size. None of the hounds took any bites and so they were loaded back in the truck and off we went to find another one. About half an hour later, we flushed another one and the chase was on again. The engine was roaring and the hounds screaming with excitment. This was a much larger male coyote and he had the speed and condition to stay ahead of us in the mud. The race was on as he was heading for a fence and large pasture full of buffalo. Unfortunately, he managed to stay far enough ahead of us to make it thought this fence and he ran out in the middle of this herd and stood there and gave us the paw. A large bull cut his gloating short and ran him out of their territory. We did not want to release the Staghounds into this area where we could not readily go get them because of the buffalo. About an hour later, still sliding in all the mud we manage to get another coyote on the run and the same chase took place. The hounds caught this coyote. One of the males took a good bite in the foot and the owner was unhappy as this could result in a month of no hunting while the injury healed. All in all, it was a very exciting day for my first experience with these amazing running hounds. As Fall draws near, the conditioning of the hounds is high priority as the hunt season is just around the corner. I don't have a picture as the guy I went with did not want photos taken. If anyone has such a photo I would like to publish it here. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 6:26 PM Thursday, August 10, 2006 This is Strike. He is a keen 9 week old pup from the litter I have been posting here. Out of the 11 pups, he was the smallest male of the 6. Every pup in this litter is excellent and has a long pedigree of coyote hunting ansestors. We have 1 male and 4 females left in this litter. Why did we select Strike over the other pups? No special reason other than he just seems to love to run. Will continue to post photos for people to see. If you have photos of good hunt hounds or hunt pictures, email them to me and maybe I will post the story and photos here. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 11:42 AM Tuesday, August 08, 2006 Grassroots action by the U. S. Sportsman's Alliance and California outdoorsmen has blocked a bill that threatened hunting dog competitors and field coursers. Assembly Bill 2110, which sought to outlaw open field coursing competitions, did not move out of the Assembly Appropriations Committee on May 25. The bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman, Loni Hancock, D-El Cerrito, failed to garner enough support among the committee members, which prevented the bill from reaching the Assembly floor. The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance (USSA) invested thousands of dollars on a series of mailings and e-mail alerts to sportsmen in key legislative districts. The USSA supporters were urged to turn the heat up on assembly members who had not committed to protecting sportsmen's interests by opposing AB 2110. The Masters of Foxhounds Association of America and the United Kennel Club also sent mailings to their California members in specific legislative districts, alerting them to the dangers of AB 2110. They were urged to call lawmakers and describe the bill's impact on sportsmen and it's financial impact on local law enforcement. "Stopping this bill in California shows just what kind of success sportsmen are capable of at the grassroots level, " said Rob Sexton, USSA vice president of government affairs. "Groups like the California Houndsmen for Conservation, North American Coursing Association, Southwest Coursing Club, Brynmair Irish Wolfhounds, San Joaquin Sighthounds, National Open Field Coursing Association, California Hawking Club, as well as the California Waterfowl Association were essential in stopping this dangerous bill." USSA board member Natasha Hunt of Coalinga, California was also critical in raising sportsmen's concerns about the bill among the legislature. She, along with lobbyist Bill Hemby, a former California law enforcement officer, raised awareness about the unnecessary strain enforcing the bill would have placed on the law enforcement community. "Sportsmen can be proud of their efforts in California, " commented Sexton. "Not only have they helped to preserve coursing, but they have helped slam the door on other anti-hunting legislation that might have been brought up had AB 2110 passed." Reprinted from the Sporting Dog Defense Coalition Quarterly Report, Summer 2006 Support the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance Posted by Mike Bilbo at 10:52 AM Thursday, June 29, 2006 It was one of those warm summer evenings when the afternoon thunderstorms are cracking in the distance and it is still 85 degrees out. The Staghounds and Terriers were restless and wanting to go for a walk. My 2 Staghounds, Scorch and Taz along with 3 or 4 terriers started walking out from our inside gate. The terriers are good at ferreting out rabbits and the Stags patiently wait for an anticipated bolt. It wasn't but about 10 minutes and the terriers had one on the run. The hounds were quick to pick it up and the chase was on. To my surprise, the little cottontail ran straight into a small bush and a fox had him. A moment later, the fox realized that this was not a gift and decided he better get out of Dodge. Unfortunately for the fox, Scorch had a lock on him and had the speed momentum advantage. He was in her grip within 30 to 40 yards. A moment later, the terriers caught up and Mr. Fox was hunting rabbits in heaven. This fox had been stealing my neighbor's gamebirds for the past few months and I am sure he was happy to hear the fox was gone. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 4:56 PM Tuesday, June 27, 2006 I had someone ask for an update on the progress of Mace. She had been kicked by the horse 4 weeks ago this Thursday. She seems to be making remarkable progress. She is still a bit slow in her reactions but is practically normal in every other respect. She has gained most of her normal weight back and is able to run again. She seems to feel good and is back to her happy self, hopefully ready to hunt this fall. I am taking her out for an outing this Saturday to see if she can focus on quarry. Thanks for all the inquires and I'll keep you all posted. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 7:49 PM I am sure this may be boring to a good number of people that are looking for hunt stories and so on but I have a large number of people that just want to see a few current photos and this is a convenient place to post them. Pups and mother are all doing well. Puppies have their eyes open and are gaining weight quickly. Most are 2-1/2 to 3 lbs and they are starting to walk. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 6:09 PM Tuesday, June 20, 2006 We pulled into Medicine Bow, Wyoming about 9:00 pm, Friday evening. We had driven about 4 hours north of our home outside of Denver, Colorado to this little historic town of 300 full time residents. The Virginian Hotel. Lots of colorful Old West characters came to mind that had stayed in this very place from Buffalo Bill Cody and the likes. Hunters and trappers from over a hundred years of history. The people checking you in were very friendly. Had the restaurant and bar open nearly all night. We were tired and decided to check in and call it a night as we were getting up early the next morning. 5:30 Saturday morning. After listening to the trains coming through every 15 minutes. ( I forgot about the damn trains ), all night long, blasting their airhorns to let people know to get off the tracks, I was a bit groggy. Was up and showered and walked the Staghounds. Gave them some breakfast and then headed to the restaurant to get some coffee poured into my system to get it started. I was meeting several friends for the hunt. Karen, who has a formidable pack of Irish Wolfhounds, and Frank who is more of an acquaintance that runs a fine pack of Salukis. They were both there and I had my very reasonable breakfast of ham and eggs with a couple of hotcakes that were larger than my extra plate. I could barely finish this up but Karen said I better, as I would need the energy before the end of the day. We finished up, loaded the hounds and drove about 20 minutes north of town into the Shirley Basin area. Early Fall. It was chilly out, probably in the mid to high 30’s. Off on the distant hills, you could see some remains of a recent snow. This land is desolate. You could see for 15 miles in any direction, and not a sign of anything but sagebrush. No fences or ranch houses was what I liked. We unloaded the hounds. Karen’s Wolfhounds were out and very excited. I unloaded one of my Staghounds maybe a bit early as her Wolfhounds promptly rolled him much to his displeasure. Frank had his Salukis out and we were in for a day of free coursing. After every bush within a hundred yards of us had been peed on we were off and walking the sage. Marked our starting point with the GPS, grabbed some water to take, a pair of binoculars and we were going. About 10 minutes into the hike, Frank screams RABBIT, Tally Ho! His Salukis, who are quite seasoned hunters were all over this hare. My Staghounds had never seen a Jack Rabbit up to now seemed a bit confused. Scorch spotted this Mach 2 hare and was off to the races after it. She passed the Salukis and forced a turn on the hare. The Salukis knowing what was about to happen hedged this move because of their experience and managed to make a grab on the quarry right off. It was very exciting to watch this take place. My Staghound came back to me panting hard and wondering what had just happened. Karen’s Wolfhounds all came back. We made a head count and were off again. We were walking along the side of a hill and looking for miles up ahead of us. I was amazed at the number of badger holes we walked by. I am sure that these animals have been excavating rodents from the ground there for hundreds of years. The Jack Rabbits probably know the location of every one of them to help escape the coyotes that hunt them most of the time. It was not very long when another hare jumped up in front of one of the Wolfhounds. The same cry of RABBIT! Tally Ho! Was heard. Once again Scorch spotted this hare right away. The athletic ability of these hares is something to behold. This animal kept a 5 meter lead on my Staghound for the full time they were visible. The Salukis and Wolfhounds were after it as well and they went off over a hilltop some mile and a half in the distance. I stood there watching through the field glasses waiting to see some sign of their return. About 5 minutes later, here they all come. A good loud whistle came in handy and all the hounds returned. Not sure if this one was bagged or not, but it was a very exciting course. That Jack gave my hound a real run for the money and would have been good to keep in the gene pool. For the remainder of the morning, we bolted about 8 of the White Tailed Jack Rabbits. They proved to be a very impressive opponent. We did not see any coyotes on this trip but they were there as we saw their signs everywhere. We got to see a herd of Pronghorn Antelope and I managed to discourage my hounds from giving chase. They would likely have run them for 10 miles only to look over their shoulders to see my Staghounds dropping dead from exhaustion. We hiked along for a few miles following the direction of the GPS. Thank God I remembered to bring it along as once we were over a hill or two, I had no idea of which direction the trucks were. On the walk as I watched a pair of Golden Eagles soaring above a small bluff, I envisioned some of the old famous pioneers trying to avoid the Sioux Indians that were native to this area. This is an area that is still very wild and relatively unspoiled by mankind. The hounds had a good workout. The hares filed a little more experience in their book of escape tactics and I was tired. Needed to stop by the Virginian for some lunch before hitting the road back home. I was already thinking about the next trip up here to watch these remarkable running sight hounds and their extremely capable quarry. We all said our goodbyes and agreed to meet again in a few weeks weather permitting. It was a nice drive home, reminiscing about the days chase. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 5:32 PM Monday, June 19, 2006 This is a picture of one the Stag pups we call Ridge. she has a ridge of hair from the crown of her head, down to her shoulders. This is a female. They are 12 days old today. This little gal had a minor eye irritation that seemed to be getting slightly infected. Cleaned it all off and put some triple antibiotic in it and it seems to be doing fine this morning. She weighs in at 2 lbs. All the pups seem to be doing great. The mother is eating enormous quantities of food. Keeping up with milk production for 11 pups is a job so I feed her as much as she is willing to eat. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 9:25 AM Saturday, June 17, 2006 This is a newer Staghound that I have had for about 8 months now and she will turn a year old next week. On the first of this month, she was kicked in the head by one of our horses. My wife Darlene found her laying in a fenced area behind our kennel. She was unconscious and not breathing. Her tongue was dark blue and she was bleeding profusely from her mouth and nose. When Darlene picked he up, she began breathing with difficulty. With severe head trauma, I was told you go by the 4/3 rule. If they live for the first 3 hours, it is a good thing. Then you give them 3 days and if they make improvement, you give them 3 weeks. If you have noticeable improvement over 3 weeks, then you give them 3 months. After 3 months they will be as good as they will ever get, so hopefully, they will have completely recovered. She could not sit up for the first day. Then she had trouble standing by herself. After the 3 days, she was attempting to walk but was dragging her back left leg. We did Xrays and there was nothing broken. All neurological damage. She would not eat for the first week and looked like she was going to starve to death. She is back to eating and beginning to gain some weight back. Looks to be on the road to a full recovery which is hard to believe considering how badly she was hurt. Hopefully this fall, she will show me that she can perform 100% and be back in match grade condition. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 8:58 AM Tuesday, June 13, 2006 All the pups seem to be doing well and are gaining weight. They are only 6 days old but are already beginning to develope their own personalities. Some are much more aggressive eaters and scream like crazy when they know Mom is close by and can not reach her for nursing. There are 6 males and 5 females. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 11:07 AM Saturday, June 10, 2006 An interesting story of a man that loved his sighthounds. Not sure how true this is as I am sure that a good portion of this has been embellished for the sake of making a good story. The Great Plains or General Custer getting in trouble with his Staghounds By Mary Trotter Kion What Not to do While Riding Your Horse Alone at Top Speed Beside a Raging Buffalo. After all this Fairy tale and Lie swapping you can see the kind of stress our boy Custer had been under. He is certainly now a candidate for some rest and relaxation as his cavalry cavorts across the plains. Though such wasn't=t in the Plan of the Day it did present itself when Custer spies a lone buffalo out among the sagebrush. And though Custer had never seen one of these huge shaggy beast before he was surly an expert on them. When our fearless leader spied the bison he had already sprinted his horse across the plains in pursuit of some antelope. With him is only his chief bugler and George's pack of English Greyhounds. Of course these Custer canines set up a long chase of the fleeing antelope, with Custer and the horn blower quickly bringing up the rear. After running a few miles, which left the bugler's horse played out our bugle boy drops out of the race, leaving the general alone on the vast plains with only his horse and dogs and the pistol he has cocked and ready in his grasp. This is when Custer spies the buffalo. Understandably, when George sees this lord of the plains he forgets all about hostile Indians that might be lurking around. He forgets about his command that is now several miles to the rear, out of sight and out of shouting distance. This perfect military machine forgets all, except the buffalo he and his faithful dogs are attempting to sneak up on. That buffalo must have been smarter than it looked or its sense of smell was offended because as soon as it detected the intruders it took off faster than a bullet sliding through butter. Now Custer wasn't going to let this prize slip between his fingers, including the one on the trigger of his loaded pistol. So off he dashed on his trusty horse with his slavering hounds keeping pace. Mile after mile hoofs and paws pound the prairie until Custer's horse and the buffalo are running neck and neck. They go so far and run so fast that eventually the Greyhounds call it quits. The hot prairie sun is beaming down. Dust and sand is flying. And still they rush onward. Custer is now so close to the buffalo that at any time he could reach out his gun and plugged that beast but he is too caught up in the excitement and desires to prolong the episode. But, at last, the buffalo begins to falter. Of course, Custer=s horse is still going at top speed, never giving an inch. At last old Mr. Buffalo must have figured out that he was a goner if he didn=t do something quick. In defense, he wheels around with the supposed intention of inflicting a serious big horn puncture wound on Custer's horse. The action was so sudden and startling that Custer felt the need to grasp the horse=s reins with both hands in spite of the fact he still had the loaded and cocked pistol in one of them. But never the less he clamps a tight‑fisted grasp on the reins, no doubt forgetting his finger is on the trigger of his pistol. When the gun fired it was probably the loudest sound that horse had ever heard. It was definitely the last sound the horse ever heard. General George Armstrong Custer had sunk a bullet into the brain of his horse while riding it at top speed across the empty hostile plains while an enraged buffalo was calculating an epitaph for man and mount alike. Custers crumpling horse put a whole new definition on the expression "Dead in its tracks". At the same time Custer demonstrated his gymnastic ability by catapulting him self into the air. It was such an unexpected performance that it must have startled the buffalo, or disgusted him, that he turned and trotted off into the sunset. Well, if it had been a Hollywood movie there would have been a sunset, except in this instance no one kissed the horse. History indicates that George Custer was eventually reunited with his regiment and continued to make equally superior military decisions. To read more about General George Custer and the 7th Cavalry on the Internet, please see: General George Armstrong Custer Net at: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/1101/ this site includes links to General Custer, battlefield photos including Gettysburg and Little Big Horn. Elizabeth Bacon Custer http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/1101/Custer_Forever.html here is the complete text to ABoots and Saddles.@ This is the memoir Mrs. Custer wrote about her life with the general. The major sources for this 2‑part article are: Custer, George Armstrong. My Life on the Plains, published by Leisure Books, New York, N.Y. Deloria, Vine. Custer Died For Your Sins, published by Avon Books of New York, NY 1970. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 10:42 AM Friday, June 09, 2006 Picked up a Staghound bitch for a friend of mine June 8th. We had made arrangements for me to whelp the litter since she was pregnant and was due soon. The current owner was just too busy to put up with a litter of pups. I was guessing she would have them over the weekend of June 10 / 11th. Well the man called me on Wednesday the 8th to say she had the litter that day. How many? I asked. He said 7. I was happy as that is a manageable number. I made the drive down to Pueblo on Thursday the 8th. He in the mean time had left me a voice mail saying that she had one more pup since we talked last. I arrived about 11:00 am, Thursday. He greeted me with a smile saying she had a couple more. Went to his kennel and there were now 12 pups in the litter. They all seemed healthy. 6 males and 6 females. One of the males had some contracted ligaments in his front legs that would not allow him to straighten his feet. My vet said this is common in Greyhounds and sighthounds and we had to put him down. The rest seem to be doing fine. Pouring all the groceries into the mother she is willing to eat so that she can keep up with milk production. 5 nice males and 6 nice females left. Hopefully they will all remain strong and healthy and grow up to be great hunting hounds that will make their owners proud. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 2:23 PM Wednesday, May 31, 2006 The last great lurcherman. This story was reprinted from Gary Hosker's Website I drove north the three hundred long miles from my comfortable air-conditioned London office to interview a recluse, a self- styled eccentric, a man above men, a lurcherman. Name, John Higginbottom. My journey started with a long drive north, then north and north again along the MI for what seemed an age. As the flat lands of the south turned first to gently rolling meadows of Northamptonshire and then to the hills of Derbyshire I drove ever onwards, finally arriving in the windswept dales of Yorkshire; a land where, if it's not raining one instinctively knows it must be snowing. High limestone and millstone grit fells clad in an ever-present mist seemingly sweep up to the very base of the stratosphere. This North of England that lies on the wrong side of a theoretical line known as the north-south divide; a North of dark satanic cotton mills that belch black smoke out of imposing, discoloured and misshapen chimneys, chimneys reaching almost as high as the fells that surround them, blending with the landscape yet at the same time destroying it. A North of coal mines and colliers, of iron foundries and smelters, where work- hardened men lead lives so arduous their circumstances could best be described as an existence. Yet, leave this industrial landscape that was once the pulsating heart of a proud British Empire and drive only a few short miles through the bitter driving rain and take a side road (track would be a more accurate description for metalled roads have yet to come to this part of Britain) signposted 'to the edge of the world' and one encounters an altogether unique England. An England so blissfully isolated from the twentieth century that one feels encapsulated in an age long past. Sheep hardened by many a long winter shelter behind 'dry' stone walls from the ever present torrent of rain, where men still scrape a meagre living for themselves behind horse and plough, cultivating crops on half an acre of boulder-strewn land, subsistence living that is this England. Yes this can truly be called a place on the edge of the world. I took this path to find lurcherman John Higginbottom, John, a giant of a man with ruddy complexion, short greying hair, a beard of flaming red, and hands like the proverbial size ten shovel. Hands that were cut, bruised and contorted, he told me, through many a long desperate dig, rescuing his battle-hardened terrier 'Tootsie' from life or death conflicts with rabbit and other subterranean creatures, this reclusive, almost shy man refused to talk about. John, a youthful forty-seven, a taciturn man who still retains most of his own teeth, was brought up in the Midlands and is a spot welder by trade. I asked him why? Why does any man try and live here, all alone pushing himself to the very limits of endurance in order to eke out a shallow existence in this particularly inhospitable place, with only the bark of his seven lurcher dogs and sound of the occasional crow for company. “Have you ever spot welded?” replied John philosophically. He sat quite still reading Kipling to himself. Breaking the silence I enquired about the breeding of his battle-hardened terrier, Tootsie. “That,” explained John, ”is a Higginbottom terrier, the culmination of a twenty-five year selective breeding programme based on the Yorkshire terrier with just a dash of King Charles spaniel for temperament.” Feeling that I had in some small way penetrated his rock-hard exterior and socialized myself with John, I asked, nay begged, to accompany him on one of his famous hunting expeditions - expeditions, on which I was informed, he uses his homogeneous pack of Higginbottom lurchers to hunt all legal quarry. For John truly is the last of the self-confessed great hunters. John fell silent, gritted his teeth, pursed his lips, and went into deep thought, almost a trance as if he were going through a metamorphosis or having an out-of-body experience. Then as suddenly as he had entered the trance he snapped back to reality, kicked his dog and snapped: “Yes, the mad are in God's keeping. Tomorrow morning, crack of ten thirty, not a minute later and I hope for your sake you have a high attention span.” Glancing in my direction before walking into his meagre shanty home, shared with his pack of Higginbottom hounds, John continued “I insist upon complete and utter obedience from both my dogs and those who chose to follow me.” Fixing me with those steely blue eyes, he gave a penetrating stare, a stare that I would come to know as his force 7 stare. I felt as the Apostles must have felt on the banks of sea of Galilee. I was in awe of this demigod. Next morning we set off across the fields at a quarter-past- eleven precisely. I asked John why he was late. “Time has no relevance here on the edge of the world,” replied he, wiping the sleep from his eyes. 'Ferrets, ferrets I must have ferrets,' he whispered gently. Suddenly he opened a hutch door, and plunged his gigantic hand into a cage of these ferocious little carnivores. Five ferrets bit deep into the flesh of each of his massive digits -- yet did this man flinch? Not he. With blood trickling down his forearm he throttled each ferret in turn in order to prise them from his fingers. "Aren't you concerned about infection' I asked “No,” said he “The poker's in the fire. I'll cauterize the wounds when we return.” I glanced ominously at the cumulus clouds gathering overhead, said a silent prayer and thought – ‘If we return.’ With a steady stride we set out into the wilderness. At our heels trotted his seven lurchers’ beardie collie lurchers these, some of the best in the world (or so I was told) bred by David Ballcock. As with Tootsie, his Higginbottom terrier, these lurchers too were the result of an intensive twenty - five year breeding programme; a programme so genetically calculated as to make the breeding of thoroughbred racehorses or racing greyhounds pale into insignificance. “John, why haven't you channeled your scientifically based genetic theories into creating the ultimate Waterloo Cup winning greyhound or a Derby winning race-horse?' Once again he went pale and then into a trance before replying: “Because my theories don't work.” Suddenly a rabbit ran from under our feet and John turned to his dogs and yelled, 'Mayhem, go!' All seven dogs gave chase opening up in glorious song. 'Yip, yip, yip, yip,' they sang. After a life or death run of five hundred and forty-six yards two feet seven-and-a-half inches, the rabbit struggled into the relative safety of its warren. Higginbottom astounded me with his ability to judge distance so precisely. My astonishment must have shown on my face, for Higginbottom said modestly: “Oh, I forgot to mention, I’m the best judge of distance in the world.” Six lurcher dogs stood over the hole 'marking' as John called it, while he explained in some detail the complexities of the chase or 'course' may be a more accurate description for such a distance, telling me how each rabbit must be given sufficient law and how, he had calculated, in a couple of years time he would have the best rabbit match-dog. One lurcher, however, lay panting on the ground halfway between ourselves and the other Higginbottom lurchers, unable to move or catch breath. “Is this dog suffering from hybrid vigour?” I asked. With a look of total bewilderment Higginbottom turned on me, his steely blue eyes glinting in the midday sun. “I value that dog at ten thousand pound,” said he. “But why,” I queried. “Because that lurcher has the intelligence to know when he's beat, thereby saving valuable energy for the next grueling encounter with the most formidable of all quarry, the rabbit! No longdog in the world has comparable intelligence.” “Looks knackered,' said I, and walked on. We left 'Myrtle' to recover and approached the six other Higginbottom lurchers that lay panting all about the warren. John pulled a ferret from his 'poacher’s pocket' and secured some electronic device or other around the ferrets neck. (There is story behind the locator, its invention and John Higginbottom, which will appear in later revelations from the diaries of Miss Wilhelmina Wordspinner.) Slowly, hesitantly, the ferret entered the rabbit’s subterranean refuge, but turned and came back to the entrance, all the while peeping in cuckoo clock fashion, in and out, in and out of the hole. John said this ferret had been trained by him to be especially wary of strangers (Higginbottom can train almost any animal to a very high standard). Then as the ferret's head disappeared into the hole for the twenty-ninth time, John kicked in a clod of earth behind it. We waited five, six, seven minutes but nothing was seen or heard of either rabbit or ferret. John pulled a small box from one of the numerous pockets in his coat (each pocket filled with hunting essentials -- tape recorder, camera, stopwatch). I was informed this box would locate the ferret, and if the ferret it had managed to find its quarry, the rabbit, we would dig down to the combatants. As Higginbottom swept the ground in a methodical fashion, the box burst to life, first with a loud crackle then a burst of the BBC's World Service. “Does this mean you have located your relentless little hunter and rabbit deep within the very bowels of the earth?” John slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, fell to his knees and in a gasping, strained voice said: “Ughhh, the locator's interfering with mi pacemaker.” After John had made an almost full recovery we walked deeper into the hills, the weather deteriorating with every step of his enormous feet, while he recounted his many and varied hunting stories; stories so unbelievable I said he should write a book. How, thinks I, has one man managed to cram so much hunting into just one short lifetime? John then started to tell me of his passion for collating data and statistics, and how bullshit baffles brains. I stood listening intently to the great man as he told me how, in his opinion, he was the greatest authority on the lurcher ever to have graced the face of the earth and how many young people regarded him as a latter-day 'Grizzly Adams'. From nowhere, a crippled sheep sprang. Instantly without a word of command the lurchers gave chase. After a course that lasted thirty-eight point seven five seconds (John always times each gallop with a stopwatch) all seven dogs eventually came to terms with the sheep. John gave a great hysterical cry, begging me not to use my camera, as this would impair the lurchers' hunting ability. Calling each dog by name, then turning to look sheepishly back in my direction, he shouted : “Kill!” and his lurchers delivered the sheep into Abraham's bosom. “That's the kind of obedience I insist upon,” said a blood-covered John as he fought his way into the mêlée to rescue a leg of mutton from the snapping jaws of his hellhounds. We turned for home, cold and wet and dejected, my mind at its lowest ebb. John saw my bedraggled state and showing his concern for the weaker sex, he began to sing a hunting song. “Do you ken John Higginbottom at the break of day, do you ken Jon Higginbottom as your hounds view away, do you ken…..” Back at the cottage that night, refreshed by a hot drink of cocoa made from ewe's milk, we dined as the Saxon kings of old, on the rescued leg of mutton John had so courageously saved. He talked endlessly of his many adventures with both rat and rabbit. I asked John if he had any burning ambitions left to fulfill. “I'd like the dogs to catch a rabbit,” said he, casually tossing a tidbit to one of the lurchers that lay contented at his feet. After dinner we sat, John reading a book while he puffed at his short clay - pipe, blowing the most enormous blue smoke rings (he loved smoke rings) that seemed to hang in the air indefinitely, or curl round and round the ceiling. I couldn't quite make out the title of the book John was reading. Without further ado I asked what book could so totally absorb such an articulate, self-confessed intellectual? He tossed the book casually over to me, a wry smile covered his face, as he said: “My bible.” I opened the book and read the title 'The Big Blue Book of Lurchers' by John Higginbottom. The hour being ever so late, John, seven very tired Higginbottom lurchers a Higginbottom Terrier and I, lay in front of an open log fire. John, however, could not sleep. His fingers that had been so savagely attacked by his ferrets were giving him jip. Yes, he had conveniently forgot to cauterize his wounds. Driving home, I felt each long mile the car covered was taking me nearer to reality and civilization. I had left a giant of a man completely alone in his cottage at the edge of the world. Little did I appreciate the power of John's force 7 stare. As my diary entries will reveal, there was intrigue, scandal and mystery surrounding John Higginbottom Esq. Posted by Mike Bilbo at 3:18 PM I started this blog as a way to communicate information on hunting or working sighthounds. I will generally not be discussing Lure Coursing although I think there is a place for this sport in working sighthounds. I will try to post something interesting here on a regular basis Posted by Mike Bilbo at 12:37 PM

Alright, gents and the few girls who may obtain extremely pissed after reading this write-up let’s go ahead and kick this off. Do not # 1: Do not spend for her dinner/drinks; do not pay for her days. The reason you do not intend to pay is due to the fact that it places you right into a carrier role. If you remain in this function, the girl will indeed begin to think that you will deal with her, that you can date her as well as worst of all, that you can be her partner. Once she believes this, the laid-back connection Immediately finishes. The only time I would certainly ever pay is for a taxi trip back to my location to have young xnxx fucked porn videos sex, besides that do not PAY. Don’t # 2: Never ever Ever hold hands in public as if you men were a real couple. Pay attention Up. There requires to be a very distinctive line between being laid-back and real dating each other. Do not cross that line or the lady will assume that there may be something even more to the relationship. This entire reasoning returns to the “he might be an ideal guy” thing. Don’t # 3: Never ever Ever fail when you are confessed to. If the woman recognizes that you are “the guy,” she will at some point attempt to capture you by confessing or by a few other methods. DO NOT FALTER BOY! Maintain your pander hand strong. There are all sorts of techniques and lines to get out of the “what are we?” question. A strategy that I have actually been using regularly is reframing the whole scenario entirely. I make her think that remaining in a genuine partnership is the dumbest thing ever by talking in strange voices. Yet earnestly just seek out something and also DO NOT GIVE IN. Don’t # 4: Never Ever make the lady succumb to you. I presume it’s ego-driven yet a lot of men try to do this, they actively try to make the woman fall for them. Like, let us claim you just made love, do not rest there as well as gaze into her eyes as you snuggle with her, do not attempt super tricky to make the day unique. Sex ought to be your primary focus, and that’s it, anything else that you strive in may end up backfiring for you later on. You should make your self independent when you are also attempting hard in other areas of the relationship and force yourself to quit. I feel it might be a subconscious point, yet if you strive to please your self-esteem by getting her to fall for you, you end up entirely losing her in the long haul.

Happy Menage Autumn Reading day! Long time no see after a long deserved break from reviewing. But I am back now but still on my own pace. 😀 However, sharing new releases and welcoming new blog guests will be my pleasure… so stay tune! Meanwhile… here are some new and old menage romances I found. Authors I love to read and some new I am very curious about… Sophia Hudson has just met three of the most handsome desirable men in one week than she’s met in over a year. Too bad for her that they seem to have no interest in a solid sized career woman that doesn’t need to be rescued or bankrolled. All that Sophie needs from a man is his love and devotion. Jack Kelly. Driven. Volatile. Lonely. He grew up believing that some kinds of love are just wrong… “No Kelly has ever been worth a damn in this town until me. But the money? I can’t talk to it, I can’t fuck it, and believe me, it’s a damn cold bed partner to wake up next to.” Dylan Smith. Sensual. Nurturing. Bisexual. He sees nothing wrong with enjoying the pleasures in life… “Just let yourself go. It’s okay to let me love you. To let both of us love you.” Cate MacMillan. Curvy. Smart. Frustrated. She’s ready to shake off her insecurities and stop denying herself… “No one else has ever made me feel like this. Wanton. Shameless. Free.” Three friends who grew up together… Their childhoods were shaped by one man, their resentments fueled by two misunderstandings, and all three will be pulled back into each other’s lives by a loss that affects them all. What they’ll find together isn’t what any of them expects… but it might be exactly what each of them needs. MINE is a 104,000 word steamy, standalone MMF bisexual ménage romance with no cliffhangers. It’s intended for readers who enjoy explicit scenes of MF, MM, and MMF on the way to the kind of HEA that combines sweet with heat… and doesn’t let up until everybody is fully satisfied. What starts as a simple ritual soon turns carnal when a monk falls for a young woman under his tutelage. All her life Chanyn has wanted to find her one true love. When she encounters the dashing Lord Dain, with his kind eyes and pure heart, she believes her dreams of love are finally coming true. Until she meets with the roadblock that is her betrothed’s bondmate. In a world where men outnumber women ten to one, Khial never thought he’d have to contend with a woman entering his bond. He gave his heart to Dain when they were just boys and has been by his side every day in sickness and health. These days it’s mostly in sickness as Dain’s health deteriorates. Though his attraction to Chanyn increases with every encounter, Khial can’t help but resent the young woman who comes into his love story to play the hero, but marriage to her may be the only way to save the man he loves. To prepare Chanyn for her union with the two males, Lord Dain hires a Pleasure Hound, an ancient order of monks tasked with instructing new husbands, who have little to no contact with women, in the art of female pleasure. Years ago a scandal left the Temple of the Pleasure Hounds near destitute. The young monk responsible for the scandal is given a chance to redeem himself and the temple when he is called upon to train the bonded triad in the orgasmic arts. But what starts as a simple ritual soon turns carnal when the monk’s heart begins to yearn for Chanyn, and hers for his. Wren doesn’t feel like the girl most likely to end up living happily ever after. Especially when Adam, aka THE BIG MISTAKE, comes back into her life. He wants a second chance, but Wren’s afraid to risk another dent in her battered heart. When Adam reconnects with Wren, he’s torn between wooing her and pursuing Tomas, the sexy guy in the flat next door. They both make his heart sing—how can he possibly choose? Or maybe he’s finally found a man and woman to give him the balance he craves. Tomas knows better than to let his personal life interfere with his job as an undercover officer, but he can’t get enough of Adam…or Wren. Or Adam and Wren, when they’re hot, naked and writhing together in his bed. Suddenly Wren’s gone from the girl most likely to get ripped off to the girl most likely to get off. But it’s more than sex. She, Tomas and Adam have something special, something they’re determined to protect at all costs. This book is the story of Adam who first appears in Kiss a Falling Star. Sara: As the daughter of Senator and presidential hopeful Jentsen Holbrook, I spent a good deal of my life under public scrutiny. What I wore. Where I went. Who I dated. It was just the way of things. I’d become what was expected of me, until I ran from my obligations and woke up one morning in Cross de Raven’s and Eryk Hale’s world, two hot guitarists from the mega-famous metal band, Cinder. For the first time, freedom to be myself was within my reach. And along with that? Inevitable scandal. Eryk: True beauty walked into my life, more beauty than I ever deserved. I partied hard. Rocked harder. I wasn’t good enough to touch Sara’s petal-soft skin, hold on tight, or love her, but regardless of my bad boy ways, no one was going to stop me from trying. Cross: Sometimes, no matter how hard we fight for what we want, love won’t save the day, and truth doesn’t always set you free. Then again… Maybe, just maybe, when you find the one you’ve been searching for, love can find a way. Eric didn’t know Luke would be heartbroken when he left town to join a hotshot forest fire crew in Western Canada. They’d been best friends since kindergarten, had gone to school together, had bought their first car and a home together and had shared their lovers. At some point, friendship had turned to love. Luke didn’t expect, when he brought his crazy cat in for stitches, that his heart would be mended by the sassy new veterinarian. Jenna may have been new in town but she’d heard the rumors and she liked the carnal fantasies he spun for her in bed of he and his best friend sharing her. Of course, that was before Eric’s job brought him home and back into their lives. Jenna isn’t sure she can be what they need, but she’s not going to give up without a fight. Even if that means inviting the sexy firefighter to share their bed. Surely there is enough love to go around. Before going inside, the clients drink a shot (or two) of Dark Ice, which hides the pain in your body and heightens your senses. No masks. No blindfolds. You crawl into the club that is pitch black and have sex with 19 strangers. The only thing left to do is enjoy your DARK experience… More than a decade ago, Roman Calder had a scorching affair with the sister of one of his best friends. Augustine Spencer drove him so crazy he thought of nothing but her. The only thing they did more often than heat the sheets was fight. Unprepared for the intensity of their relationship, Roman broke things off and concentrated on things that made sense to him: his career and putting his best friend, Zack Hayes, in the White House. Gus Spencer is known to Washington insiders as the president’s secret weapon. Gorgeous and brilliant, Gus runs the press pool with the determination of a shark. No one dares to cross her, not when she’s known for having a spine of steel…but long ago one man melted her down. Despite the fact that she’ll never forgive Roman for breaking her heart, now that they work together she can’t get him off her mind. When a dangerous investigation leads both Roman and Gus to London, the heat between them becomes unbearable. As they begin to unravel an international conspiracy, they find themselves falling all over again. But when a killer threatens their world, can they fight to stay together or will the sins of their past keep them forever apart? coming soon: November 13, 2017 A warrior with everything to prove. Tristan Knight has served the Admiral of England since he was a teenager. As a knight he has pledged his life to protect the Masters’ Admiralty, and when he’s assigned to escort an archaeologist on a research trip he knows the menial task is punishment for the failure of his last mission. A woman in a gilded cage. Sophia Starabba is a brilliant scholar and accomplished law enforcement officer, working for Italy’s cultural heritage protection department. But none of that matters to her family or the other members of the territory of Rome. To them she’s the “Principessa”- daughter of the Admiral. The man who holds the key. James Rathmann lives for mysteries. In another life he would have been a detective, but a love for digging in the dirt made him an archaeologist. Now one of the world’s leading experts on coins, and curator at the British Museum, he’s been called to Rome to examine a recent discovery. An old enemy back from the dead. Among the coins they find something alarming–a message from a villain everyone had assumed was long dead. Tristan leads them on the trail to identify and protect the next potential target and possibly discover the identity of the Domino, a killer and anarchist who plagued the Masters’ Admiralty in the past. One love. One obsession. Double the trouble. This time, he won’t take no for an answer. For three years, Daniel Armstrong has wanted the beautiful, fiery Bridget Kelly. But when he sees her at Houston’s premier BDSM club and realizes she has an interest in submission, his determination reignites. A charity auction provides a means for him to possess her and do good at the same time. Who could resist? Focused solely on Bridget and the decadent delights he intends for her, he outbids everyone to claim her. Helpless, trapped by the glare of a spotlight at an auction she never agreed to participate in, Bridget is stunned when bidding for a weekend with her goes higher and higher. She’s frantic when she realizes the gorgeous, successful Daniel Armstrong has won her. For years, she’s been attracted to the renowned heartbreaker, but she’s kept him at a distance to protect herself. Then one night, she sees him at a BDSM club, and there’s no doubt he recognizes her submissive tendencies. Now that the devastating Dom knows her naughty desires, she’s doubly determined to avoid him. When he claims her, she believes things can’t get worse. Then he introduces her to his identical twin, Jacob. Suddenly, she’s faced with not one, but two men determined to make her every fantasy come true and take her to the heights of submission. As long as Antonio has Justin and the Silicon Valley start-up they built together, Antonio’s content to hide his true feelings. He’d rather keep Justin’s friendship than confess his love and lose everything. But Justin’s gotten careless with their business. The board of directors sends them Emily, a contract developer, to ensure their rules are being followed. Justin doesn’t expect her to be the one-night stand he played out the scorching fantasy with, of sharing her with Antonio. As long hours and tight deadlines push the three closer together, they heat up keyboards and the sheets. If their private hookups become public knowledge, she’ll lose her job, they’ll lose their company, and the three will be torn apart before they discover if all of them can find happily-ever-after together.

Crucified With Christ by Nan Doud, Guest Writer I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. Do we have any idea what it is to be crucified with Christ? Do we really comprehend a hint of what it is to be betrayed by our beloved ones and handed over to be done away with, unceremoniously ripped off like a soiled band-aid and thrown into the rubbish heap? Do we know the strength expressed in choosing weakness, in a lion choosing to go as a lamb to the slaughter? Anything we have experienced in this life, from the most trivial to the most egregious, is but a drop in the bucket compared to the endless ocean of suffering that washed over our Jesus again and again on our behalf. Have you met anyone of whom you can say they suffered well? Likely so, but in reality, many of those who have suffered well, have done so largely unnoticed. What you saw was a sliver on the surface of all that went on beneath it. Jesus silently accepted the judgments, accusations, insults, and even beatings of those whom He came to save because of the joy set before Him. What was that joy? You. Me. “An inheritance of nations.” He took those wounds that are visible even now, and He showed them to His friends when they simply could not believe. He showed them not as proofs of how evil those who pierced Him were, but as proofs of how dearly He loved them. Lord, may I wear my own wounds with the humility and grace of my Jesus, who doesn’t shame me with those scars, as He very well could do with all justice and integrity, but rather holds them out to say, “Look, Dear Heart, see how much I love you. Let me heal you with these wounds…” Lord, may I grow to accept and embrace that you may heal me, and perhaps even others, through the wounds you have allowed to mark my life. LIFE GIVING ENCOURAGEMENT Ask the Lord to help you see beyond the happy faces people often put on as they walk into the church building or go about their lives. Ask Him to remind you of that one who you know is dealing with excruciating pain, perhaps the loss of a spouse a year ago or a mother whose child is chronically ill, or the woman whose husband broke her heart with infidelity. A hug, a word of encouragement, or an invitation to lunch or coffee – the Lord will multiply a simple act of love into beautiful comfort for a friend who is trying to “suffer well”. STORE UP MORE TREASURES At some point in our lives, we or someone we know will go through great suffering. I encourage you to go the MARKINC website and listen to OCD and the Search for Truth audio resource so that you can store up treasures of encouragement for the next rainy day in your life or someone else's. Here is a summary and teaser of this resource: A courageous woman shares her lifelong struggle in the grip of the lies of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Though typically thought of as someone who washes their hands repetitively, some people struggling with OCD have other rituals and some merely struggle secretly in their thoughts. OCD is a debilitating disease that affects millions of Americans and it is believed less than 10% seek treatment. Here is a look at the many different faces of OCD and how Gail’s increasing knowledge of the disorder and her faith have helped her begin to heal. Nan Doud and her husband, Shawn, currently minister alongside one another at Samaritan Ministries International as Needs Advocates. They have spent 21 years of marriage in full time Christian ministry while raising their four boys who are all teenagers now. Nan enjoys writing poetry and meditations on the intersection of life and grace as expressed in the Bible. She loves articulating and dialoguing with people on how the gospel touches both our cultural and individual struggles. Subscribe to Daily Treasure and have devotionals like this one delivered to your inbox.

27 Military Wife Quotes That Prove There Are Heroes At Home These Amazing Quotes About Military Wives Are So Accurate, It's Scary Hey military wives, listen up! We found some of the best quotes that describe you, your life, but most importantly, you're resilience. It is not easy raising a family when your better half is across the world fighting for their country. Military life is not easy and we wanted to share with you some quotes that showcase just how strong you are! You're keeping it all together while maintaining a relationship from afar. Time zones, deployments, Skype calls; you've seen it all. We thank you for all that you do and we hope these military wives quotes will cheer you up and add a smile to your face. Military Wife Quotes "Anything worth having is worth waiting for." - Unknown "It takes a strong woman to love a military man." - Unknown "Being deeping loved by someone give you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." - Lao Tzu "Hug a military wife or give her liquor." - Unknown "Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow." - Mary Anne Radmacher "Distance is not for the fearful, it is for the bold. It's for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone in exchange for a little time with the one they love. It's for those knowing a good thing when they see it, even if they don't see it nearly enough." - Meghan Daum "With you, I’m home." - Unknown "Military Wives—Sacrificing Months of Sex for the Country." - Aditi Marthur Kumar Military Spouse Quotes "Love is what you've been through with somebody." - James Thurber "All human wisdom is summed up in two words--wait and hope." - Alexandre Dumas Pere "Marriage doesn’t make you happy–you make your marriage happy." - Dr. Les Parrott "Love is the greatest gift when given. It is the highest honor when received." - Fawn Weaver "A successful marriage isn’t the union of two perfect people. It’s that of two imperfect people who have learned the value of forgiveness and grace." - Darlene Schacht "You are my favorite hello and my hardest goodbye." - Unknown "I’ll hold you in my heart until I can hold you in my arms." - Unknown "Don’t marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can’t live without." - James C. Dobson "I may not be able to fill their shoes but I will always support our troops." - Unknown "Some people look up to their heroes. I’m in love with mine." - Unknown Military Spouse Appreciation Quotes "She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way (and it surely has not), she adjusted her sails." - Elizabeth Edwards "It’s the wide variation of women in our little shared petri dish that makes our lives never boring. Really all that we have in common is we each fell in love with a dude in uniform. The rest of it is a wild card. . . . Each of us trying to get through the day, the deployment, and the time in between." - Angela Ricketts "It doesn’t get easier. You just get stronger." - Unknown "Love doesn’t make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Franklin P. Jones "Marriage is a mosaic you build with your spouse. Millions of tiny moments that create your love story." - Jennifer Smith "My hero doesn't wear a cape or tights; he doesn't have superpowers and he can't life cars, but he fights to defend his country, and that is enough for me." - Unknown "She refuses to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring." - Zelda Fitzgerald "The look ordinary, they lace up just the same, but it's not the boots that matter, it's my soldier in the boots that means the world to me." - Unknown "Courage is fear holding on a minute longer." - George Patton Let's Keep the Conversation Going... What quote about military wives is your favorite? We want to know!

I am often asked, “How can I undo the damage I have already done to a relationship, such as not acting enough of a challenge to a woman or getting into a big argument with her?” Unfortunately, this is no magic fix. You can’t just go back in time and “fix” any damage that has already been done. Let me show you what I mean… Whatever situation you’re in right now, you’re only in it because of your past actions. For example, if your girlfriend you met on adultfrinendfinder.com login finds you too needy and wants some “personal space” right now, it’s because you were too needy IN THE PAST. And since you can’t go back in time and live your life again, there’s nothing you can do right now that can “reverse the damage”. However, never forget that your future will one day become your present, and when that happens, your present will become your past. What this means is that whatever you do NOW will affect your future. So while you can’t go back in time and “reverse” the damage you’ve already done, you can take action now to make things better for the FUTURE. For example, if you have always been needy in the past, you can’t just call a girl and “promise” her you will give her lots of personal space from now on. You can, however, ACT independent from this moment on, and if you’re lucky, in a few months she may stop seeing you as a needy person. Here’s another example… If you’ve just got into a big fight with a woman, instead of doing further damage by proving to her that you’re right, you can just let the issue cool down and work on ATTRACTING her. Here’s the bottom line: If you just keep fighting, her attraction for you will keep dropping. But if you stop fighting and start attracting again, in a few months she may be so attracted to you again that she’ll forget about the fight completely. In short, always look towards the future and never dwell on the past. what done is done. You can’t change your past. Focus on shaping your future instead! Lastly, don’t forget that it is much more logical to PREVENT making dating mistakes than to REGRET making them Too many guys come to me for help only AFTER they have done a great deal of damage to their relationships or to their love lives. Solution? Play the love cop. Look at your love life and relationship objectively. Try to see if you’re “missing” anything or making any costly mistakes. Never get cocky and stop improving your love life. As I always tell my students, what you can’t see will eventually kill you. Just like a car, we each have blind spots in our love lives. For example, you could be doing things that are driving women away RIGHT NOW without even knowing it. Your job as a Smart Dater is to identify each of your blind spots and overcome them one by one. We ALL have areas that we need to work on more – even me. Posts from the same category: - None Found

AKI-KCAW: History of our Partnership Kingston Community Animal Welfare has been an AKI Partner Organization from the beginning of AKI in 2007. AKI support to KCAW ensures that they can feed, spay/neuter, and provide vet care to 100s of street cats and dogs and pets belonging to poor people in Kingston, Jamaica. Together, we've helped 1000s of animals; below is just a few from 2007 - 2015 (stories are courtesy of KCAW's Deborah Binns). In the early days--when we were 1st raising money, AKI supporters covered only about 20% of KCAW's costs. Since around 2011, we've covered about 75% of costs--and with that increase, Deborah/KCAW has also been able to help so many more cats and dogs. For more recent information about KCAW rescues and how AKI funds are used, see other AKI Blog posts. From Deborah (20 April 2014): "This is my old boy Ralph. The (dog) love of my life as far as downtown strays go. He was as old as the rolling hills. I put him to sleep last week. He lost the use of his hind legs and stopped eating. He represents every dog I have ever saved and loved on the streets of Kingston. He got more chops from machetes and stones thrown at him than any dog I know, yet he kept going with that unmistakable happy wag of his tail. I looked after him for 8 years, and now he is gone. Living in the ghetto isn’t easy for any dog, no matter how often you visit or feed them. But he enjoyed a long life and I had the chance to see him at his very best! My boy Ralph. What a dog!" From Deborah (11 March 2014): This is Tumper and lil' Brownie. I rescued them from a horrible place downtown three weeks ago and took them to my house. Here are pics of their new forever home! Brownie was very ill when I first found her and I never thought she would make it but she pulled through! Their new names are Molly and Jilly. Here's another great adoption of 2 rescued puppies: Deborah told AKI: "While I was driving home from work in terrible Christmas traffic (December 2012), a huge, scrawny, starving dog appeared, bobbing and weaving in between cars. He wasn’t being chased but something sure had him scared. I thought for sure he would be hit sooner or later but as luck would have it he turned off onto a quiet side road. I left the main road and followed and saw him getting into someone’s garbage. Of course, after years of doing this I was prepared to run this fellow down, so I took off my work shoes and donned my ‘runners’! Lol. However, on my approach he never ran, but kept trying to get into the garbage. He was hungry! I took a tin of dog food from my trunk (I always have food for occasions such as this!) and as he heard the tin snap he looked my way, came over and grabbed the tin out of my hand! I patted him and he never tried to run, he swallowed the food whole! He was bigger than my car! I opened the back door of my little car and he simply walked in and made himself comfortable (2 pictures below). So smart! I took him home, bathed him and de-wormed him (thanks AKI for the meds!) I am happy to tell you that Samson went to his new home with Gregory on Saturday (3rd picture below) and they love him very much! They'll bring him for his neutering appointment next week." From Deborah: "This is Angel. She got that name because she should not be alive today. We thought she was going to be another little puppy angel in heaven. But she fought with all she had...and here she is today! This is what AKI's donations go towards!" My favorite rescue ever is this one (below-from 2010) of Deborah rescuing a dog from a canal in downtown Kingston. Deborah sent this: Black Dog: Ok Deb you got her, now pull! Me: Can you help? She's heavy Black Dog: Er...no, cause I don't have any hands! Me: Well with all the food I give you every week couldn't you at least try? Black dog: Er...no Me: She's slipping.... Black Dog: Ok, here grab my paw! But it'll cost you an extra bowl of food. Me: Ok, deal Me: Ok she's up! I got her! Black Dog: Great!I know you're gonna give her all the food, so can I get mine first? Deborah still visits and feeds Girl. A few years ago, she found Girl in bad shape, full of fleas and ticks and along with Girl's caretaker, gave her a bath. Even though Bob was in horrible shape when Deborah saw him (2012), he really made her work to rescue him. She finally caught up with him, got him in her car, brought him home, and he went from a skeleton to a healthy-but still extremely wary- dog (and not adoptable, but happy enough at Deborah's). In October 2015, Deborah, with the help of Sandra, rescued a dog that had been hit by a car. She named him Trugg. He had a broken hip bone and femur. He fully recovered. From Deborah: "I found these pups [below] in an abandoned house near where I live. Can't catch the mummy dog, this is her second batch! Going to have to outsmart her but it's not easy outsmarting street dogs, they employ every bit of smarts to survive man's cruelty. But I won't give up. I have 3 months till they breed again." [pictures below] Deborah: "The residents of Hanover Street in downtown Kingston begged me to help them with the terrible mange problem plaguing their dogs. So I told them to spread the word that I will be there at a certain time and date. Over 50 people were there waiting! I was so tired after I just sat on the curb for half an hour. In appreciation, I was offered a marijuana spliff and hot Guinness while I sat there, both of which I graciously declined! These people are so poor, yet they are so nice and really care about their dogs. They just need a little help!" Below are pictures of some of KCAW/Deborah's rescues and typical feeding situations of KCAW street cats and dogs. Deborah saw a guy throwing rocks at this mama dog (in the 2nd picture, you can imagine what she's saying to him). The dog was badly injured and Deborah treated her and took her and her puppies out of that bad situation. Deborah: "I removed this dog from a yard downtown where he was kept without food or water. The pup was starving, the man could barely afford to feed himself and he relied on me each day to feed the dog. He had 2 pups, this one and a smaller one, an absolutely cute little pup, which eventually died. I’m keeping him safe and fed until I can find a home where they can afford to feed and take care of this guy just like he deserves." Deborah: "The little brown pup I took from a smoldering tyre in downtown Kingston along a busy road beside my office. A homeless woman named Lavern who loves animals and always tells me when one is in trouble told me she saw someone put a puppy in a tyre and light it. She told me where (not even 500 metres from my office) so I drove over. I saw the tyre and the smoke. The little pup was safely curled up inside the tyre, unscathed by the flames.... He not only survived, but he grew like a weed." Deborah: "I rescued this black doggie from a mall where she was left with a rope around her neck. You could tell she was still nursing little pups. I can only imagine what happened to them. I put her in the back of my car and took her home. She was so fragile and old. I was not going to extend her suffering. I took her to the animal shelter and asked them to please put her to sleep. But I feel ok about this because she knew warmth and kindness in her last days, and always had a full belly." Deborah: "This cat doesn't really live anywhere, he or she lives next door in an apt complex where he has to dodge ‘missiles’ thrown by the residents, avoid speeding cars, plus a handyman who doesn’t want him (or her) around. Every night he sneaks into my backyard while my dogs are in the front and enjoys his cat food that I leave for him. I can't touch him but he doesn't run from me anymore. I’m going to trap her/him and spay/ neuter in the near future." Below is a group of dogs that Deborah has been feeding for several years. As new ones arrive-and they always do-she gets them fixed and if needed, she takes them for vet care or provides needed treatment on her own when she can. Here are some of the street cats and dogs and locations where Deborah/KCAW does weekly feedings. The dog below who is stepping off the curb--he's running over to Deborah's car. It's amazing how the dogs know the sound (and definitely the smell) of Deborah's car long before she actually arrives and they come running from all over! For many of the street dogs and cats, Deborah's visits are their only chance for a real meal. For many though, Deborah works with people in the communities who feed the cats and dogs on days when Deborah doesn't come by. After Hurricane Dean, Deborah was first on the scene to help animals in need of rescue (back in 2007). For more information about KCAW, including how AKI funds are used, see AKI Blog posts.

Traci Odom and Eric Michael Summerer narrate different stories in this collection, but they have something in common. They both are engaging storytellers. These 16 previously published stories gathered together in this audiobook form a disparate vision of the future. Each narrator adopts an easy conversational tone until the stories call for intensity, suspense, or some other form of conflict or tension. Each is faced with depicting a motley assortment of characters such as a body mercenary (whose special talent is switching bodies just before he dies) and a disabled woman who is striving to save a distant settlement. Each is versatile and skilled at portraying memorable characters and making them believable. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2019] Trade Ed. HighBridge Audio 2019 CD ISBN 9781684574193 $34.99 Nine CDs DD ISBN 9781684574186 $20.99 Get our FREE Newsletter and discover a world of audiobooks. Let us recommend your next great audiobook! No algorithms here! We pick great audiobooks for you. Sign up for our free newsletter with audiobook love from AudioFile editors. If you are already with us, thank you! Just click X above.

By Joel Francis The Daily Record We at The Daily Record try to play clean in our tiny corner of the interweb. Once a year, on “music’s biggest night” the gloves come off and the snark comes out. This year, we present a live diary of the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. We’ll be doing this live throughout the telecast, so keep checking back. 7:01 – Lady Gaga opens the show in a dress she bought at Bjork’s garage sale. 7:02 – She forgot to buy the pants, though. 7:04 – At last, Elton John has found someone with more flamboyant taste in eye wear. Wonder how that feels. 7:11 – Stephen Colbert may have already delivered the line of the night. Re: Susan Boyle selling the most records of ’09 and saving the bottom line – “You may think you’re the coolest people in the world, but just remember that your industry was saved by a Scottish woman in sensible shoes.” 7:13 – Beyonce wins “Song of the Year” but can’t make it onstage to accept the award. Why not have it received by the Chippettes, stars of the year’s best film “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”? Now that’s synergy! 7:15 – Who the hell thought it was a good idea to turn “American Idiot” into a musical? I can hear this one flopping faster than Twyla Tharpe’s tribute to Bob Dylan. Forget “Movin’ Out,” how about moving on? 7:16 – Nothing screams “punk rock” louder than a Broadway chorus. Even the Clash buried their choral version of “Career Opportunities” on the last side of “Sandinista.” 7:24 – I can’t figure out which interests me less Kirsten Bell’s insipid new movie “When In Rome” or what song Bon Jovi will play tonight. Let me guess: a really lame one from the ’80s. 7:26 – Does Taylor Swift have a clause in her contract that she must win every award for which she is nominated? Has she ever lost? 7:27 – I’m a little disappointed Kayne West didn’t jump onstage and start talking about how great Keith Urban is. 7:28 – Hey, Beyonce brought the S1W’s with her. Nice to see her kicking it old school. 7:29 – (The S1Ws were the black panther dancers who guard the stage during Public Enemy performances.) 7:32 – Nothing screams 2010 like Alanis Morrissette songs. On to the next one. 7:37 – Questlove just tweeted “must admit that watching twitter tweets are better than watching the actual event.” 7:41 – Pink is wearing the sexiest berka of all time. 7:44 – Nothing screams “class” like a chick in a g-string spraying water everywhere. Pink is so talented! 7:45 – Between Pink and GaGa that’s four butt-cheeks bared tonight. Just wait until Howard Stern and Prince come out. 7:47 – I’m not sure who the Zac Brown are, but respect the fact that they didn’t get all gussied up for the show. 7:48 – I’m also glad none of them were wearing a g-string. 7:55 – Will.I.Am looks like Mr. Roboto from that Styx album. 7:56 – Fergie looks like someone from either Buck Rogers or the original Battlestar Galatca. Does anyone else remember when Channel 62 used to show all those back-to-back on Saturday afternoons? 7:58 – I gotta admit that watching the Peas do “I Got A Feeling” in concert would probably be a lot of fun. That song got a lot more infectious energy than it deserved. 8:00 – OK, so we’re an hour into this thing and a couple ground rules have already been established. No. 1, no one can perform a song all the way through. Medleys only, please. No. 2, all performance must somehow make their way from the main stage to the satellite stage, and back. 8:01 – They keep advertising the 3-D Michael Jackson tribute with Celine Dion. That woman’s so skinny, I bet even in 3D she’s only 2D. 8:06 – Who the heck are Lady Antebellum? 8:07 – I knew it would happen. People are starting to compose songs for those episode-capping montages. This Lady Antebellum song would be perfect over the poignant closing moments of “Grey’s Anatomy.” 8:09 – The presenter just said there was a Grammy category for artists who don’t have musical talent. Wait, there’s a Grammy for people with musical talent? When are they going to give that one out. Oh yeah, it was done earlier in the day in the parking lot behind the Ross downtown. 8:11 – I bet Stephen Colbert’s daughter thinks her dad is cool now that he’s won a Grammy. 8:12 – Oh, just as I blogged the above Colbert asked his daughter if she thought he was cool now. I am so freaking prescient!! (She said yes, by the way.) 8:13 – The Target ad just showed a white dog with a red spot of his eye. Spuds McKenzie lives! 8:14 – OK, that’s three exclamation points in the past two entries. I’m calming down now. 8:18 – Wow, Taylor Swift was up for “Song of the Year” and she didn’t win. I bet she gets at least half an album’s worth of songs of out how she’s feeling right now. 8:20 – They just introduced Robert Downey, Jr. as the most “self-important” actor of his day. How out of control is your ego when you’re crowned most “self-important” in Hollywood? 8:21 – That operatic introduction to “Blame It” was brilliant. Every time I hear this song I remember that Stevie Wonder stopped his show at Starlight last summer to play it over the PA. 8:23 – If they hadn’t just shown George Clinton in the audience, I would have sworn he was the white-haired conductor onstage. 8:24 – I think “Blame It” is starting to suffer from auto-tune overload. It sounds like Kraftwerk. 8:25 – Now Slash is onstage playing the guitar solo from “November Rain.” He probably just heard someone talking about alcohol and bum rushed. 8:27 – Joe Posnanski just tweeted: “They really had people VOTE to determine what Jon Bon Jovi sings at the Grammys? Was there a ‘What’s the difference’ option?'” 8:33 – Hey, Green Day won “Best Rock Album” for their follow-up to “American Idiot.” Can’t wait until that gets turned into a Broadway musical. 8:34 – Chris O’Donnell looks like McSteamy on “Grey’s Anatomy.” I hate myself for knowing this. 8:36 – Wow, a “country” band singing a patriotic song. Way to think outside the box, guys. 8:37 – Answer: Leon Russell with the Zac Brown Band. Question: Who will be headlining Knucklehead’s Labor Day celebration in 2012? 8:38 – Are the red-staters happy that the Zac Brown Band is celebrating America by playing a patriotic number, or upset with them for supporting Obama? This is so confusing. I thought we established that one couldn’t love their country without blindly supporting its president. 8:46 – Has anyone noticed how Taylor Swift strums from her elbow and not her wrist? It’s like she just picked up a guitar for the first time. 8:47 – I hope the tattooed guy on banjo is getting paid well for this gig. 8:49 – Good Lord, Taylor, stay in key! She has pitch like Mariah Carey at a baseball game in Japan. 8:53 – Dang, I forgot to get my 3D glasses. Fortunately, I still have 7 minutes to make it to Target. 8:54 – All you chumps who forgot your 3D glasses will now be given a migraine. 8:56 – I think Smokey could have handled the whole MJ tribute on his own. I would have loved to hear him cover a less-maudlin ballad on his own. I’d even settle for “Ben.” 8:57 – I love how Beyonce is wearing her 3D specs while Jay-Z is sans glasses. Hey B, you’re at the event. It’s already in 3D. 9:01 – I bet MJ’s kids feel really out of place when they hang out at their Uncle Tito’s place. Those are some pale-faced children. 9:03 – Wow, they were just paying tribute to MJ on the Grammys and now there’s a a commercial for “This Is It” on DVD. What a weird coincidence. It’s almost like it was planned. 9:08 – All you have to do to win an icon award is write “Sweet Talkin’ Guy”? Seems to be setting the bar a bit low. 9:09 – So what you were really voting for was which part of a Bon Jovi song they’ll perform. 9:10 – I hope Roger McGuinn is getting a cut of “We Weren’t Born to Follow.” Methinks Bon Jovi should have paid more attention to the Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow” when they were ripping it off. 9:11 – Someone needs to say it: Bon Jove are looking old. How many chins does Sambora have, anyway? I count three. 9:12 – I’ll tell you who says you can’t go home: Thomas Wolfe. And if home sounds like this, I’ll be out with Dean Moriarty on the road. 9:14 – Jon Bon Jovi should be forced to sing “Living on a Prayer” over the PA at a Home Depot. 9:16 – What the? How did Mos Def get onstage? “True Magic” had more artistry than the entire careers of everyone else onstage tonight – combined (except for Smokey Robinson and Leon Russell). 9:18 – Next year at this time, I hope Mos Def and Talib Kweli are being presented with the Best Rap Song award for “History.” Black Star rules. 9:19 – So Kanye actually wins an award and he doesn’t show up to collect it? How classic would it have been for Taylor to crash his speech? Probably why he didn’t show up. 9:21 – Seriously, though, best of luck to you and whatever you’re going through, Kanye. Your albums are genius. I hope you get your magic back and exorcise those demons. 9:26 – So it’s OK to sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to show support for the Haitians even though the song was banned by Clear Channel in the wake of 9/11? 9:28 – I just want to get this off my chest: Mary J. Blige, magnificent voice, but she oversings and all her songs are vamps and choruses. She doesn’t know what to do with a verse. And the a-hole who thought it would be a good idea to run that voice through auto-tune for MJB’s latest single should be shot. That’s like tying Fred Astaire’s ankles together. 9:30 – Do Mary J and Andrea Bocelli know they’re both singing the same song? Their “duet” was like an otolaryngological cock fight. 9:37 – Who’d have thought the Latin Grammys would have lasted a decade? 9:38 – How come there isn’t a Jazz Grammys or Klezmer Grammys? 9:42 – How many support musicians does the Dave Matthews Band need for this song? Maybe the USC Marching Trojans will show up again. 9:44 – Dave Matthews dances worse than Elaine Benes from “Sienfeld.” 9:46 – Now Ricky Martin has stolen Chris O’Donnel’s close-cropped look. He should just be glad he’s not forced to pay is way in with the general public. 9:48 – I think Beyonce’s dress is made of all of Jay-Z’s discarded bling. 9:55 – When I saw Maxwell last fall at the Saavis/Keil/Whatever it’s now called Center in St. Louis I imagined the experience was similar to seeing Marvin Gaye back in the day. Maxwell is the real deal and he’s killing it right now. Best performance of the night so far. 9:58 – Maxwell + Roberta Flack. At last, a duet with two people who actually know how to sing with a partner. 10:00 – As the show rounds the three hour mark, just think: the whole night could have been as good as what we just heard. 10:05 – I wonder if this is the combo Jeff Beck will be bringing to Starlight in April. 10:06 – So what’s the thinking here, now that all the kiddies have gone to bed we can shelve the pop tarts and have some real music? 10:07 – Does Quentin Tarantino know that pretending to act like such a badass is making him look like a huge douchebag? 10:14 – Is there a song underneath all these edits? Why not change the lyrics for television? I wonder if the producers have a lyric sheet up in the booth so they know when to drop out. That would be classic to see. 10:17 – Jamie Foxx is singing along with every lyric, but I have to say I think Drake is horribly overrated. 10:18 – Drake’s blend of preppie (black leather jacket, black shirt) with ghetto (torn, sagging jeans) is cracking me up. He’s clearly trying to have it both ways. 10:26 – Taylor Swift wins Album of the Year. Yawn. 10:29 – That’s it for the night. Thanks for reading and for hanging out.

When the clock struck 12 and the New Year arrived, it was time to revamp the vision board in all things 2019! When the clock struck 12 and the New Year arrived, it was time to revamp the vision board in all things 2019. Having been a fixture in our sales office for the past few years our vision board highlights the expected new trends for 2019 weddings and our brides and grooms LOVE IT! Now I was not expecting some of what I found! (but I am so glad I did!) This year’s new dress trend; jumpsuits. I was shocked to see the traditional look going away and seeing more personalized dresses. It was a new flattering style for all shapes and sizes. Your jumpsuit can now be a new way to feel more comfortable at your wedding. In 2018 pockets were something many woman loved in their wedding dresses and the trend continues! Some jumpsuits come with pockets and adds a new formal style to walk the walk to then talk the talk with your gal pals. If it's walking down the aisle or a more comfortable and affordable way to dance and party, the jumpsuit is taking over! 2. New Use of Flowers! In 2019, flowers are everywhere! A trend that I saw different from last year is laying a strand of flowers over the bride and grooms tables or around geometric shapes for centerpieces. Last year flowers were more hanging or drooping over tables but in 2019 they are all in circles or straight lines. The use of white flowers instead of color or white roses are also a new beautiful trend dominating 2019. This year is minimalist/neutral with elegance. 3. Any Color Goes! 2018 had 4 colors creating all the buzz: maroon, dark blues, gold, and white/silver. In 2019, it doesn’t have a set color more like a set shade, pastel. On our vision board, there are mainly pinks, blues and greens but there are also splashes of yellow or red/maroon or even orange/peach! If it is a forest color like green, navy, or purple, they tend to have a more monochromatic color scheme. The diversity in trendy options really seems unique to 2019. 4. Gold Metal! I love the new trend of gold metals! From the metal sculpture for a centerpiece or just metal accents, 2019 is here for it. There are lanterns made of gold or flowers in a gold rimmed vase or even just a metal rimmed box to hold cards for any wedding-or any event. The new use of abstract and geometrics combined is one of my favorite centerpieces that we are even seeing in cakes! Adding a hint of flowers can make it trendy, with an easy personal touch. Drapery has been a growing trend for the past few years and in 2019 it has officially arrived! From indoor ceremonies with draping above the aisle to a pinpoint drapery from the middle of the room, it provides a flowy elegant feeling inviting the guests. Having white drapery allows a semi-formal yet soft feel to the room. In the drapery there seems to be a lot of lights: fairy lights or lights with yellow/gold hues. It looks like an enchanted fairytale wedding with a new whimsical feel to your special day.

For Women Who Want The Ballerific Life! Ok so I just realized that the women of BA might be my secret weapon in helping me handle something lol. I'll try to keep it as short as possible... I'm gonna ask you to put yourself in the shoes of my fiance lol....... You're a 21 year old woman working 10 hours a day with no kids. You moved away from all your family & friends so that you can now live with your soon-to-be husband & you've been doing so for the past year successfully. The only problem is that lately you havent been having much time to spend with your man since both of you have time-demanding jobs and this has lead to your relationship being under strain lately. You now live in a town with not much going for it in the way of nightlife & attractions, which is a big change for you because you grew up in the Los Angeles area where there's normally always lots to do. You've been with your fiance for nearly 3 years now altogether & your relationship has always thrived on spontaneity and laughter. Now for the question: Taking all of this into account, what are some spontaneous/sweet/creative things that your man could do for you or with you either at home or out around town to add some excitement or joy into your evenings within the time/location restraints of how you're living? Romantic things, fun activities, unique ideas, things that would make you feel like you are making the most out of the limited time that you two have to spend together & getting a much-needed refresher in the relationship My bag of tricks is a little low at the moment so if you ladies could help me out I'd really appreciate it!! Thanks in advance! Does your city offer helicopter rides of the city? Near water? (sunset cruise/dinner cruise), movies in the park, walking tour at the garden (if your city has a botanical garden), hotair balloon ride, carriage ride, sporting event w/awesome seats and have a special message displayed on the scoreboard(most teams will do this for a fee), two personbike ride tour, find a rooftop lounge and watch the sunset while having drinks, paint your own pottery shop, make your own cupcake/dessert date... Its hard to give suggestion without knowing your city. Google: Fun things to do in (your city). You'd be surprised what pops up. I personally find it nice when someone does something they haven't done in a long time like what he did to first get me.....Sometimes people get complacent think about somethings you did in the beginning that you use to do that you stopped doing or something she constantly complains about (if she does) I know where i live we have the weekender paper that tells whats goin on. check out the living section in the newspaper and it should tell u of different thing going on such as crawfish festivals, jazz conerts, and things like that. a lot of ppl dont know so they dont go to these type of things. also try go online and type in events in your cty. Try a picnic @ a park, lake or s.thing. do you fish? has she ever been? even if yall dont catch anything, just being together and trying may work. go to a nearby city and see what they have goin on. plan a night with friends or other couples playing board games and cards. plan a massage, pampering night for her with you doing all the pampering...it may not be righ tbu tjst the thought and u guys should have fun doing it. This is so sweet! I'm not sure where you are, but here is a list of ideas/suggestions that I thought of: 1. Pick an evening out of the week that is designated for date night and take turns planning the outing (dinner and movie gets redundant after awhile) 2. You can try booking a couples session at a spa- get a couple's massage, mani/pedi, facial (don't be shamed to do this as a guy. It's okay if you are doing it with your sweetie) 3. You can also do some at home pampering by getting some bath salts or a bath bomb from Lush.com or wherever and then put rose petals in the bath water. Also, light lots of candles, get some massage oil and rub her down after she gets out of the bath, and make a mix CD with all romantic songs. You rap, right? So, then write her a poem or a rhyme- maybe even make her a song and perform it. 4. Plan a mini-vacay. Drive out to somewhere pretty in your town and book a room for the night for the two of you. Plan out activites for the evening/morning so the two of you are not just staring each other in the face, lol. 5. If you live near the beach, wake up really early and make a picnic basket with breakfast items. Drive out to the beach and watch the sunrise together and then have breakfast. Be sure to look up what time the sun rises. 6. Go see a live band perform some music. Maybe if they have an open mic, perform your love song to her there (but pick one place to perform the song. Don't do this and #3- overkill). 7. Cook her dinner. I'm talking about a 5 course meal, flowers, etc. 8. Wash her hair. 9. Plan her a surprise party with all of her friends and family from her hometown for her b-day or some other special occasion. 10. If there is a spring or a creek in your area where people go canoeing or swimming, take her there for a nice outdoor activity. 11. Go camping. 12. Take a vacation to a caribbean island. Bahamas is pretty close and economical, but that depends on what state you live in. 13. Go to a local festival, like jazz, arts, or something of that nature. 14. Find something that she really misses from home and try and get it for her, or recreate it. 15. Save up to take a trip overseas to Africa, Europe, Australia, etc. 16. Go to a seminar about investing together and make up a little game to start planning for a fruitful financial future (may not seem that romantic, but you can make it fun) 17. Plan an enchanting evening by hiding clues around all day, like a scavenger hunt. Almost like that Case video with Beyonce. Buy her a nice sexy dress, schedule an appointment at her favorite salon and pre-pay for it, and then send a car to take her to a nice restaurant. 18. Leave post-its all over the house and in her car in unusual places with sweet messages and play a game to see how long it will take her to find them all. 19. Give her a week off of all domestic duties, such as cleaning, cooking, washing, etc. 20. Rent a fly car (exotic or maybe a convertible) and take a drive to nowhere. Just bring some good music and an overnight bag, just in case. That's all I have for now, but I hope something works. Good luck! :) OH YEAH, GOOGLE EDIBLE ARRANGEMENTS.COM TO SEE IF U HAVE ONE IN YUOR CITY/GREAT FRUIT BASKETS Mini-Golf... Its fun and it can be romantic... It will give you two the chance to feel like kids again :-) I looked it up (your profile mentions Bakersfield) and there's a glow in the dark mini-golf place in your area.... true, there IS one of those in town, they just opened up too i think! you're a sweetheart for looking that up for me thanks a bunch kat i'll have ta write that 1 down Kit Kat said:Mini-Golf... Its fun and it can be romantic... It will give you two the chance to feel like kids again :-) I looked it up (your profile mentions Bakersfield) and there's a glow in the dark mini-golf place in your area.... small things player, small things...fresh flowers, short walks, movie nights, cooking, massages, baths, intimate little notes placed n her purse, clothing pocket etc, hotel getaways, the new i phones- u can see each other when talking, work her a$$ out in bed....treat her how you would like to be treated. Awwww Rev.......I think you've just tied the Don for my favorite dude on here lol Ooooo! I have some cousins going through something similar (they've moved to a small town that is just DEAD on the nights and weekends). What you can do is talk to a few businesses that offer things she likes, and plan a scavenger hunt, and she'll go to each one and they'll have something you've bought/arranged waiting for her. My cousin is a girly girl, plays volleyball, and sings in her church's choir. Her husband had her clues set up similar to this: 1) Go purchase new volleyball equipment w/a gift card for about $25 for her to get some shorts/knee pads 2) Go to music store and purchase new music books and CDs w/another gift card 3) Go get a manicure and a pedicure (he paid for the services in advance) 4) Go have lunch at Restaurant X and he met her at the restaurant and they had a nice lunch and went somewhere else. I know they are on a budget, so he had to figure out how to scrape up $150 out of their tight budget on payday. He also did it as a way for her to see what their town had to offer because their schedules are totally different (she works overnight at a hospital) and she's not the type to venture out alone. GOOD LUCK!!!!! I hope your fiance realizes she is a very lucky woman. I am a huge fan of this. It reminds her of how much you care even when you aren't around. california said:small things player, small things...fresh flowers, short walks, movie nights, cooking, massages, baths, intimate little notes placed n her purse, clothing pocket etc, hotel getaways, the new i phones- u can see each other when talking, work her a$$ out in bed....treat her how you would like to be treated. Rev, you can incorporate a lot of the ladies' suggestions into booking the hotel. Buy bath salts, massage oils, etc and go from there. You can trick out the room to her liking: her favorite flowers, a meal from her fave restaurant delivered to the room (if possible), a few bottles of her fave wine...you get the idea. Have fun with it and let us know how it works!

Friday, December 31, 2010 This woman actually believes that Helen Clark, by sitting on her arse in a New York skyscraper and spending other people's money, is going to solve poverty in the world. Anyway what will 2011 bring. 1. More of the same. Labour or Labourlite will win the election. John Key's optimisim may not rub off on as many people this time around. Goff will just be rubbed off. 2. The Maori Party will continue to ensure that we remain the most bi-multicultural country in the world. 3. The Greens will finally see a drop in support as their bullshit starts to wear thin. 4. ACT will have to do a serious reinvention of their brand. 5. Peters will come close but thankfully not close enough. ( can we please have our money back) 6. The media will ensure that our chance to get rid of MMP is pissed against the wall of ignorance. 7. Another pleasant location for the next round of climate summit/saving the world will be found. 8. Helen Clark will be paid another wad of tax free cash and there will be even more poor people in the world. 9. We will win the RWC, everyone will party and forget about the $20 billion deficit for another night. Anyway that's all for next year. Happy New Year's Eve 2010 everyone. And yes I know he is on the public record as an apologist for the genocidal maniac Pol Pot as the best thing to happen to Cambodia since unpolished rice. So why am I surprised when Keith Locke parrots the ritual left wing condemnation of the SAS involved in the Kabul operation. Bugger the facts still to emerge. Just stick the boot as a Pavlovian response nurtured by a visceral hatred of anything the western allies might do in order to bring sanity to that unfortunate country. Keith, war is shitty. People get hurt. That is the nature of the business. But highly trained and disciplined soldiers act within the rules of engagement as laid down and I for one support them 100% in doing just that. They have my respect. Keith Locke, communist bred and nurtured and successfully infiltrated into the Greens certainly does not. Thursday, December 30, 2010 Now there was a real president. Unlike the crooked devious lickyourarse all sort they've got in the White House for the next two long years. Black on the outside, red in the middle. I joined the 'International Club' where students from other countries mixed with locals. This was my very first experience of realpolitik. Seared in my memory is the statement from one of these paragons or political virtue:- "I am coming here to get a fine education Man, so that I can go back home and steal my countrymen blind." He was not joking or being flippant. Likely he has long ago been assassinated but his progeny live on, it seems. It is not coincidence that most of the world's flash points are run by people just like this guy. With no apologies to hand wringing PC leftists, have a quick look through the list and you will see most of the ' leaders' of these tropical or desert shit holes are either black bastards or Islamists. ALL are corrupt crooks and despots who seem to have no shortage of money for weapons. Fifty years ago, naively we trained them. Wednesday, December 29, 2010 In a world where the past is the past this wouldn't really matter. But in a world where big money rides on what is apparently verbal diarrhea, it would be good to have the real truth acknowledged. Tuesday, December 28, 2010 Come annual leave time, on Christmas eve, the car keys were thrown onto the sideboard and there they stayed until around February 1st. I've never got out of the habit and therefore I have no sympathy for these brainless idiots, whinging and moaning about traffic jams. What the hell do they expect? Maybe they could try getting out of bed a bit earlier - say 0400. However, there is always a silver lining. Auckland is a great place to live, once all the dozy pricks who live here go somewhere else with their thousand decibel boom boxes to tailgate, overtake on bends, cut off the other bloke, honk their fucking horns, run red lights and give everyone else the finger. Monday, December 27, 2010 The piece is almost straight out of Labour Party taking points with the two most egregious falsehoods here:- - He believed next year would be even tougher than this year, as households were hit with extra costs from October's rise in GST, increasing costs of fuel, higher ACC levies and taxes from the emissions trading scheme. - "The bottom 60 per cent of income earners are worse off than they were last year. I think the early part of 2011 will be pretty difficult." What a remarkable two hours of cricket. Australia's batsmen simply threw away the match and the series. Adolf watched for an hour or so before stumps and offers the following observations. - The game was over on the first day. This time there will be no come back. - The Aussie batsmen played like New Zealanders. They flailed at everything off the stumps and paid the price. - Adolf wondered during the first session whether the Australians realised they were in a Test Match - The Pommy bowlers, particularly Anderson, were superb. - The Pommy batsmen (batters are for baseball) let all the high risk balls go through to the keeper. That's why they have lost no wickets. - Australia's bowlers ranged from mediocre to just plain bloody awful with Johnston and Harris both hurling the ball down yards from the batsmen and the extreme reach of acrobatic keeper Haddin, gifting the Poms with eight runs. - Ponting's field placings were puzzling. With seam bowlers operating, at one stage early on he had only two slips with men on the boundary. The Poms clearly were not in the mood for hook and pull shots. Ponting thought he was bowling against Australians. - The umpires are blind. How you could miss an edge that was thicker than a Labour Party blogger is beyond me. And why on earth were those two free boundaries from Johnston and Harris adjudged byes? They were wides by a country mile. - An hour and a half from stumps, the stands were nearly empty. Earlier in the day they held 84,000 people. It looked as though 80,000 gave up in disgust. - Boxing Day at Melbourne saw the end of Ricky Ponting's career. Australians will never forgive him for this humiliation. What a sad end to an excellent career. Friday, December 24, 2010 1. Labour think that the ETS scam should get more teeth to screw over NZ business quicker. What a winning idea for them. But I would recommend false teeth, in keeping with the theme. Sadly Nick Smith probably agrees with them. 2. Government awards itself a pay rise, backed dated to July. Key urges a freeze. How about legislating a freeze. Maybe he could have just urged an increase in GST. 3. My bet is that the Crafar farms will end up with Landcorp. I don't know why governments thinks they are better farmers than private individuals. Wasn't that tried in some part of the world with disastrous results. I guess having our money to play with makes farming easier. No pesky bank managers to annoy them when they write the big cheques. 4. The MMP referendum next year will be a shambles with MMP being retained. The media will wallow in it. Politicians and 100's of thousands of people who rely on them for a living will breath a sigh of relief. The status quo will continue - as long as Bill can bring home the $300,000,000 bacon each week. But I do sleep easier knowing that Bill guarantees we will be back in surplus by 2015. That's a big relief. 5. There is a very strong probably that there will soon be trouble in Korea. The South Koreans will be unwilling to back down and actually have the steel to sort things out. You don't rebuild a country in 50 years by stepping backwards. Our troops had better be on the first plane to Busan to help our friends out. 6. Our national past time of child abuse will continue unabated as no government can solve the problem by social engineering, when that is also a big part of the problem. The only real solution is showing the perpetrators no mercy whatsoever. Keep it simple- 20+ years imprisonment with no bail. 7. I was going to mention Phil Goff but can't think of anything worthwhile to say. For some reason the word twilight comes to mind. Is Goff now the stuffed man? Anyway, Merry Christmas to all and I wish everyone a safe and prosperous New Year Adolf expects the bid, unlike the ridiculous and shambolic bid for Crafar Farms, will be successful. The bidders are Agria Corporation, already a 19 per cent shareholder in PGG Wrightson, and New Hope Group, one of China's biggest agribusiness companies. Agria chief executive Tao Xie, a PGG Wrightson director, said the two Chinese companies were seeking no more than 50.01 per cent of Wrightsons and would form a joint venture to make the bid.................Agria, a New York-listed, China-based agricultural investment company, bought into PGG Wrightson last year. Its bid partner New Hope is not well known in New Zealand but is a major producer of feed as well as meat, eggs and dairy products. There is nothing strategic about a piss ant once was dominant farm services company which is remembered by four generations of farming families for the way it screwed its customers when times were tough. Therefore it is difficult to see what damage or downside for New Zealand there might be from such foreign investment. On the other hand, control of a significant part of our milk production and processing industry by overseas interests whose reputation for quality control is akin to the SlackCaps' reputation for winning had the potential to cause serious long term damage to our biggest export earner. That's the real reason the Crafar Farms bid was denied. The inept dolt fronting the bid simply gave the excuse for the decision. Good luck PGG Wrightsons. You'll need plenty of it. Thursday, December 23, 2010 The sooner they find a way to extricate themselves from their damn fool Emissions Trading Scheme the better off we'll all be. New Zealand's chief conspirator, Dr Jim Slazenger, has been outed fudging the figures in this latest development - an apparent peer review carried out by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Unfortunately for Dr Jim the insipid report's commentary gave him a couple of backhanders. NIWA has abandoned the official national temperature record and created a new one following sustained pressure from the NZ Climate Science Coalition and the Climate Conversation Group....... .........NIWA’s complete renunciation of the old graph was confirmed recently by their admission in a court document that the graph was not an “official” record. Which means they have also disowned Dr Jim Salinger’s methodology, which created the graph...... .........“Almost all of the 34 adjustments made by Dr Jim Salinger to the 7SS have been abandoned, along with his version of the comparative station methodology. “NIWA is clearly not prepared to defend the adjustments exposed in Are we feeling warmer yet? But it took a court case to force them into a corner...... And here's the clanger- no warming in NZ since 1960. Yep! No warming in the last fifty years. It was all invented by that double faulting Slazenger.:- For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that no warming has occurred here since about 1960. Almost all the warming took place from 1940-60...... Apparently the good doctor had difficulty (a) keeping his thumb off the scientific scales as well as (b) obeying his Superior's instructions, the latter for which finally he was sacked. To its eternal disgrace, NIWA had to be forced into court before it would recognize the travesty it had sponsored and promoted. They just don't seem to get it. Neither Labour nor the Herald. Articles like this cement in the public mind all that is negative about Labour. - They are all old bastards. - They don't do anything constructive. - Digging for dirt is their primary, indeed only, focus. - They are out of touch with the public. - They have no ideas, initiative or imagination. - The party matters more than the country. - We pay these useless pricks a fortune to indulge in this childish carry on. - You couldn't seriously allow this rabble to run the country. Wednesday, December 22, 2010 Today, the NCTionalMP administration has put the bid where it belongs, in the trash can. The decision covers the applications by Natural Dairy to acquire UBNZ Assets Holdings Limited and a retrospective application to acquire four Crafar farms which UBNZ purchased in February 2010. "We concur with the Overseas Investment Office's recommendation that consent should be declined," they said in a joint statement. "We will not be commenting further on our decision." Now the receivers can get on and sell the properties one by one, as they should have done right from the start. Just a quick note to ask you why you, and the rest of your ilk, feel you have to make shit up in order to be heard? You latest post at Red Alert, entitled "Save ACC" is by far and away, and without a shadow of a doubt, as big of a piece of horse shit as you've ever written. We both know that ACC is not in any danger of being sold off or closed, so why would you invite your readers to "be kept up to date on the campaign to stop the ACC sell off"? I'd bet a lazy $20.00 that even the uber sychophant spud knows this isnt true, but doesn't want to banned for life for saying so. So Trevor, as you're obviously not very bright, then let me help you. Allowing people to make choices about work place insurance is not selling off ACC, but you already knew that didnt you. So what does that make you Trevor? PS How sad it is that the hard earned taxes of so many kiwis is used to support you while you indulge yourself producing such works of fiction. Sad little man. Has anyone else noticed that the major, a term I use loosely, lefty blogs, ie The Standard, Red Alert, The Greens, and No Right Turn, have made absolutely no mention of the disturbing child abuse stories that have so exercised the country of late. For my part the antics of Mark Hotchin, what Clark says about Wikileaks, Mad Cath's opinions about anything, and how apparently dishonest the National Party are, is all very small beer when compared to the mental images I have of a small child being tortured in MY neighbourhood. A small girl cringing in a wardrobe whilst in agony from the wounds inflicted by those who are supposed to love her and care for her evokes in me the deepest sadness. I weep for her. I weep for her and all the others that we dont know about, yet. I am also deeply concerned for a nation where those who are desperate to rule, and who would do "whatever it takes " to achieve power, cannot bring themselves to comment on this, the most serious issue facing the country today, or are they hoping it will just go away. You'd think Obama might get the message? Texas, continuing seven consecutive decades of growth, will gain the most seats with four more House members in 2012. Florida gains two, while Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington each gain one. States losing seats include Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. All those states lost one seat apiece, save for New York and Ohio, which lost two each........ ....."It is no coincidence that the states gaining population the fastest over the last 10 years have lower tax rates and, consequently, stronger economies. As states draw new congressional districts to reflect this shift, we will certainly see more Republicans in the U.S. House," McHenry said. No? He's too busy. Of course, these silly people will be made to realise they are wrong, wrong, wrong when the Socialists legislate, regulate all these go ahead states into submission. They just don't understand what's good for them. For those who are unaware, state governors have considerable influence over the 'redistricting' process for federal electorate boundaries and this quite dramatic population shift, with its associated realignment of electoral boundaries is likely to heavily favour the Republican Party. Is it a gerrymander? Yes it is but it is one which for years has favoured the Democrats so it is only fair that they should reap the harvest of their own political folly. Tuesday, December 21, 2010 Watch for the howls of anguish from the socialists. Helen Clark closed out private insurers as soon as she gained power in 1999. Some say this was an ideological decision but wiser analysts know the decision was political. Ideology requires principles and if there's one New Zealanders have learned from Wikileaks, it is that Helen Clark has no principles apart from 'whatever it takes to gain and hold power. ACC was brought back into the gummint fold for one purpose. To provide a sink hole in which to park beneficiaries so that she could tell the people what a fine job she was doing reducing the number of people on benefits. Adolf sincerely hopes Nick Smith and Co set the deal up properly so that ACC can not be hijacked by Labour for a second time. Monday, December 20, 2010 Sunday, December 19, 2010 From memory it had National down substantially with Labour up and 40% of National voters unhappy with John Key's handling of the Panzy Wong business. Nobody seems to have told the people who were polled at the same time by Colmar Brunton. Watch The Herald's circulation take another dive over coming months as it follows assiduously the tried and true strategies of the egregiously partisan New York Times. As an aside, from this poll it looks as though voters have made up their minds who killed the twenty nine miners. The Greens have shed more than a third of their vote and are out on their shabby arses. NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark told Australia's ABC radio July 8 "I must say that I personally have met George Bush a number of times and consider the personal relationship between us to be very good." Making a direct link between those meetings and NZ's anti-nuclear stance, PM Clark added that she was "optimistic that over time what happened over 20 years ago will be of less and less relevance to these relationships." Snuggle snuggle, cuddle cuddle And here is bandy legged Kindalooza meeting svelte Condoleezza Yet all the while, The Bilious Bitch was sucking up to the US and Australia she and her mates were telling NZ's voters what a pack of pricks they were. Clark Goff and Mallard were all complicit - dirty little dealers in double talk. So there you have it. Improved relations with the US were deliberately sacrificed for the sake of the few votes they needed to just scrape over the line in 2005. The Charge told Goff that the Embassy would have appreciated a head’s up that Mallard would be making these remarks. Goff said that as was well known, Goff has very favorable feelings towards the United States…But, he went on, the Government believes that these issues do resonate with the New Zealand public and it would therefore be foolish not to pursue them. There will be more campaigning on issues related to U.S. policy in the weeks ahead, he cautioned. The Charge said…if further false claims were made the Embassy would respond. Goff…endorsed the idea of our making a press statement refuting Mallard’s claims......... ..........In addition, we understand that our MFAT contacts have been counseling the Government that there will be long-term impact on our bilateral relations if Labour continues its baseless diatribes and hints that a close relationship with the United States is in general not in New Zealand's interests. But where was Goff? Oh, he was off developing bilateral relationships with REALLY important people. Labour would sell their Grandmother if they thought it could buy them a vote. Apart from telling us what we already know, Wikileaks is just another nail in the coffin of Western civilisation. The rest of the world won't be releasing their secrets so flippantly. Saturday, December 18, 2010 Maybe, they and their mates in the media shoulda woke up about half way through 2008 to the fact their guy had no experience, no ability, no political nous and no common sense. Goddammit, he cain't even play poker to save hisself. It's aaaaaall too late folks. Roll on 2012. Meantime stock up on cigars, beer and popcorn. The entertainment will be non stop as Obama goes on to out perform Jimmy Carter. Why, I'll betcher Dubbya could whip the BA off the JA in eighteen holes of match play, even. At the time, Adolf and Whaleoil were almost lone voices raised in protest at the appalling behaviour of an incompetent and complacent losing tenderer; it's greedy venal GP cohorts; and the blitheringly naive and inadequate oversight of the project by Auckland's DHBs. Brian Rudman, in today's Herald, provides confirmation of our accusations. We were right. Here are some choice excerpts from the ministerial report into the hand over. "The assumption by the DHBs that there would be co-operation from the outgoing provider DML was not well founded," says the review team of Waikato University management associate professor Jens Mueller and Waikato District Health board chairman Graeme Milne. "The good-faith provisions in the old contract requiring co-operation with the [three Auckland] DHBs were simply ignored by DML." The report criticises the boards for "a fundamental lack of understanding of the strong clinician backing of the outgoing provider ... [which] contributed significantly to the ability of DML to wage an unprecedented interference campaign, which drained DHB resources during the transition and caused confusion among patients and clinicians". Yes, my own doctor's practice was in it up to its eyeballs. The report refers to the "full-fledged media circus ... fuelled in part by DML operating its own video 'reporting' of patient dissatisfaction". This is a reference to the losing tenderer hiring fake journalists to doorstep patients leaving the new testing centres, then rushing any negative comments off to the media - shamefully, state TV ran them. The authors paint this white-anting as normal business practice. They were taken aback that most of the 80 people they interviewed were surprised "by the unexpected activity of DML". They say "it could hardly have come as a complete surprise to the DHBs that the incumbent would not only have no desire to aid an orderly transition of providers but would vent its frustrations through a deliberate campaign to destabilise the transition process". Well Adolf has news for these naive authors. Such behaviour is NOT part of normal business practice in my experience. It is the sort of behaviour which identifies it's perpetrator as an organisation unsuitable ever again to be offered the chance to provide service in New Zealand. The last word goes to Mr Rudman:- On losing the tender process its first move was a scaremongering "important notice to patients" threatening "you may not receive the same level of service" and even, "your samples may be sent ... out of New Zealand for processing". It tried every tactic possible to sabotage the handover to the successful tenderer, Labtests (LTA). Thursday, December 16, 2010 Just when you think Labour has excelled itself in stupidity and incompetence, along comes Phil Goff with a double dip. Not just a double dip, but one he promised to fix long ago. Pay the money back, Filk. Pay the bloody money back. Oh how I wish this had come out for all to see two days ago so that Bill English could have given a slightly more spicy answer to Trevor Mallard's question about housing allowances. Adolf is wondering whether Cunliffe has quietly helped this one along. Goff loses glasses, mistakes Cunliffe for Key And as part of their 'austerity' programme we see that Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse has been awarded a 50% salary increase from $80k to $120k per annum. And this for attending all the functions that Len Brown wouldn't be seen dead at. Penny Hulse just wouldn't happen to be a fellow left winger ... would she? Why is it that socialists and troughers are inexorably intertwined? This sounds like a union of one ball breaker with another. No wonder Warnie is not match fit. Mind you, it would be huge contribution to the sport of cricket should some other activity prevent him from commentating important fixtures. Hot on the heals of revelations that Helen Clark aided and abetted Ammerikaaner electronic spying comes the news that Uber commo Australian PM Julia Gillard's speechwriter is a secret agent for the CIA, or something. Her bloody speech writer, no less. The bloke who puts the words up on her teleprompter. Then of course there is ALP power broker Mark Arbib who also looked upon with great favour by the Yanks. Good God, before we know it we'll find that secretly Keith Locke has been passing DNA samples of all his peacenik mates to the CIA. Let's have more leaks, I say. More wonderful leaks please. In fact, it is a non story, interspersed with the opinions of the writer when no actual hard facts are available. The base was used in the 2006 coup and probably the 2000 coup, although New Zealand officials have always denied that they were spying. The revelation is likely to anger Fiji prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama, who seized power in a December 2006 coup. We are meant to be surprised, shocked and horrified that NZ used the Waihopi base to listen in on the cell phone conversations of participants in a military coup in Fiji. New Zealanders would be shocked, horrified and greatly surprised if we learned that any government had failed in its duty to listen in to such conversations involving parties to such events on our very door step. Adolf must concede that in this instance the Bilious Bitch acted impeccably. Wednesday, December 15, 2010 Whaleoil has the story from the print version of the Dom Post. Of course the greasy Herald has not a mention of it, preferring a steady diet of anti National Party smut for it's diminishing gang of loyal readers. I sincerely hope the AG's investigation leads her to ask for broader inquiries into other aspects of this slippery fellows activities. And you thought Hubbard was bad. God help Auckland "....and so, in response, we will be introducing a stimulus package" After decades of paper-macheing bureaucracy over every possible legal business that people are smart enough to dream up and invest their capital in, politicians somehow think that when things inevitably turn to custard, throwing in wadfulls of taxpayers money is some sort of viable solution. The only true stimulus is to strip away the size of government. Allow people to compete unencumbered. This will take a lot of people out of their comfort zone in the short term. Because governments are very good at protecting "short term"- it's what gets them through the next election. But if we do not start thinking long term, then we are doomed to stagger from one stimulus to the next. All that achieves is to make life and business a perverse state sponsored lottery- like Lotto on steroids. Tuesday, December 14, 2010 Even with The Herald doing his dirty work for him, he just can't seem to get ANYTHING right. He's spent the last week trotting around after his octogenarian veterinarian, digging for dirt on Pansy Wong. 'It's a whitewash!' he screamed to anyone who would listen. The Herald listened and ran the story for all it was worth which turned out to be fuck all more than six pence. Today the Auditor General called an end to his game. Clean bowled him with a swinging yorker to the middle stump. The Auditor-General has ruled out an inquiry into National MP Pansy Wong's spending just hours after her resignation this morning. Of course you could not read this last bit in the Herald. It came from Stuff Meanwhile Filk and his cadaverous mate continue to bat from the dressing room. But Goff said Labour MP Pete Hodgson had evidence of other interests that would raise fresh questions about the Wongs' use of the subsidy. "We'll see the first installment of that in Parliament this afternoon. The Wongs never came clean in the McPhail investigation. They never exposed the full extent of their business dealings in China." It seems the Auditor General didn't think much of his evidence. While the idiots at The Standard bleat on about tax cuts for the rich being the cause of it all (presumably because they think you can raise an extra billion or three by taxing out of existance the top five percent of the country's earners) the truth is New Zealanders are being carefully conditioned to accept the politically charged inevitable. The rolling back of Helen Clark's outrageously irresponsible election bribes of 2005 and 2008. Adolf looks forward to the day when; - no longer will a family with a household salary income of $35,000 be able to draw down $911 per week in welfare disguised as 'tax credits.' - no longer will the children of well off New Zealanders be able to borrow money and pay no interest. - no longer will New Zealanders pay for myriads of government 'commissions' which write meaningless reports for other meaningless people to read. - no longer will New Zealanders pay life time loafers to sit on their fat, mainly black arses, breeding generations of kids whose one aim in life is to sit on their own fat arses while someone else feeds them. Why, because they were addicted to spending. It is time for John Key and Blenglish to blow the whistle on government spending. Preparations have been underway for some time. The report of the working group on welfare should be accelerated and a list of SOEs to be made the subject of a partial minority float should be put out for public discussion. Let's face it, even Hillary Calvert's ping pong ball receptacle came out the other day in support of partial floats for SOEs. At around 15 billion lightyeardollars I would guess that we are now at the edge of the debt galaxy- the Milked Way . Captain Key said it was difficult to say whether the rebalanced of the economy through people saving more and spending less would continue, or for how long. "How quickly we revert to type I don't really know...we spent quite a lot of time getting here," he said. Rebalancing is a flash word for reality check. People are unlikely to revert to type any time soon. Those heady days of lightspeed consumerism are gone. But I suspect that it will be a long time before Starship Statespending returns to Earth. While they chew through half our GDP we are a long way from home. I look forward to First Mate Bill's report on what lies beyond the galaxy today. This story about these animals barking like dogs just reinforces my pessimism. John Key said " It is certainly a worrying trend and we need to have a serious look at whether arming teems is the best way to combat this issue". Howard Broad when asked for comment said " Gee I don't know, Greg O'Connor has not given me my usual guidance on this issue and after spending the last few years playing interference for the last Labour Government I am just looking forward to retirement". In other shock news, the traffic cop bashed with a Machete is saying a silent prayer in thanks for the fact that he did not have a gun that the teens who bashed him from behind could have grabbed as he lay bleeding and unconscious and shot him. Personally I blame John Banks. Putting aside the last 40 years of social engineering that has left parents and teachers powerless to punish these little gobshites before they get into serious strife........ If Banks had not turned the Police into tax collecting uniformed jackals by merging the black and white pie eaters with the cops we would not have a situation where most of us only come into contact with them when they are pointing a radar gun past their massive stomachs. The combination of Howard Broad being a uniformed defacto member of Clarks spin weasel department and the aggressive ticketing sweeping the country is it any wonder cops are now quivering every time they go out without a gun on their belt? Monday, December 13, 2010 When will it dawn on our politicians that we have had enough? Where is the leadership and the savings? Because this looks like business as usual to me. Tax, borrow and spend. All I see is Brown lining up his mates for cushy jobs, raising money for pet projects and trying to push the blame on past decisions - of which he was also a major player. I will be very interested in hearing Rodney Hide's take on this. But I guess we will have to wait until after the summer holidays. You are sub human with no redeeming features whatsoever. Clearly society would be a much better place if you had been strangled at birth. And now we, the long suffering taxpayer, are going to have to fund the cost of your incarceration for what I hope is a very long time. But you have it in your own hands to partially redeem yourselves in my eyes at least. So how about 'topping'? I know it takes guts but it can be quick and relatively painless if you get it right. I might even shed a tear over your departure (but not many) and you will have done the right thing for the first time in your miserable lives. Gueez Wayne ... I feel a whole lot better for getting that off my chest. Sunday, December 12, 2010 A man who arrived on the scene before the police arrived told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper that the dead man had a large wound in his abdomen. “It looked like the man was carrying something that exploded on his stomach. He didn’t have any injuries to his face or his body and the stores nearby weren’t damaged. All the windows were whole,” the witness told DN. It appears that much of the small blast was absorbed by an intact bag of nails found at the scene. A devout Jew was preparing himself for daily prayers, the way devout Jews do. Some dumbarse Kiwi reported to the ship's skipper that the Jew was about to detonate a bomb. TV3 embellished the story:- An Israeli man was being spoken to police at Picton police station this afternoon after the incident, which was being played down by police. TV3 earlier reported that the Kaitaki Interislander ferry's captain had been taken hostage by a man in possession of explosives and possibly a gun. What else needs to be said? Fuckwits making up news for fuckwits. Nominations for the seat open on 11 March and close on 1 April. On 9/10 April the Preselection Committee will determine a short list of up to five candidates to go forward to selection scheduled for Saturday 30 April at Kaikohe. It is anticipated that upwards of 250 delegates representing the 4,000 Party members in Northland will make the final selection. The meeting also passed the following resolution which is the main point of this post. It relates to illegal land occupations. The resolution reads "Resolved that Government cease negotiations with any iwi, hapu or whanau in respect of their Treaty claim(s) if that iwi, hapu or whanau, either overtly or covertly, encourages and/or endorses the illegal occupation of privately owned land in support of real or imagined grievances". We would expect that Government takes note of this resolution and acts accordingly. It disregards this resolution at its electoral peril. Saturday, December 11, 2010 Instead I am now battling shit – literally- by milking cows. I have been a dairy farmer since July, which has been a huge learning curve and a lot of fun. Simply put, a heck of a lot of grass goes in one end, a surprising amount of shit comes out the other and hopefully some milk arrives from parts between. Actually a huge effort goes into producing milk solids and my belt has certainly gone in a couple of notches. The daily routine of milking, cleaning, feeding and calf rearing is relentless plus the added work in between of upgrading the water and effluent systems, making silage, drilling summer crops and maize planting. All under the umbrella of a looming drought. We have actually been pretty lucky and got in over 100ha of excellent silage which will hopefully serve the cows well over summer. When I was a retailer I was a miserable bastard who hoped for rain in the weekends. Now I’m not so fussy and any day will do. So I watch the clouds. Sometimes from the sea, sometimes from the land. I call them Clarkulonimbus.They roll in on the wind, butt laden, promising to deliver rain you can trust, rain that cares, sustainable rain, clean technology rain, green rain, hopeful rain, rain you can believe in, rain that just can. But even before you can wipe the dust off your gumboots, they've g'offed (like moved on but faster). If you are lucky you get blessed with a few spits. Then they're off to dump on some other more "deserving" part of the world. Some things never change. Update On cue Ele at Homepaddock has found a real word to hopefully describe my new state Friday, December 10, 2010 Wednesday, December 8, 2010 If ever there was a strategic asset, it is the dairy industry and no matter what, no Chinese rat fuckers should ever be allowed within a hundred miles of it. Not ever, no matter what. A 65-country study, comparing 475,000 15-year-olds on reading, mathematical and scientific literacy, places New Zealand fifth, fifth and 10th. But the study, the third in an OECD triennial programme, also shows New Zealand has one of the widest gaps between the top and bottom 5 per cent of pupils – with Maori and Pasifika pupils languishing near the bottom. Well, duh. Any measure of NZ educational achievement has its overall score lowered by Polynesians. And the education professionals' response: "The majority of our young people are really well-served by the system ... but we have these groups of kids and the pattern's remained the same since 2000, that we are not doing well for." Wrong. All of our kids are extremely well served by the system. It's doing a good job for all of them. There isn't some evil voodoo that makes our system an excellent one for every kid on the planet except the ones from Polynesian cultures. Don't look at the system, look at the fucking culture. I know sod-all about Pasifika cultures, but the Maori one values words only as oratory and genealogy. For anything beyond that, actions speak louder than words (which is not a value judgement - people for whom actions speak louder than words are in a lot of cases way more useful to have around than people like me). However, it does mean Polynesians are going to be pretty well represented in the sports and arts (music, dance, acting etc) but not well represented among the intelligentsia. If people really want to change that, they're going to have to change the culture. Expecting the education system to do something about it is pointless. And so it is that I disagree strongly with the decision of my Party (supported by Labour) not to move on raising the qualifying age for NZ Superannuation to age 67 as recommended by the Retirement Commissioner. Her suggestion that it be implemented over 12 years starting in 2020 in two monthly tranches each year seems eminently sensible. The 2020 start point is generous in its lead time, allowing those effected the opportunity to plan ahead. The phase in is more user friendly than the formula used last time when the qualifying age was raised from 60 to 65. Yes, such a move could give Winston First a boost and might see him him over the 5%. That is an issue but I for one would be prepared to take the short term risk for the long term gain. And yes, I am well aware of the Maori and Pacific Island mortality statistics. Pakeha too die before age 65. Every Vietnam veteran is well aware of that. That's life (or death). New Zealand Superannuation at age 65 is an unnecessary luxury the country can't afford. The current season started on October 13th at four kilometres and there have been five 'days off' since then. So far six kilos of adipose tissue have been shed and all medical markers are heading in a healthy south easterly direction. But now to the headline. I get going just before sunrise, any time between 0515 and 0545 when street lights are still on and there is a quiet twilight with sometimes wonderful sunrises. Tui and doves are starting their early morning chortling and gurgling. In these dubious visual conditions it seems common sense to wear a white shirt so as to be readily visible when crossing the road or walking on the bitumen to avoid adverse foothpasths - usually cross sloping and hell on ankles and calves. It is amazing to note the following:- - The number of walkers and joggers dressed in BLACK from head to toe, some occupying the road way on the left hand side instead of the safer right hand side. - The number of dark coloured cars driving with no lights on. The drivers of these cars too usually are dark coloured- coconuts, pakis, cane cutters but few Maoris. The Bros are still asleep at that time of day. - The absence of cyclists on the magnificent and expensive new cycleway on East Coast Rd. They are all still using the road and hoping to get killed. Driving their bloody cars, of course. Monday, December 6, 2010 Poms are not happy and rightfully so. They could have bowled one or two more overs before the rain came. What a bunch of girls. As a matter of interest, I reckon I saw Australia lose the ashes about an hour ago when Ponting and Watson were sent packing in quick succession. This is good. His only apparent problem to this is that there is 'no money to back it up" Why he thinks that a government throwing even more money at a problem is a solution to anything is beyond me. Get the government out of the way and let the real visions of of the people flourish, without being sucked dry by out of control state taxing, borrowing and spending. Maybe a "clean technology" would be one that sucked the fat out of his aspirations. Sunday, December 5, 2010 I personally believe there most certainly is, but the quote below from one of the left's sages has made me realise that there are some in this country who have already had access to all the facts, who have heard all the evidence from all the partys involved, who must have snuck into the mine and examined its contents, and who have then analysed everything and come up with the end result: "That’s not ironic – that was most definitely purposeful so that companies can cut costs even more and, yes, the deaths at Pike River are most definitely the result of inadequate procedures used in the mine for which the company is responsible." There you have it folks, courtesy of Draco T Bastard. Now while there is a strong possibility that Mr. Bastard's statement could be nothing more than the petulant mewling of a precocious twelve year old with an over developed sense of so called social justice, the left blogs are spinning towards culpability resting with Pike River management. Ceck'em out for yourselves if you have the stomach for it. Another example of this are the posts on KB from Mao's man in NZ, one Zhumao. This guy must also be party to Mr. Bastard' findings as he has no problems pointing the bone of responsibility at Peter Whittal the CEO: "Whittall is a consumate actor ala ‘I’m gonna get my boys out of that mine’ , in Hollywoodspeak. He is the villain of the piece, and should tender his resignation soon. " "Superintendent Knowles yes. Whitall absolutely fucking now. Whittall should most likely be awarded a set of prison overalls." Tried and sentenced. Just like that. Remembering, of course that the Chicoms were never big on people being innocent until proven guilty. Anyone else think that Justice Panckhurst and co surely have New Zealands most difficult job on their hands? National will win the election with an increased number of seats sufficient to govern in its own right but will decide against going alone. There will be some surprises in the National Party List. John Key will assume the mantle of 'King Dick Seddon'. National will win BECAUSE of him. Labour will loose seats and Phil Goff will do a Helen Clark on election night and step down. The Greens will gain seats at the expense of Labour. All bets are off in Epsom. The continuing feud in ACT between their Pragmatist Wing (Hide) and their Ideologue Wing (Douglas) coupled with increasing attacks on National will turn off many voters. National may decide they are not worth the effort and go all out for Epsom. Redbaiter will continue to drive people away from voting ACT in droves. Ohariru voters will continue to demonstrate they have no political sense while the electorate remains bereft of a decent men's hairdresser. The Maori Party may well pick up an additional seat but if they are offered and accept a role within government John Harawira will quit and sit as an Independent. Winston First will get 4.9998% of the Party Vote thereby proving to his supporters that the 'great conspiracy' does exist directed by the Jews or Chinese or .... (you insert). In the referendum the electorate will demonstrate its lack of political maturity and vote to retain MMP. Richie McCaw will get a Knighthood. You heard it first. Thursday, December 2, 2010 I thought it was done with dignity and style. A uniquely 'Kiwi' occasion. While I am not overly religious I thought having the Rev Tim Mora as the 'MC' was an inspired choice. He captured the mood of the occasion. And it was the West Coast at its best. New Zealand but different and all the better for that. Today we remember the 29; we especially remember the families. But the Coasters are one big family and our thoughts are with each and every one of them. Wednesday, December 1, 2010 Whaleoil is tackling one of the former who appears to think 'duplicity' is a mutually uplifting emotion enjoyed by men and women immediately after copulation. If, like David Farrar and Cactus Kate, you have received correspondence from Rich or Mitch or Frank or Henry or Buggerlugs, promising 50% of advertising revenue generated by your copy then you'd better get in touch with Whaleoil, pronto.

In the span of six years, Rick Bass has published five nonfiction books about the outdoors, including The Ninemile Wolves (1992), Winter: Notes from Montana (1991), and Oil Notes (1989), all of which offer inside glimpses into one man’s reverent, intimate relationship with the natural world. In Oil Notes, Bass boldly declares, “No one has ever before seen what I am seeing.” This much is true: Bass’s vision of the world is twisted and enlarged to resemble something otherworldly, much like the work of such noted magical realists as Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Ben Okri. In his stories, Bass stretches the fabric of everyday reality in order for readers to see what he sees, to realize the limitless possibilities of a world surrounded by sky. In Platte River, his follow-up work of fiction to the much-acclaimed collection of stories The Watch (1989), Bass transforms the rugged, river-runs-through-them natural landscapes of northern-remote Montana, New York, and Michigan into magical, mythical, miraculous places where “ravens sometimes fell from the sky in midflight, their insides just snapping” from the “hard winter” cold. Bass uncages his hungry, wildly fertile imagination to forage over these locales in its search for what lies unseen, beneath the surface of things, waiting to be told. To read the work of Rick Bass, to read Platte River, is to step three times into “some sort of afterlife, separate from the real world.” In “Mahatma Joe,” the kick-off novella, Bass tells the story of an evangelist living out his last days in the sparsely populated village of Grass Valley, Montana, a place where the inhabitants once celebrated the end of winter with a festival called “Naked Days, where no one wore clothes at any time, . . . not even when they went into the saloon.” Mahatma Joe Krag is rejuvenated by the possibility of cultivating a garden of salvation here in “a valley more wicked than any of the mining camps in Alaska.” Joe ultimately finds more than he had bargained for: This novella, like the other two that form the “Platte River triptych,” is ultimately about love and the renewal of the heart. Mahatma Joe’s heart is Bible-tethered, though he is torn between the promise of an eternal afterlife and the sensual, flesh-bearing pleasures of Grass Valley—a paradise of earthly fruits. Preacher Joe is privately tormented by the notion that he has “wasted time . . . on long slow walks through the woods . . . sinful daydreams.” Worse, he is publicly heckled by the heaven-on-earth hedonists who call Grass Valley home. “Despite its wildness”—perhaps because of it—“its lack of electricity or phones . . . the people were frightened of nothing, they were wild like animals,” unwilling to be tamed. Enter, then, into the valley, Leena, a luckless, on-the-run woman who hails from the South, a refugee rebounding north, looking for a new, clean life, a chance to start over here in this valley of “wild promise.” Like most of the characters in this collection, Leena is leaving behind a past shaped by love, misshaped by failed relationships, by men who had “always wanted her to be a certain way.” Here, ironically in this valley of mostly men, Leena hopes to inhabit a new skin, to wake up each day feeling renewed, to create a private space for herself and her dog Sam, to revision a new life based on the doctrine “No more men.” Yet strange events take place in the valley, in this book—ominous occurrences that possess the power to change the way characters think. One of Bass’s greatest assets is his ability to depict these mysterious moments as if he were describing something as common as a man and a woman watching television. Consider the likelihood of an elderly husband and wife skating down a river of black-holed ice in the middle of the night with “shovels and spades [strapped] across their backs like rifles.” Through the narrative ease with which Bass weaves such irregularities into the stretched-out fabric of his stories, he allows the reader to accept such seemingly impossible events as wholly plausible. The three long stories gathered here in Platte River stoke the fires of readers’ imagination, feeding the human need for a fantasy—Bass’s metaphysical fabulism—that is firmly rooted in (rises up out of) the natural world. One night Leena is awakened in her tent by the sound of a man and a woman, Mahatma Joe and his wife Lily, racing down the river, singing and humming. Leena crouches in the dark and crawls on her stomach through the grass in order to “get closer . . . to hear what they...

You're sitting in the waiting room, icing your sore ankle. The teen-ager to your right is moaning and clutching his belly. The woman to your left is coughing into her mask. A stretcher rolls by with a man yelling at the top of his lungs. An ambulance arrives. You see paramedics performing CPR. You wonder, with all this chaos around you, how can you make sure that your emergency room doctor will address your concerns? Along with primary care physicians, we emergency providers are the frontlines of medical care. We see people with every imaginable issue. Some ER patients are critically ill — from trauma, heart attack, or severe infection. These patients will get seen immediately and have the full focus of ER staff. Other patients are not critically ill but still have needs that must be tended to. As an emergency physician and patient advocate, I've met many patients who are frustrated by their medical care. I wish I could have given them advice before they came to the ER. I see some of the same missed opportunities and miscommunications again and again. Categorizing the clusters of difficulties can help to identify and fix the problems. Here are my suggestions for 10 types of ER patients. I don't intend to stereotype or imply that every patient falls into one of these categories. If you recognize yourself in one of these categories, you may benefit from some guidance to help us best help you. The Repeat Customer Often, ER docs will see a patient who's had headaches for 10 years or foot pain for even longer. If you have a chronic, ongoing issue, explain why today is the day you came to the ER. Help us understand why you're here. Maybe your symptoms have changed. Perhaps your sister just got diagnosed with cancer and you're worried. Please tell us the truth. If there is truly nothing new and you have a primary care physician, please consider making an appointment with her. We can take care of acute pain, but you will need someone to follow you for ongoing medical problems. The Second-Opinion Seeker You've had months of troublesome symptoms. Nobody — not your primary care physician, not the five specialists you've seen — has given you a satisfactory answer. We understand that you're concerned, but it's unlikely that in the ER, with limited time and resources, we can give you the in-depth investigation you deserve. Ask your regular doctor for referrals and further testing. Keep in mind that we have finite resources; if you're in our emergency MRI for your chronic knee pain, that means the patient with the possible stroke needs to wait. The Internet can be a powerful tool for empowering patients, but please use it responsibly. Looking up your symptoms yourself might turn up that you have a brain tumor when you have food poisoning or that you are pregnant when you have belly pain (and you're a man). Use the Internet to help you understand your diagnosis and treatment and to come up with questions — not to diagnose yourself. The “Pain All Over” Patient We call it the “positive review of systems” when you say yes to everything we ask. Headache? Chest pain? Shortness of breath? Fatigue? Muscle aches? Yes, yes, of course, yes. Some illnesses really affect many parts of the your body, but more often than not, patients will say yes to convince us they are ill. We know you aren't well, so tell us the truth. (If you don't, you run the risk of undergoing unnecessary testing.) If everything hurts, try to tell us your story. When did you last feel normal and well? What happened then? And please don't exaggerate. If you say that your pain is 15 out of 10, but you're eating lunch and texting on your iPhone, it's hard for us to calibrate your symptoms. The “Totally Healthy” Person I can't tell you how often a patient will tell me he is healthy with no medical problems, then mention to his nurse that he gets insulin shots and takes “some white and blue pills.” Please give us the full information about your health. Few visits to the ER are truly such an emergency that you don't have time to prepare in advance. Carry a card with you of all your medical conditions, past surgeries, allergies and current medications and dosages. Don't forget vitamins and herbal supplements. Let your doctor know you're coming; she can call in and let us know, or she might say you can see her that day instead of going to the ER. Often, I'll ask patients what brought them to the ER, and they'll look at me blankly. “I don't know,” they'll say. Going to the ER is stressful, especially if you're ill and already not feeling well. While you're waiting for the doctor, write down your symptoms and key concerns. Bring a family member or friend with you who can help you speak up. There is limited time to see the doctor, so you have to make use of that time and tell us why you are here. If you brought a loved one to be seen, stay with the person — this isn't the time to go shopping and leave granny alone in the waiting room. The Narcotic Seeker This is the patient who says he has chronic pain and is out of his narcotic medications; for some reason, he cannot contact his primary care physician, and his pills have all been “stolen.” The United States has an epidemic of prescription drug abuse, and we in the ER inadvertently become detectives. We want to be careful to identify patients who have real pain and real need, but we also don't want to feed addiction and even criminal behavior of those who abuse the system. If you have a real need, explain what happened and why you cannot see your regular doctor. If it's a different pain than usual, tell us clearly — perhaps there is an underlying new problem that we have to investigate. The Small Talker We want to talk to you; we really do. Actually, the greatest pleasure of my work is getting to know people, and I would love to sit and chat. Unfortunately, there are 20 other patients waiting to see me, and my job is to help you and them. So please tell me about your health, and ask me as much as you want about that. I don't want to be rude, and I appreciate your interest in me, but please help me help you by focusing on your health. You've been waiting for hours. You're in a tiny room; the TV doesn't work. We are sorry about this; we truly are. Our ER may have 50 — 100 — patients in it, and we have to take care of everyone in order of severity. Screaming and shouting doesn't help, nor does threatening to call your lawyer, the hospital CEO, or the local news station. Please be assured that we are working very hard and are trying to take care of you as quickly and as well as possible. If something has changed and you are feeling worse, please let us know. If you want to help the ER improve, there are often opportunities to do so by joining patient advisory committees. “I'm so sorry to come in for this. You have a lot of other patients who look worse than me.” It's possible that other patients may be sicker, but you came because you weren't feeling well. Help us understand what prompted you to come in today. We know it's hard to know when it's necessary to come to the ER and when it's not. And there's no need to feel sorry for us. We chose this job because we want to treat all patients, regardless of who they are and what conditions ail them. We are proud to have the privilege of caring for you.

Tonight on ABC their hit crime drama CASTLE returns with a new episode called “Scared to Death.” On tonight’s show Castle becomes convinced that he too is marked for death when he accidentally watches the cursed video. Did you watch the last episode? We did and we recapped it here for you! On the last episode in the powerful conclusion of a two-episode story arc, when the FBI failed to get his daughter back, Castle took matters into his own hands, reaching out to a shadowy fixer to help him recover Alexis. But Castle soon learned that his daughter’s kidnapping might be part of an even more sinister agenda. On tonight’s show when a young woman appears to have literally been scared to death three days after watching a “haunted” DVD, Castle and Beckett delve into one of their creepiest cases yet. To make matters worse, Castle becomes convinced that he too is marked for death when he accidentally watches the cursed video. Master of horror Wes Craven makes a special quest appearance Tonight’s episode is going to be great and you won’t want to miss it. So be sure to tune in for our live coverage of ABC’s Castle tonight at 10 PM EST! While you wait for our recap, hit the comments and let us know what your think of Castle season 5, so far? RECAP: A girl Is on the phone with 911, the lights went out and she is afraid, she says that she is going to die and it’s coming for her. Castle and Becket are on the scene, the girl is dead and she looks like she was scared to death. The victim’s name is Val, her friend Amanda just arrived at her apartment and she tells Castle that her ex-boyfriend Freddy would have been someone that would have wanted to hurt her. Val filed a restraining order against her ex, he claims he went over to her apartment, but only because she begged him. Freddy says that Val said that he sent her a package and when he said that he didn’t she freaked out, she also asked Freddy if he believed in the power of evil. The package Val received was a CD or a disk. Castle finds some weird DVD that says you will die on the third day, she died because she got that disc. Castle is convinced that the message on the disc is what killed Val. Becket reminds Castle that it is fiction, but Castle is convinced that now that he has watched the disc, he is now going to die in three days. Becket wants to watch the DVD, Castle is against it but he sits down and watches it with her. Becket thinks the images are creepy, but she is sure they mean something. Castle is convinced that the DVD resurrects something from beyond, something dangerous. Castle and Becket head to the morgue to find out the results of the autopsy. It appears that Val died of heart failure. The cause of death is unknown. Val had a mail box, it belonged to a guy who died months ago. Esposito tracks down who the package came from that was sent to Val, but it`s too late, when they get to his apartment, he is dead. This guy also got a package with a disc in it, Castle is counting down, he`s convinced he is going to die in 48 hours. Becket is convinced that there has to be more of a connection between the two victims, she puts Esposito and Ryan on it. Becket wants to go home and have sex with Castle but he wants none of it, he says that it is what usually happens before people are killed, they have sex the night before. Becket can’t believe how far Castle is taking this. Castle calls a friend, Wes, to find out what to do with the spirits. The next day, Esposito and Ryan tell Becket that there is no connection between the two victims, they are at a dead end. Castle took it upon himself to dissect the images on the DVD and he has found a connection, there is a photo of an The Brunswick Inn and both victims have previously stayed there. Esposito and Becket head to the Inn and they find the Inn Keeper who tells them that the room numbers they stayed at end in number 13 and they are connected to a trial of a serial killer, Nigel Maloy. But, he couldn’t have killed the victims because he died three years ago in prison. Castle has a tape of an interview of Nigel Maloy, he says that even when he is gone he will continue killing, death is just the beginning. Ryan remembers that Nigel has a brother, Leopold, who was found not guilty because of reason of insanity. The weird thing here is that Val visited the mental institution where Nigel’s brother resides. Castle and Becket head right over to the institution and Becket asks him what happened when he met with Val. Leopold says that he is not his brother’s keeper and did not do anything. Leopold asks Becket why would he be a party to a murder when he is going to be facing he parole board soon. Leopold continues to talk and says a little too much about other witnesses, Becket knows that he has been talking to someone about those murders. There has been a development, Nigel Maloy’s body has vanished from his grave, Castle is convinced that he has risen from the grave. It turns out that Leopold had no contact with anyone, he couldn’t have been responsible. Esposito has found another witness, Mark Heller and he received a disc as well, he will most likely be the next victim. Becket and Castle are on their way up to a cabin in the woods to find the other witness when Becket is on the phone with Esposito and she loses the connection. They find there guy and he is drinking, Becket tells him she wants to take him to the station to protect him but he doesn’t want to go. All of a sudden, the power goes out and we see someone running outside the cabin – do corpses run? Becket runs outside after whomever is out there and Mark tells Castle that they all have blood on their hands and feel guilty for what happened. Becket tackles the person down, it is Leopold’s nurse – she is there for Leopold, to protect the victims from getting killed, he wants to get parole and she loves him. This is about a guy named David Collier and his daughter Amanda, her father was wrongly id’d for being a serial killer and she lost her mind and went to get revenge on the people she thought responsible for her father’s death. She tries to attack Mark, but Castle hits her on the head with a bottle of holy water and knocks her out. It appears that Nigel’s body never disappeared, at least recently, the morgue lost his body and never buried it.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 Romantic Suspense Heroes I got the idea for this blog topic from the February Intrigue Authors Newsletter. All the authors said what they were looking for in the hero of a romantic suspense novel. This was my answer: For me, he’s got to be tough on the outside but tender at his core. A take-charge kind of guy who has his own inner strength and a strong sense of right and wrong–which might not dovetail with the conventional wisdom. I mean, he might bend the law, if he thinks the ends justify the means. And in a fight, he probably won’t stick to Marquess of Queensberry rules. He’s got good instincts about people, a good sense of humor, a strong streak of personal loyalty. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he confronts problems head-on, which is good because danger has a way of catching up with him, sooner rather than later. He’s a complicated guy, with something in his background that makes him wary of relationships. A woman who’s going to win his love must get past the protective wall he’s built around his emotions. But he enjoys sex, and he’s an excellent lover, sensitive to his partner’s needs. And if he has something extra–say the ability to change into a wolf, like Cole Marshall, the hero of my Decorah Security novel, DARK MOON, that’s a definite plus. And one more thing. He looks a lot like my husband. Only younger, thinner and taller. If I describe him as anything besides dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a five o’clock shadow, I’m lying. These are the kind of alpha males I write about. What do you want in the hero of a romantic suspense novel? Comment for a chance to win two of my favorite Harlequin Intrigues--autographed. If you want a chance to win, please include an e-mail address in your comment.

Category Archives: sexual health Aloha! I’m in Hawai’i for the next week or so, and, despite the layer of sweat that seems to continuously cling to my skin, will do my best to enjoy myself (: Today I want to return to briefly return to my first post about condoms. While it’s true that I have minimal experience with condoms, I’m at the same time no stranger to them. Trojan condoms, of course, are ubiquitous, and everyone knows about them and what they make. That being said, I’m positive that I’ve never used a Trojan condom. (Those weren’t the ones they gave out for free at Student Health.) And if I have, I certainly had nothing to do with it. But even if I’ve never personally used a Trojan condom, Trojan has found a way into my life. I can’t for the life of me tell you why I know the brand, but I do. Maybe from TV, maybe from radio commercials or print advertisements. What I think is really cool is that with the Internet becoming a prevalent part of most people’s lives, Trojan has a new and really important way to connect with young people. Just see Trojan’s YouTube page. Some of the videos are advertisements along the sexy lines: But a huge number of the others are informative and surprisingly intelligent. Many of them end with the slogan, “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” or convey a similar message. For example, my favorite: This video tells women that it’s okay to deny sex if it’s not going to be safe – and also reminds men that they should always be practicing safe sex, and that the whole “less of a man” line isn’t going to fly anymore. Without mentioning STDs or STIs and relying only on the trajectory of sexual pleasure, the video pushes the importance of safe sex. (Plus it’s fun, and a little kinky, and now I want to try all of that on my partner.) Some of them are both funny and more straightforward, like this one: 1 in 4 teenage girls has an STD?! That’s insane for a society of our size, level of education, and relative advancement. Give teenage girls a means to protect themselves, and the knowledge to do so! No teenage girl should have to suffer from an STD or STI from simple lack of knowledge. And, guess what? Trojan gives you that knowledge in this totally awesome video: I mean, maybe guys get lessons in how to put a condom on in sex ed (when and where you actually get sex ed) or from parents, but I definitely didn’t get any lessons in how to use a condom. I learned from the Internet. Which is where you learn the best stuff anyway. This video is a pretty solid introduction and is viewer-friendly, and I was really pleased to find this video on YouTube that is informative and encourages young people to be practice safe sex. Finally, Trojan recently posted a video showing you around their facility and explaining how condoms are made! I’m really a hands-on learner and possessor of useless trivia, so I really enjoyed the video learning about the process that you really… don’t think about all the time! 1 million condoms a day?! Awesome! (Image originally posted by justanotherdumbblonde on Tumblr. Click on the picture to visit! Thanks to the nifty YouTube search box for the videos. Thanks Trojan!) Happy one month anniversary to me! Yes, it’s true, I’ve now been around on this blog for a whole month. Congratulations to me! Since I just posted Friday and plan to post again tomorrow for TMI Tuesday, this celebratory post will be limited to some interesting links relevant to my interests and something I’ve already posted about. First is an interview with Gary Trudeau, author and artist of Doonesbury, about abortion and sexual politics in his comic strip. Despite the criticism I know some people (even people you’d think would be supportive!), I’m rather refreshed to hear his take on issues and how it relates to what he writes. Yes, Gary Trudeau (along with other commentators such as Jon Stewart) is a man, but let’s face it: he commands a huge audience and following and is funny. I like reading his stuff, regardless of his gender/sex, because ideologically we’re similar and I appreciate satire. Second is that Ben & Jerry’s has announced that it’s renaming one of its ice cream flavors in the UK to support same-sex marriage. Apple-y Ever After cartons, adorned with pictures of gay couples on wedding cakes, will join flavor Hubby Hubby to celebrate and support same-sex partnerships. And deliciousness. Now that a month has passed I should be getting to my first full-length review sometime later next month. Not necessarily of the newest toys on the market, but one of my old favorites that I can keep falling back on 😉 Also stay tuned for tomorrow’s TMI Tuesday! (Image originally posted by stairmastertoheaven on Tumblr. Click on the picture to go there!) I had honestly and truly intended to blog about small, local toy stores and supporting them (which I did this week), but my musings and comments on them were superseded by, once again, politics. Let me say now, for fear that everyone will think I actually like controversy, that I dislike politics immensely. I was a politics/political science major in college, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I am and always have been a strong believer in the representative and democratic system, and I believe I should vote and so should others and that we should be aware of the world. But, since politics is often divisive, I prefer to keep my politics to myself. For the most part. (There’s just no denying that I’m a liberal.) However, Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke have simply left me angry and speechless, and I think that it’s too much to be silent about. I think often about how my sexual behavior intersects with other aspects of my life, and this is just too much of an attack on women and our sexuality to sit quietly by. The short story is that Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University, was blocked from testifying before the Congress in support of employers providing birth control. When she was asked by Democrats to testify for them, Limbaugh called her a “slut” and a “prostitute” and said that if employers covered her birth control, she should post video of her having sex in exchange. That is absolutely and undeniably wrong. That kind of behavior should not be tolerated by anyone, because it tells women and girls that they don’t have a right to their own body. Some man with money and power can tell them that they are only worth something if they are performing an act for his gratification. It’s so much more than misogynistic. It makes women feel unsafe. Not just because contraceptives are used by many women for reasons other than birth control, but because it means that a woman’s very body is not her own. I know that Rush Limbaugh is just a stupid, crazy man who says things and I don’t need to take them seriously. But someone is. Someone is teaching a little girl that sex is wrong unless she’s willing to get pregnant. Someone is teaching her that asking for protection means that she’s a prostitute. Someone is teaching a little girl that controlling her body means that she should be performing sex acts for a man with money and a voice and that she should be silent. The Democratic Senators have launched an online petition here. According to the Huffington Post, the petition has collected well over 100,000 signatures. Donate as well if you want, but at the very least stand with people who know how wrong it was for Rush Limbaugh to say what he did. Put politics aside and realize that even if it is political, it is also so much more than political. If not with the Democratic Senators, then sign ThinkProgress’s petition here. I can’t even imagine how much this must be affecting Sandra Fluke. To be publicly attacked like that for speaking out about something you believe in – and because she wants to protect a friend with ovarian cysts. I had a cyst that ruptured when I was a senior in high school; I ended up in the emergency room for a whole night. Was the pain bearable? Well, I guess. I needed two doses of Morphine before I calmed down enough to sleep, and I waited 7 hours for that. The next day, it was gone. But the doctor said that they might come back, and the only way to prevent another emergency room visit was via birth control. From just one night, 17 hours, I can say that I hope no woman ever has to go through that every month. According to the Huffington Post, President Obama called Sandra Fluke and told her he supported her and that her parents should be proud. It’s not just that this whole thing has ramifications for women’s sexuality and health. It’s has much wider implications. If a smart, well-educated, respected woman is attacked for presenting facts and a well-reasoned argument in support of a policy change, what kind of message does that send other women, young women, and girls? As if girls didn’t have enough pressure to be or act a certain way already. Stand up for what you believe in, and you get called a prostitute. Not that your argument is ill-reasoned, or that there are facts that contradict what you say. No, you’re a prostitute. You should be demeaned and humiliated. We should be teaching girls – and boys, of course – that they should be confident and educated. They are smart. They can make good decisions if they are given the right tools. They should stand up for what they believe in. They are not lesser because they are women or because they want to have sex someday or because they want to protect their bodies. When you demean a woman in part for being intelligent and educated, or say that Girl Scouts “sexualize young girls” in an environment filled with “feminists, lesbians, or Communists,” you tell her that she does not deserve a voice. She does not deserve to be bright, educated, or confident in herself. And when this kind of message about gender is coupled with sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, ability status, or any other classification that adds other layers of discrimination? I can only wish that I were as strong as Sandra Fluke. (Image originally posted by sinfulbitch on Tumblr. Thanks to The Huffington Post for the article links.) As a relatively young person (only my students and my taste in music and movie stars can make me feel like an old lady), it seems to me that my entire adult sexuality has intersected with politics in some way. From the simple fact that I am a woman to the more complex question of using birth control, my body has existed in a network not just of personal decisions and thinking, but of very present and demanding social “suggestions.” My decision not to pursue my doctorate was influenced by the realization that I needed to “plan ahead” and think about the family I wanted to have. My decisions on sex and partners in college were influenced by the pressures of what scholars (some of my professors included) call “hook-up culture.” And on and on. Perhaps one of the most memorable experiences of my college career occurred at the very end of my senior year. I was working on my last major paper in the computer lab when one of my friends rushed in exclaiming, “Condoms for everyone!” and literally showered me with condoms taken from the student health center. He helped me pick them up, and I won the grand prize of 25 condoms, absolutely 0 of which I needed. Later, as a grad student, I would shop for condoms in Japan with one of my friends from high school, who picked up a package of glow-in-the-dark condoms similar to the ones pictured above. Yet I realized yesterday that I have never purchased – or even picked up for free from student health – my own condoms. I did win an assortment in a giveaway last May, but I consider that something of the coward’s way out, since everything was conducted under the protective (relative) anonymity of the Internet. Sure, I can argue that I generally have no use for condoms. I could use them with toys, but I could also not, especially if I don’t share and am good about cleaning (which I am). I kept some in my drawer as a college student because my roommate was more likely to need them. (Another memorable college experience is being woken at 3AM by a text message from my roommate asking if I had any to spare.) But at the same time I sense that part of my reluctance stems from very subtle social pressure I experienced – and probably continue to experience – to be a “good girl.” In short, I suspect that I am simply too embarrassed to buy condoms. (Now I realize I should have made that one of my printed New Year’s Resoluations. Alas.) Just a quick, in-the-bathtub analysis of such a simple issue made me hesitate to think about all the more complex, emotional decisions about my body, health, partner, family, and sex I may or will have to make someday. I am an avoider by nature; I avoid the tough stuff in hopes that eventually I’ll be strong enough to deal with it or that it’ll just magically go away. (In general, neither of these things happen, and I just have to tackle the issue like the weakling that I am.) But I could not argue that no matter what the decision is or what I decide, my politics as a woman, Asian American, liberal would somehow play into it, and that one small decision could become “representative” of something much bigger. Not that this is a new realization, since that’s what I think half (or more) of my college education was about. But now that I’m ostensibly an “adult,” my decisions seem to have much greater meaning. I’m not sure that’s true, but that’s what I’m led to believe. And I find myself astounded that I have not done what I’m fairly certain most of the stupid boys I knew in high school and college have done. And, moreover, that it’s simply because I’m embarrassed. It’s strange to think that this issue, that frankly I would consider a relatively small issue, based on my life experiences, has taken center stage in politics and completely usurped the more fundamental question of health care. Newsweek published a very interesting article last week, right before Valentine’s Day, about the culture wars and contraception. The full article can be read here. But questions of sex and sexuality are dangerous, and so it’s not surprising that anything related to them ends up embroiled in much bigger discussions. I should just be honest with myself: buying condoms? A very, very small matter. I can do it if I put my mind to it. (Much like I can drink milk, take Vitamin D pills, and floss when I put my mind to it.) Even though it seems like the whole world is talking about it, I don’t have to listen. I can safely walk into a drugstore, pick up a box, and pay for it at the counter. I’ve paid for Plan B, and that wasn’t so hard. (I avoiding making eye contact with the pharmacist, for fear of the JUDGMENT in her eyes, which made it easier.) Besides, compared to the birth control I could be buying? A little package of condoms is the least intimidating. Especially if they’ve got cute little bears on the packaging. (Thanks to Newsweek for the links; they’ll take you to The Daily Beast for reading/viewing. Also, if you’re interested in Rilakkuma condoms, you can get them from White Rabbit Express here.)

Meet Our Team Mitch Krach – General Manager After selling two restaurants back in New England where I served as chef, general manager and partner for 15 years I relocated to Florida. I’ve spent time working for The Grand Hyatt Regency in Tampa, and later for the Island Outpost Hotels in Miami Beach during the reconstruction of the Tides Hotel. A position with U.S. Home Corporation—later a division of Lennar—that focused on the development of their golf course communities marked my entry into the world of “club and community management.” While working in the capacity of vice president of operations for two start-up communities, I collaborated with contractors and engineers to build the infrastructure and amenities. Upon completion, I went on to manage the community associations for these golf course communities for six more years. Now, you can find me at Cypress Lakes 55+ Community, where since 2006 I’ve served as general manager of both the community and its golf course, Big Cypress Golf Club. I oversee the community operations, food and beverage, in addition to the 36 holes of golf. Cyndi King – Director of Sales & Marketing, Lic. Real Estate Broker Originally from Southern California, Cyndi came to Florida in 1983, getting her start in the manufactured housing industry in 1984. She first spent nine years with a builder developer of 55+ communities prior to joining Blair Group in 1992. Over the years, Cyndi has managed multiple properties and onsite teams. She has been a part of building 5000+ homes in Active Lifestyle 55+ communities and has managed every Blair Group community. She is currently the VP of Operations for Blair Group, overseeing all five locations. She also oversees the marketing and advertising efforts for all communities and the brand. Cyndi has been very active in the Florida Manufactured Housing Association (FMHA), currently serving on the Board of Directors; having formerly served as president. She is also a member of the National Communities Council—an entity of the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI)—and holds both a Real Estate and Mortgage Broker License. Becky Higgins – Receptionist Becky moved to Florida from Syracuse, New York back in 1996 and officially started working for Cypress Lakes in December of 2005. Becky is truly an asset to the community, and is known as our “director of first impressions.” The fact that she loves helping all of our residents and future residents that come in the door however she can is a bonus. Becky enjoys spending time in the Florida sun with her husband and daughter, and their dog. Amy Mendez – Sales Specialist, Lic. Real Estate Broker Amy grew up outside of Mansfield, Ohio and relocated to Florida in 2000 with her young son. Having been in most every aspect of real estate since 1986, Amy jumped right into real estate in Florida and is now a Licensed Real Estate Broker. Amy has been working with Blair Group since 2012. She says, “It has been very rewarding and have met a lot of wonderful people. It is a pleasure working with such a wonderful developer [Bob Young]; he genuinely cares about his residents and is very hands-on. Cypress Lakes is a wonderful community that ‘sells itself,’ so that makes my job easier! When you come into our community, you will be welcomed by the residents and employees and see the pride and care we take in Cypress Lakes. Imagine living on a resort; that’s what it is like here every day.” Tom Cain – Housing Consultant Happily married with six grandchildren, I started working in sales for Blair Group back in 1990. I spent 14 years at our StrawBerry Ridge community, and then transferred to our Cypress Lakes community in 2003. I love coming to work each day, and especially enjoy helping our customers. I am high energy and nothing thrills me more than selling a home! Patty Lunski – Housing Consultant Patty and her husband, John, are originally from Hanover Township in Northeastern Pennsylvania and are now full time residents of Cypress Lakes. Says Patty, “We fell in love with Cypress Lakes before we even looked at one home.” Throughout her 10-year real estate career, which began in 2005, Patty served on her local area board of directors, was a member of the community service and public relations committees, and was recognized by her brokerage as “Top Sales Agent” year after year. Says Patty, “I love the real estate business and have always said it is the best ‘job’ I’ve ever had. … I’m excited to be back doing what I love to do in this community I now live in and have grown to love in just the few short months we’ve been here [since June 2016].” Come by our community today to meet Patty, as she is very eager and happy to share with you the lifestyle her and her husband enjoy day after day! Mike Kelly – Listing & Rental Coordinator, Broker Associate Mike brings more than 30 years of real estate experience to the Cypress Lakes Sales Team. Originally from the metro area of New York/New Jersey, Mike and his wife Patti (who now works in the Big Cypress Pro Shop at Cypress Lakes) relocated to Southwest Florida back in 2000. Shortly after, they both became licensed real estate brokers, opening an office in Cape Coral. Throughout their 10+ years as brokers, the Kelly’s became known for their excellent customer service—to both their buyers and their sellers—Mike feels communication is key. Mike resides right here in Cypress Lakes 55+ Community, and he and his wife love it! In a short period of time, they both realized they purchased far more than a home here, they say, “We bought a lifestyle that’s just priceless.” Mike’s focus is educating those residents with homes for sale all about the manufactured housing industry so that they have the opportunity to get their homes ready and priced right according to the current manufactured housing market here in Central Florida. Says Mike, “There are a number of reasons residents decide to move on from the Cypress Lakes lifestyle, whether it be family, health, and so on, and my goal is to make the sale of your home here at Cypress Lakes as easy as possible.” If you must go, he will help you get your home listed at the highest value possible, and along with the rest of our Sales Team, help find you a buyer in the shortest amount of time possible. Mike Townsend – Construction/Service Coordinator Born in Charleston, W.V., I later moved to Florida where I started my now 28-year career in general labor and construction. I hold an Associate’s in C.A.D.D. and a Bachelor’s in construction management. Throughout my career, I’ve held various positions in carpentry and installation, and have supervised, coordinated and managed many large-scale projects with prominent brands like Walt Disney, Circle K, Publix, etc. Before joining Team Cypress, for five years I owned and operated my own company. I have a beautiful family of eight and they come second, only to God. I’m thankful to be a part of Team Cypress and look forward to fulfilling my career here with Blair Group. Jane Herbst – Activities Manager A native of Minnesota, Jane is a natural business woman who followed her extensive customer service career to Arkansas then Texas. After 25 years with the company, she retired in 2013. Through her in depth research on 55-plus living, Jane wound up choosing Cypress Lakes 55+ Community as her retirement dream home. She says, “It’s just like a resort and I feel like I’m on vacation every day.” Jane is thrilled to serve Cypress Lakes’ community as the Activities Manager. Her goal in her role is to create an atmosphere within our community where every resident can feel like they’re, too, on a vacation that never ends! Duke Fenton – Grill Manager Duke offers a range of expertise to the Big Cypress Grill having been in the restaurant business for a total of eight years, three of which he spent personally owning and operating a restaurant/bar in the Tampa area. Prior to lending his hand in hospitality, Duke owned and operated a commodities company for 30 years. Duke brings a new perspective to the Big Cypress Grill and Cypress Lakes’ residents are happy to have him! Dean Zarlenga – Grounds Manager I started doing landscape maintenance a few years after high school at the Lakeland Yacht & Country Club, and managed to land a part time gig as well working for Professor Thomas Mac of Florida Southern College where I landscaped high-end residential homes. Following that, I worked for the City of Lakeland. City layoffs wound up pushing me along my journey to landing my dream job at Cypress Lakes. … I started at Cypress Lakes back in 1990 and have been here ever since! I worked my way up from a lawn maintenance worker to the now Grounds Manager. I take pride in my job and can honestly say I love it. In my spare time, I enjoy traveling, hiking, fishing, golfing, and of course, working in my yard. Scott Yates – Head Golf Professional Head Golf Professional, Scott Yates is a 20+ year PGA Member. A Michigan native who moved to Florida for the sunshine and all-year golfing weather, Scott continues to compete in local PGA Section events. Scott’s focus at Big Cypress Golf Club is to offer our Members the highest level of service that is expected from the finest golf country clubs. His teaching style is tailored to the individual needs of each golfer with emphasis on keeping the game fun. When not running our Golf Shop, Scott also serves as Golf Coach for perennial power Windermere Preparatory School and the North Florida Section PGA Growth of the Game Committee. Gary Newcomb – Golf Course Superintendent Golf Course Superintendent, Gary Newcomb is GCSAA certified and holds an Associate of Science Degree in Golf Course Operations from Lake City Community College. Gary is a Florida native with three year’s turf grass experience in Virginia. His focus is maintaining high-level playing conditions while staying committed to long term sustainability. When not working alongside his crew, Gary can be seen at the range working on his game or doing a quick turf test playing nine holes before calling it a day.

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This book will change your life is a phrase to make the eyes roll, especially if you’re a book publisher. It is conceivable that a book’s wisdom and insight might make you fitter or smarter, a better lover, cook or parent. It might make you more empathetic and spiritual, calmer and neater to boot. It might transform your social interactions as your friends start twitching as you drone on about a book’s revelations. Residents of the Land of Literature will argue that the pleasure of serious reading—a noble end in itself—is life-changing enough. I am an optimist and a booster for my profession, permanently on call to spruik book publishing, particularly of the nonfiction variety. But in not-breaking news, the vast majority of books will not change your life. Those least likely to do so are probably the ones with a tagline on the front cover, or a blurb on the back, promising transformation. While I can’t yet speak of the impact of publication itself, to my surprise and joy I have discovered truth in the proposition that writing this book will change your life. I would even go so far as to add the phrase, for the better. No-one is more surprised by this turn of events than me. I’ve worked with writers for all my professional life: cajoling, encouraging and occasionally pleading, but mainly enjoying myself, and their work, very much. Happy in my role as professional reader and publisher, the idea of becoming a writer was never a life goal. Until one day early in 2014 an idea landed and rather than commissioning someone else to write the book, I decided I would write it. Not in a begrudging passive-aggressive, ‘Oh, I’ll do it myself’ way. Instead, pulse quickening, I saw the clouds opening to give me a moment of clarity where I could see the outline of my own project, a history of the year 2001, blurry but coming into focus. That might be fun, I thought. It took more than a year for me to share my vision with anyone else, though ‘vision’ is too grand a word. Mine was more of a mini idea with serious growth potential. Some low-key research and a lot of thinking and reflecting meant that one auspicious day when the urge to share my idea struck, I had the confidence and the language to pitch it. Being on the receiving end of countless pitches had given me a template for what might work, but in that moment I learnt that being the pitcher takes courage. The pitchee’s only task is to say yes or no, the latter often taking less courage than the former. It is no coincidence that my audience in the moment this desire struck was a literary agent—now my agent—who found the tables turned on her. Her first question to me, expressed with more than a little trepidation before I launched in was, ‘It’s not a novel, is it?’ Not having written a novel felt like the greatest ice-breaker ever. Awkward moment out of the way, I threw myself into the task, so pumped I could feel my face and neck going red. She liked the idea and asked for a proposal. I sent her one I had prepared earlier and will never forget the first line of her email in response: ‘We love it.’ She sold it and before too long, oh happy days, I had a book contract. That sounds too easy and in a way it was, except that I had been in training to get one for 25 years. At this point most accounts of the writing process focus on the paralysis of the terrified writer as she looks out at the blank pages spreading before her, hundreds if not thousands of them to be written and rewritten, crafted and cut. Each page forming a stepping stone between where she stands now and a deadline 18 months away. For me, that panicked image is a lie. The rush of excitement and purpose the contract brought with it never dissipated. It licensed me to do what for so long I had wanted to make my work email signature: Sit down, shut up and write the book. Writing a book is not a mysterious or metaphysical act. It is all about work. It was time to interview the people, read the books, articles and transcripts, to watch the video clips and study the photographs. Immersed in my new world, it was time to resurrect memories, my own and those of others. The book gave me permission to interview a former prime minister, former Ansett flight attendants and pilots, a former refugee, people who were in Washington or New York City on 9/11. I didn’t need the book’s permission to revisit the worst thing that has happened to me but the book gave me permission to write about it. What do you think about this, the book asked me, how do you feel about that? Sure, that may be true, replied the book to my undercooked arguments, but where’s the evidence? The book niggled at me, interrogated me and made me try harder. I’ll tell you what I think, I said to the book and wrote it all down. Then I cut all those words so I could write them again, better, differently. The book took hold of me. I was a woman possessed. I rearranged my life. My supportive boss allowed me to go part-time, saying optimistically ‘Writing your own book will probably make you a better publisher.’ My colleagues were unflagging in their support too, selflessly so, as my initial day-a-week absence grew over time and meant one thing for them—more work. Soon I was spending every Sunday in the State Library of New South Wales. 49-year-old me going through newspapers alongside hordes of students studying for the HSC. There we all were, in this public repository of knowledge abuzz with teenage pheromones. My daughter had been part of this scene but she started hanging out somewhere else. She couldn’t be seen in a place I had now inhabited, especially after one of her friends was forced by circumstance to introduce her new boyfriend to me, both of them blushing as I shook his hand. One day my son said, not a little plaintively, ‘I feel like we used to do more things together on the weekend.’ I had unilaterally removed myself from weekend family life, with the promise that I would return once the book was done. I remember going away one weekend for a celebration of two friends’ 50th birthdays and realising it was the first Sunday all year I hadn’t been in the library. I could not have been happier to be there, but no festivities could budge my deep paranoia about missing my deadline. To do so would surely be the worst karma ever. No author of mine would ever deliver on time again. (Not that they all do.) So, full disclosure: nine months before the due date I asked my publisher for an extra six weeks so I think I am telling the truth when I say that I met the deadline. But I will confess that the manuscript was longer than I said it would be. I have often been on the receiving end of what are nominally conversations but are really monologues as an author describes their work in detail. Sometimes fascinating detail, sometimes stupefying. Minutiae about their research, interviews and writing. Reflections on their progress, the revelations of the archives, and the difficulties, always the difficulties. Now on the other side, I got it. I understood their obsession, their need to offload big-time in response to the question ‘How’s the book going?’ When someone asked me that question I told them, often in more detail than their innocent query deserved. Even when they protested, ‘No, I’m really interested’ after my counter-question ‘Do you really want to know?’ For I was more interested in telling them than they might imagine, even as they stepped back and cast furtive looks so a fellow party-goer or dinner guest might rescue them from a manic writer on a roll. When I had coffee with my wonderful publisher I found myself thinking, well, at least she’s being paid to hear me go on and on. No such luck for my family. More than once around the dinner table I zoned out and with varying degrees of politeness my nearest and dearest would call me back from 2001. One time I remember saying to my husband and son, ‘You’ll never guess what happened’ and, poised to launch into my tale, was interrupted by one of them sighing as he said, ‘Don’t tell me it was in 2001.’ To which I could retort, ‘No, it was this morning.’ Boom. And yet I couldn’t have done it without them. Not just the meals, hugs and banter, but the support, encouragement and advice, particularly from my husband, who found himself co-opted into the role of reader and multidisciplinary sounding board. Imagine living with a wife writing a book and a daughter studying for the HSC at the same time. He was copping questions about Nazi foreign policy fired from one side and al-Qaeda from the other. When my book was safely delivered, I had coffee with one of my authors who confided that his marriage had broken up. Gulp, was it because of the book he had taken so many years to write? No, but the book probably didn’t help, he answered. And his (former) partner doesn’t appear in his book like mine does in mine. Yet once I delivered the book, flooded with relief and fatigue though I was, I missed it. Because it had been fun. Yes, I’ve heard the tales. Writing is supposed to be a hellish nightmare. The hardest job in the world. Compared to what, I ask? It’s not lucrative, granted, but I’d rather sit at my desk writing than work in a childcare centre, cart water from a distant well or assemble iPhones in a Chinese factory. Writing meant I wasn’t working through spreadsheets, managing people or wrangling other people’s words. For better or worse, I owned this project and was writing it on my own terms. Words didn’t always flow but when you entered the zone where they did you might look up hours later and feel as if you had just scaled Everest, oxygenated by a rush of ideas as you looked down on a beautiful world. Often a descent through the valley of doubt and despair followed, but doing the work, always doing the work, meant you might reach the summit again. I delivered the manuscript after adrenalin-charged weeks and months, and immediately felt as if a truck had run over me at the end of a long-haul flight that had left me with the worst-ever case of jet lag. I had dreamed of watching television and drinking wine at the same time. But when the day arrived where such oblivion was theoretically possible, my book now sitting on someone else’s computer, sleep was all I craved. At first I couldn’t sleep because my mind was whirring through the book, but then I slept the sleep of the dead. Only now am I waking up. I booked a massage. I explained to the therapist—klutz alert—that the day before I had ploughed into a door at full throttle. We giggled as I imagined the bruise on my arm in the shape of a door handle, like in a cartoon. She made the standard observation, ‘Your back and shoulders are really tight’ and I imagined those muscles knotted in the shape of a book. Maybe a hundred books, lined up along my trapezius muscle, now a bookshelf. All the books I’d read for my own book, maybe all those books I’d read through my life that had stayed with me, in me. My whole body weighed down by books—other people’s and my own. The essential oil burned and the bland massage music piped and I realised this thought was completely wrong. All these books had liberated me and made it possible for me to carve out my own. My neck and shoulders may have been locked, but my brain and my heart were open. • Phillipa McGuinness is a Sydney publisher and writer. Her book The Year that Changed Everything: 2001 will be published in June 2018.

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The coronavirus pandemic has seen a flurry of new activity in Catholic liturgical life. Clergy are streaming live coverage of themselves celebrating the Eucharist and inviting others to join in by watching. As lockdown eases in some places, the latest desire is to have a system – similar to that used for social distancing in shops – so that people can "receive Communion". One group of clergy have gone so far as to issue rubrics on when the presider is to wear or not wear a face mask! Meanwhile, many Catholics have expressed their sadness, now bordering on anger in some cases, that they cannot participate in liturgy. Except that is not what they are saying: the form of their complaint is that if the church is closed they cannot have access to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. If they can only have streamed Mass, they cannot receive Holy Communion – and they want this because it is receiving the actual body of the Lord. And, from their point of view, they are glad that there are many presbyters, and even a few bishops, who are supporting their demands to the civil authorities: they want the right to be able to go into their churches and do what they want. They want churches in which to pray, so this demand should be fulfilled. It seems no more standard Catholic practice. What could be more basic than "hearing Mass" and "receiving Communion"? It also seems to be a matter of civil rights. They see themselves as being deprived, indeed oppressed. Is not freedom of worship mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Other Catholics, clerical and lay, are less bothered by not be able to be physically present at the liturgy. After all, one can hear all the words, listen to the readings, hear the sermon, hear the priest saying the Eucharistic Prayer and see what he does (sometimes even more clearly than in the church)… So what's not to like? It is true that one cannot receive actual communion, but there is "spiritual communion" that provides one with grace even if the wafer is not eaten. Isn't the end result the same? Some say they listen more carefully sitting in their own living rooms than when they're in the distracting building. In privacy in front of the computer or TV, one can be quiet, private and prayerful. Did not Jesus recommend as much? You see, you hear and you learn, all that is to be learned! Moreover, most Catholics – though they do not admit it in the way members of other Christian denominations do – have the attitude that American liturgist Bryan Spinks calls "the worship mall": you pick the kind of worship you like. I hear of people "shopping around" – note the phrase – "on the web" for the Mass they like best. One person I know goes on a web search every morning and samples "streamed Masses" until she finds one she fancies, and it adds spice to life to find another the next day. Some have found "very good Masses" that just suit them. There is a priest in Ireland who has long had a local reputation for a "quick Mass" and for one-liner sermons on Sundays. Barely 11 minutes most days and he makes a point of no Old Testament readings! If you like your religion fast and without frills, now that there's web access, he's your man! Many people have become very discerning liturgical customers. Before the lockdown, when they were going to the nearby church, they never realized one could have so many tailored variations! The web is an individualist's utopia! Catholics of the same place or parish now have a choice. Each can go to his or her own space, even simultaneously, choosing the streamed Mass each one wants. No need to argue here about whether or not there should be badly sung Latin chant or drippy 1970s folk hymns! There is an armistice in the liturgical culture war. Chacun à son goût. Or, perhaps, de gustibus non disputandum est. Your choice! When one says in a secular context that human beings construct their universe through shared rituals, many sneer and think that is just a theologian trying to smuggle religion back into the public space. Yes, people used to have rituals, but that was in an older world of pomp and circumstance, now we just "cut to the chase"! But the virus has seen rituals re-emerge within lockdown. Here in Britain most of us go outside every Thursday at 8 pm and clap our hands as an expression of thanks to our medical workers – I hope for those in care homes also – who are on the front line in coping with the virus. It seemed to me a bit corny when I heard of it happening in Spanish cities – but now it has spread, literally, to my front door. The TV channels announce that the common moment is approaching and cover it with scenes from around the country, firemen in one place, a street scene somewhere else, and outside my neighbors have improvised drums from saucepans and wooden spoons. We are together – but correctly distanced – and we are acting spontaneously, expressing thanks and interdependence. We are being joyful in a vale of tears and expressing that we are a community, not just loners. It is an attempt – as we say – "to give something back". Ritual is conveying that which we could not otherwise convey. It is expressing our situation and we are going out of ourselves to be a thankful community. There are umpteen little rituals like this that are emerging. Just take the farewell: "stay safe!" It is a cross between the Gaelic word for "goodbye" which is slán leat(literally: may health be with you') and the Latin vale (may things go well for you). It expresses not just "that's over" (as in "bye bye now"), but says that I am concerned for you in this time and I not only hope you will be well, but want us both to do all that we need to do to maintain that state. It is a social pleasantry, a wish, but also an instruction about action. It is a ritual boundary marker more similar to the old "Let us move forward in peace" (Procedamus in pace) than to the banal "Cheerio! See ye!" we would have used several weeks ago. We live in a world of transactions. I do something for you; and you, in return, do something for me. It is the very nature of all commerce. I have something you want, and vice versa, so we exchange to suit our needs and desires. We should not criticize this process. This is what has built our world. It creates links and fosters peaceful co-operation. It can, of course, get out of hand when someone corners the market and abuses fair-trading. People cashing in on the sale of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) or using medical kit as political leverage during this crisis are examples of the transactional nature of human life running amok. But we try to spot robber barons and control them. However, the transactional nature of our lives – which is the rationale underpinning every shop and every wage packet – can get out of kilter in other ways. An obvious one is consumerism: I am only alive to the extent that I consume. I am what I buy. Now the ability to trade becomes an obsession. I reduce everything to its ability to satisfy my needs and "devil take the hindmost" so long as my wants, desires, "needs" (i.e. not what I need such as food, shelter, relationships but "what I really, reallywant") are satisfied. I am the center of the world; it flows into me and is only recognized insofar as it suits me. And so long as you have the money flowing in the opposite direction, there are many out there who want to confirm you in your consumerism (for exorbitant prices, of course). But there is another danger of transactionalism that can only be understood by those who belong to the great monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and believe that the Creator freely chooses to create and so the whole universe is a divine gift. It is one giant "free meal" that contradicts the transactional wisdom of "there's no such thing as a free lunch"! Knowing this – that God is generosity and love – we discover two recurring human errors. The first is that we think that transactions are all that there is in the universe – this is the theory of the selfish gene. We seek to explain everything in terms of exchanging needs/assets. For example, love is just an illusion that dresses up a trade off in romantic terms. No human being is capable of pure "gift love" – to use a beautiful term coined by C.S. Lewis – because only God is without needs. We humans also know that there is a profound difference between genuine human love and someone who only is performing a job. One has just to look at that kind of love that makes someone who is poorly paid go on caring right now in a care home – and one sees that love is more than trading. But there is a second error we continually fall into as monotheists. We imagine the relationship with God in terms of transactions. This was fine in the polytheism of the Roman Empire where it was summed up in three words: do ut des. We could render it thusly: "I give to you, some god or other praise and sacrifice, so that you give me what I want." Sadly, the attitude was carried on into Christianity. The result was to "get Masses said" for particular needs and to make vows in order to obtain something! Transactionalism not only perverts the Christian vision of the God of infinite generosity – love itself – into a stingy Supreme Overlord from whom we try to extract favors, it destroys our relationship with God. It is no longer love and praise, in union with the whole people to whom I belong. Rather, it is extracting what I want. And, as befits a transaction, I want the best value going. I want the most for the least cost. The current crisis has brought us, on the one hand, a very genuine liturgy of a community celebrating thankfulness together. One could say that we are being Eucharistic towards health workers. But, on the other hand, it has brought us a lot of transactionalism: "I want to receive communion"; "I want my time before a tabernacle"; or "I want my kind of liturgy." We see the ritual of liturgy being streamed and we see the ritual on our doorsteps: which is more in line with, and more prophetic of our vision of the universe? The coronavirus crisis has brought before us many who think liturgy is a matter of what the rubrics allow or what is "permissible". It has also brought out many people imagining that liturgy is something you get, or which clerics provide. Perhaps this was inevitable. We have a long history of treating God as "the man upstairs" whose favor we try to corner, or as the policeman who checks off that we have done what he told us to do. Moreover, much of our popular piety, inherited from a time when the piety of ordinary people rarely touched the official liturgy of the clerics, is deeply transactional and individualistic – and the crisis has made this visible. And, of course, we know what we like. And we often demand what we like without asking any deeper questions. But think about that woman who told me – just last Sunday – that she liked "shopping around for Mass". I suspect it reveals a deeper theological confusion than when she surfs between Amazon and Book Depository to see which has the best deal on a book! In liturgy we are not consumers, but celebrants. Yes: each of us is a celebrant and not just the cleric who is leading the gathering. It is we – as a people, not just a bunch of individuals – who are celebrating God's love. Think again of the Thursday night ritual. We are all celebrating, we are all celebrants. We are certainly not out there, with our saucepans and wooden spoons, as consumers. Thomas O'Loughlin is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis's Call to Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2019).

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I didn’t feel like decorating for Christmas this year. Usually, I’m gung-ho about it and have our home festive by early December to fully enjoy the season. But this year it just seemed like too much effort. Too much hassle for no visitors to enjoy. The premier of Ontario told us to stick to our… Continue reading 🎶(Staying) Home for the Holidays!🎶😷 Quaint little church that caught my interest in Chatham, Ontario. © Rita Jacques 2018. Catholics can be funny creatures of habit. We like to sit in the same pew each week. I like “my” pew because it’s close to a fan. That makes for prime seating when the weather gets hot because the church lacks air conditioning. But, last Sunday I noticed two different people situated in the pew in front of me. As I’m short, this… Continue reading Liver, Anyone? Stress. I’ve become an unwilling expert on this topic lately due to unfortunate circumstances. Let me share a few of the life lessons I’ve picked up. I’m learning to let go of things I cannot change. Just like the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer: Easier said than done. Make a tight fist. Feel the power… Continue reading Stress Busters!! Among all of the back-to-school photos posted on Facebook, one photo stood out. It didn’t feature a cute sign listing the little scholar’s future career ambitions and favourite foods. Nope, the photo didn’t depict the latest style of fall fashions, either. It wasn’t of an adorable four-year old embarking on his/her very first day of… Continue reading Back to School…and Beaten! My Mom was distraught. Her hearing aid was missing. Yup. The newly upgraded edition that had involved several trips to the hearing clinic. Mom had removed it earlier and placed it in her pocket. Werther’s candy wrappers happened to be in her pocket also. When the wrappers were tossed into the garbage, Mom thought the… Continue reading A Prayer Heard I love to check out garage sales. It’s not just the lure of finding a treasure for next-to-nothing that’s the attraction. It’s the opportunity to find something unique that is no longer available in stores. Once I stumbled upon a garage sale where there were many poppy items and Christmas nutcrackers, both of which I… Continue reading Enduring Love I told the older woman behind the counter at the dress shop that I liked her cross. Funny how those words opened up a conversation. She looked beyond retirement age but I’d watched her move expertly through the store: measuring brides-to-be for wedding gowns and teens for their prom dresses, and fetching yet another outfit… Continue reading A Cross to Wear “Inshallah!” A friend of mine practiced nursing overseas for a year. She worked at a state-of-the-art hospital in Dubai. Besides being paid extremely well, she found the unit she worked on to be well-stocked with modern equipment and computers. However, she had one complaint. If she needed a “stat” x-ray performed or “stat” blood work done, she always got… Continue reading Seeking an End to Worry? The young man sat hunched over in his old wheelchair. It was the kind you roll with your hands, not an electric model. An overturned baseball cap was held out by chapped, bare hands. My daughter and I had walked three blocks on a blustery January afternoon. We’d passed by six parking meters, each one labeled… Continue reading Pay You Double!

Making April formed in 2005 but broke up in 2010. In the time as a band, they sold over 100,000 downloads on iTunes and at one point, were the #1 unsigned artist on MySpace. It’s a shame they’re not together anymore as this is a great love song and the chorus is fantastic! Download this song: The next song in the long list of best love songs is Paramore’s “The Only Exception”. It’s quite different from Paramore’s usual style of songs with it being less rock and more acoustic, but it’s sweet and seeing as Hayley Williams lies on a massive assortment of fan made Valentines Day cards, I thought this would be the perfect love song for this Valentines Day I’m a big fan of Jason Mraz but only recently discovered this song. “I Won’t Give Up” is a slow and sweet love song that has been less publicised, at least where I live. If you can play the guitar and sing, this would be the perfect love song to sing to your loved one at a wedding or on Valentines day, it is after all, almost February now. It [...] Released as the second single from Gin Wigmore’s studio album debut entitled Holy Smoke, “I Do” is a sweet pop song that sounds authentic and unique thanks to Gin’s signature voice. It’s a slow yet catchy song that will no doubt help you get the “I Do”. I discovered this song after hearing a snippet of it from season 3 of Vampire Diaries. Apparently Ron Pope wrote this song in 2005 and it went on to become an Internet hit! Well I’m only discovering this song 7 years late, but whose complaining? Anywho, this is a really sweet love song about a guy is leaving town and has feelings for a girl who is seeing him off, [...] The second song from Bruno Mars we’ve featured on this site! We first featured “Marry You”, and now we’re featuring his first single from his debut album. This happy love song is simple yet it means so much to tell a girl that she looks fine just the way she is, especially in today’s world of super skinny supermodels and plastic surgery perfection! A bit of a different love song today, Darren Hayes’ “Insatiable” is a song about a man who is obsessed with an actress. Well at least in the music video anyway, if you take away the music video and just listen to the lyrics, it’s a more adult orientated love song. But nevertheless, it’s a great debut song from Darren Hayes, former lead singer of Savage Garden. This 2006 song by James Morrison is the type of song which talks about someone who never expected to find love and now that they’ve found it, are unsure what to do with it. In particular is this line – I was meant to tread the water But now I’ve gotten in too deep I think it’s a really sweet love song and listened to it extensively when I was [...] Written by Brian McFadden for Delta Goodrem who had helped Brian through a difficult part of his life “Like Only a Woman Can”. The song is really cute and sweet and really captures the essence and power a woman has over a man. In particular, my favourite verse is – She’s kinda perfect She’s kinda everything I’m not Yes, she’s an angel It’s amazing how she’s patient Even more at [...]

Christina has admitted she's attracted to women. The girl who so famously made out with Madonna during their VMA performance confessed she loves to look at women's naked bodies. She really wants to make sure we all know she's not going to play it any softer just because she's now married. Here's more on her love for women: "I think the female body is really beautiful and sometimes I think the sight of a female nude body can be more attractive than a male's - but that's just me." When asked if there was a particular woman she would like to get down and dirty with, the singer admitted she thought Halle Berry was "beautiful". She said: "Halle Berry is a very beautiful woman, but I'm not saying yes or no." The 25-year-old also says her husband, music executive Jason Bratman, does not mind her same-sex urges. She said: "He supports my little ways. It's OK by him." Lots more sexy pictures of Christina from her new album and Rolling Stone so read more

Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline dropped a bombshell during a hearing today in a case involving pro-abortion pushback against the charges he filed against a Planned Parenthood abortion business. The man who was the top pro-life attorney in the state of Kansas is in the middle of hearings on nine counts of alleged ethical violations before the Kansas Attorney Disciplinary Board. The trial is estimated to go on for two weeks and is the latest phase in a protracted, multi-year effort to distract from the 107 counts of wrongdoing, including 23 felonies, against a Johnson County, Kansas Planned Parenthood abortion center. The politically-motivated charges claim Kline acted improperly during his investigations of abortion clinics, even though recently released documents show that investigators for the Disciplinary Administrator cleared Kline of any wrong-doing in 2008. During the hearing today, Kline made it clear that the actual wrongdoers are working at Planned Parenthood. Like LifeNews.com, pro-life blogger Jill Stanek has been following the Kline hearings and she noted comments Kline made today in court: In an ethics trial that is seeking to determine in part whether Kline acted too aggressively to enforce Kansas child rape laws in his capacity as Attorney General or Johnson Co. District Attorney, Kline just revealed to the court under oath that he found 166 instances during a specific time period when girls younger than 14 years old got abortions at clinics owned either by late-term abortionist George Tiller or Planned Parenthood of Overland Park. But during that same time period, Kline testified, Planned Parenthood reported only one case of child rape, and Tiller reported only one case of child rape. This means there were 164 instances when girls 13-years-old and younger had abortions at one of those abortion clinics, and the clinics failed to report the abortions to authorities. The news is not surprising for those who have followed the Planned Parenthood abortion business. Last December, a judge issued a ruling saying a Cincinnati, Ohio Planned Parenthood abortion business rushed an abortion it did on a 14-year-old girl who was a victim of sexual abuse. The case was brought by parents whose minor daughter had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood facility without their knowledge after being sexually abused by her adult coach. The parents allege that Planned Parenthood failed to comply with the statute requiring reports of known or suspected child abuse as well as Ohio’s parental consent statute. Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Jody Luebbers gave the girl and her parents a major legal victory and said the abortion practitioner for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio breached the legal requirement by not meeting with the girl 24 hours prior to the abortion, as stipulated by the state’s informed consent statute, to explain to her the alternatives available to her. A Planned Parenthood in Indiana in 2008 suspended an employee after a video showed the staffer covering up a girl’s statutory rape. The video was a part of an earlier series of undercover investigations Live Action performed with a UCLA student, Lila Rose, posing as a 13-year old girl who had sexual relations with a 31-year-old man. “Okay, I didn’t hear the age [of the 31-year-old]. I don’t want to know the age,” she tells Rose. A video in Alabama showed a staffer at a Birmingham, Alabama Planned Parenthood a woman who appears to be a victim of statutory rape that “we bend the rules.” In this new video, the Birmingham Planned Parenthood counselor tells Rose, who pretends to be a 14-year-old statutory rape victim that it “does sometimes bend the rules a little bit” rather than report sexual abuse to state authorities. Rose told the staffer that she was 14 and had been impregnated by a 31-year-old boyfriend. She told the Planned Parenthood official she needed a secret abortion so her parents would not find out about her sexual relationship with the older man. Rose asks, “Is it a problem about my boyfriend?” The counselor, identified as “Tanisha” in the video, responds, “As long as you consented to having sex with him, there’s nothing we can truly do about that.” However, Alabama code 26-14-3 requires health professionals to disclose suspected cases of sexual abuse to state officials immediately. Since February 1, 2011, Live Action has released footage from New Jersey, Virginia, and New York Planned Parenthood clinics, all of which have been met by an ever-changing defense from Planned Parenthood. The sting operations revealed Planned Parenthood center staffers were willing to provide assistance to alleged operators of a sex trafficking ring — ranging from helping them arrange abortions for the underage girls they said they were victimizing to showing them how to avoid scrutiny and skirt parental involvement laws. The videos covered Planned Parenthood centers in Richmond and also other centers in Roanoke, Charlottesville, and Falls Church. A District of Columbia Planned Parenthood also encouraged and assisted sexual traffickers, as evidenced in an undercover audio file. Live Action also filmed Planned Parenthood staff helping sex traffickers in New Jersey — and the nurse who aided the alleged traffickers there has already been fired while the state health department is looking into the problems further. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has already received the full, unedited footage of the Planned Parenthood expose’ videos and he told CBS 6 WVTR in Richmond that they are “shocking.”

It Feels Great To Be In Love With Ronda Rousey During a recent interview on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Ronda Rousey discussed the impact boyfriend Travis Browne had in helping her recover from the first loss of her career at UFC 193 to Holly Holm. Rousey told host Ellen DeGeneres that her immediate thoughts went to suicide directly following the loss to Holm. But those were quickly fleeting as she saw Browne, who was in Australia to support her at the event. “To be honest, I looked up and I saw my man, Travis, was standing there,” Rousey said on the show. “And I looked up to him and I was like, ‘I need to have his babies. I need to stay alive.’ Really, that was it. I haven’t told anybody that. I’ve only told him.” Speaking extensively for the first time on his relationship with Rousey, Browne, a partner with Activ8Media, said simply being there for Rousey in a critical moment is what mattered most to him. “I was there to support her in any way I could, just like any man would do for his woman,” Browne said. “It’s pretty simple. There’s no magic in it. We go through those dark times and we need someone to lean on. I hate the fact that she had to go through that dark time, but like she said, it happened for a reason and there’s a great purpose. This is our story and this is our life, and I would go through hell and back for her. “It means a lot that somebody would look at me in that way, especially Ronda. She’s such a sweetheart. She’s a great fighter and athlete and a big movie star, but what impresses me most is the woman that she is. She is who she is 100 percent of the time and I really respect that about her, just the woman she is and that’s what I love most about her.” Browne noted the support system between the couple has been incredible, especially with the spotlight surrounding them. Rousey’s acting and fighting success has made her one of the most popular athletes/entertainers in the world, while Browne has enjoyed his own success in the UFC’s heavyweight division. But Browne and Rousey have managed to keep the bulk of their relationship private, something that has been important to both of them. So while it may seem the spotlight is bright, Browne said they haven’t really noticed it. “Honestly, I don’t look at it as going through a lot,” Browne said. “There’s a perception that people have and they don’t see our real relationship and, honestly, they don’t see how wonderful it is. The way that we handle it is by being in the moment with each other. It’s a relationship between Ronda and myself, and we keep it that way. We don’t go outside of that and we don’t care what other people think. We’re there for each other and that’s it.” Having a strong support system is something that is important for any fighter, with Browne mentioning the massive highs and disappointing lows that come with wins and losses. Rousey’s popularity only amplifies that, but navigating the ebbs and flows of a fight career has been much more positive and fulfilling with each other’s support. “Obviously we love each other and I’m just glad I could be there for her,” Browne said. “That’s what a partner is there for. They are there for support whenever you need them, for good times and bad. We dedicate our lives for this sport and I’m glad I could be there for her and show her that support.”

I loved the Brothers Grimm since I was a little kid. My mom was never a woman to candy coat stories. For some reason I never noticed that Jacob and I were born on the same day. I saw something on TV or was reading something on the internet (I can't remember), but I know one thing. I wasn't looking for Jacob's birthday. Sometimes, at odd and unexpected times, something will find you, something perfect for the moment. I looked for people born on my birthday before and never noticed him. I stopped looking up other people born on my birthday and randomly found out that Jacob was born on my birthday. Small, I know, but if you knew me it would explain a lot. Let's just say I am destined to work with my family, destined to love stories and destined to live an enchanted life. I've noticed that my family are a people of the light with some very, very dark life experiences. We won't be talking about those, but they are important because magical moments are key to our survival. Even the smallest of things help us ward off the forces of darkness. I started to look at fixed things in our lives that could be seen as strange coincidence. My grandmother is the youngest of 19 kids (or is it 20?). They always said grandmother had 19 brothers and sisters, so I guess that would make her kid #20. Okay, I can't help it; I am going to mention one dark thing. Eight of my grandmother's brothers died within 12 months of each other not all of the deaths were of natural causes. If I had not been a child at the time and witnessed it, I wouldn't believe it. Anyway, my grandmother is the youngest of 20, and she had 8 children of her own: four boys and four girls. Here is where it gets interesting: each girl was born with a different astrological element. Daughter one is an air sign. Daughter two is a water sign. Daughter number three, my mother, happens to be an earth sign. Daughter number four, a Leo, is a fire. If the four of them could have worked together they could have been invincible. Unfortunately, they did not notice their awesomeness together, and now I really don't think working together for them is a good idea, at least not yet. Out of my grandmother's 4 daughters my mother was the only one to give birth to girls. I am my grandmother's first grandchild, quickly followed by Joy and Faith. Two of my aunts had male children only. The first male cousin died while being born. It was my oldest aunt's only child. In that same year my mother was pregnant with her last daughter and my other aunt was pregnant with her first son. So, the sisters had 3 pregnancies between them in the same year. Faith came next, and a month later the first living male cousin was born. He was born on his mother's birthday. Needless to say, mother and son are very close. So Joy and I were born the same year, and Faith and our first living male cousin were born in the same year. The same aunt had another boy a couple of years later. I consider us the original 5. We are like brothers and sisters. It is awesome because we back each other up most of the time. My mother's youngest sister is godmother to Faith and baby boy #2. So, if you are counting, only two of my grandmother's daughters have kids. My mom has all girls, and grandmother's daughter number 2 has all boys. I know I am rambling, but I am just looking at events that are fixed. I can control if I walk down a certain street, but I can't control when people were born or when they die, so I am looking at what is already there for a magic foundation. I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I am more just trying to observe the information. I guess this is more for myself and for my family. This is my way of linking us together or maybe just reminding us of our start, from the way I see it. I don't want to take anything for granted. Any moment can change my mood or outlook on life. Good moments and strange coincidences make magic moments. Most of the time you live your life without noticing it or the people around you. We miss out on the odd coincidences that may not be coincidences. We miss opportunities.

Wherever you went at the Venice Film Festival last week, you would hear somebody whistling the opening bars of “City of Stars”, the signature song from Damien Chazelle’s musical, “La La Land”. Partly, that was because the theme recurs so often in the film (too often, probably) that it worms its way into the listener’s brain. But it was also proof that “La La Land” will be a hit. At the time of writing, Chazelle’s sparkling tribute to the golden age of Hollywood musicals had a score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator. And there is no doubt that when the Baftas and the Oscars roll around, “La La Land” will be the film to beat. And after that? Considering that Hollywood has never been slow to cash in on its successes, there is a chance that it will set a trend. For the Astaire and Rogers fans among us, it’s easy to fantasise that there will be a flood of musicals from, say, the Coen brothers (who paid their own toe-tapping tribute to golden-age Tinseltown this year with “Hail, Caesar!”), and Michel Hazanavicius (who put a dance number at the end of his Oscar-winning film “The Artist”), and Joss Whedon (who wrote and directed a musical episode of his television series, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). And there are signs that audiences are ready for a big-screen musical revival. Numerous repertory cinemas, including the Prince Charles in London, have regular sing-along nights, at which the audience is encouraged to dress up and belt out songs from “The Sound of Music” and “Frozen”. Meanwhile, televised stage shows have become an unlikely phenomenon lately. NBC have broadcast live productions of “Hairspray”, “The Sound of Music”, “Wiz” and “Peter Pan”, and Fox joined in with “Grease”, “The Passion” and “The Rocky Horror Show”. On the other hand, “The Artist”, didn’t set off an avalanche of new black-and-white silent films, so it would be foolish to predict The Return of the Musical. As sad as I am to admit it, the brilliance of “La La Land” is down to some very unusual factors, which make it hard to imitate. The first is that the 31-year-old Chazelle has a profound fondness for and understanding of music and musicals. His breakthrough film, “Whiplash”, examined the unfashionable subject of big-band jazz-drumming. Chazelle – a drummer at high-school – used rapid-fire editing, sweat-drenched close-ups, intense acting and combative dialogue to give it the adrenaline-pumping energy of a sports movie. Before “Whiplash”, his debut film was 2009’s “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench”, a low-budget, black-and-white musical which posed the question: can a man ever be content with a woman who doesn’t appreciate jazz as much as he does? That question returns in “La La Land”. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play an aspiring actress and pianist, struggling to find fame in Los Angeles. They are enchanted by classic films and jazz records, and so the film bursts with affectionate references to “An American in Paris” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, as well as bittersweet acknowledgements that life can’t always be as happy as it is on the silver screen. “La La Land”, then, isn’t a gimmicky one-off experiment for Chazelle – as “Everybody Says I Love You” was for Woody Allen, and “8 Women” was for François Ozon. Nor is it the work of a theatre veteran who doesn’t have a clue about cinema, such as Phyllida Lloyd’s “Mamma Mia” or Susan Stroman’s “The Producers”. The reason Chazelle can celebrate and subvert Hollywood musicals so deftly is that they are as central to his film-making identity as violent crime thrillers are to Quentin Tarantino’s. It’s no wonder that “La La Land” makes its audience fall back in love with the genre. We can tell that Chazelle is in love with it, too. A related point: “La La Land” is fun. Most recent film musicals, such as “Les Miserables”, “Into the Woods”, “Sweeney Todd” and “The Last Five Years”, have had comic interludes, but their over-riding tone has been either glum or grandiose or both. But right from its opening sequence – a traffic jam which develops into a joyous song-and-dance number – “La La Land” shows its audience a good time, constantly engaging us with bright blocks of colour, enchanting fantasy sequences, and attractive actors playing loveable characters. It’s that rare film musical which has the viewer bursting into song rather than into tears. This positivity leads us to one last crucial factor. There have been hardly any great romantic comedies over the last decade, largely because contemporary rom-coms tend to be too cynical to make our hearts flutter. But the unironic, witty “La La Land” is a beguiling romantic comedy – and it would have been even if its songs, by Justin Hurwitz, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, had been left on the cutting-room floor. But then what would anyone have had to whistle at the Venice Film Festival?

With six weeks left in the year, it’s easy to get swept away with plans, tasks, projects, events, shopping and the holiday buzz. It always takes something to slow down, breathe deeply, practice self-care and connect with what’s important, and it can be particularly challenging at this time of year. Here are three keys to holiday happiness. 1) Debit-only spending. Research shows that men and women tend to overspend by up to 23% simply by using a credit card. Spending money borrowed from your future is a slippery slope and credit card induced magical thinking can lead to financial hangovers. Be grateful I am not suggesting cash-only spending. After one session, a financial therapist put me on a 30-day cash only assignment. I was also instructed to un-do every automatic payment, call to negotiate bill due dates and actually interact with people rather than swiping the card or clicking to “buy now”. It was transformative. True financial freedom comes from conscious guilt-free spending. 2) No spend days. The best antidote to overspending during the holidays is to “fast” or not spend any money a particular day (or two). Many people have the day after Thanksgiving off from work and if you’re at home, be creative and enjoy a staycation. If you’re traveling, be present and do something fun rather than losing a day in lines and competing for stuff. You could use the down time to create a proactive holiday spending plan. Pick one day between now and January 1st to enjoy not spending. Try it with a friend or the whole family and see what comes up! 3) Focus on the simple things. Deep breaths are the fastest way to return to the present moment. There is so much to see here and now – sunlight coming through the window, our family members and friends without assumptions or expectations and the beauty in nature during winter. Gifts are wonderful and giving may even be your primary love language and there are meaningful ways to spend little or no money on the holidays. Words of affirmation, healthy affection, acts of service, quality time and homemade gifts are often more memorable than big tickets items. My one year old daughter is obsessed with my debit card. She tracks down my purse wherever it’s located in the house, dexterously extracts my wallet and bypasses the cash, gift cards and credit cards to pull out the same Moven debit card every single time. She passes it between her hands, examines the front and back and sometimes even clutches it for up to 20 minutes. Other times, she carries it room to room and then socks it away in her favorite places: the doll’s carriage or under the edge of the carpet. “Whatever is important to mama is important to baby,” a wise woman commented at the playground when the only way I could get her into the stroller was giving her the card. Of course, I’m reading into this and wondering what it means. If, one day, my daughter writes her own money autobiography, will this be her first memory of money? If there is a single lesson I can impart on my child, it’s to be true to yourself. For us as adults, that translates to live within your means, even during the holidays.

Snow And The Seven Huntsmen by Zoe Blake & Alta Hensley 🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩 hats from Julia! This book will have you on fire! Seven men, seven different types of passion and one pure woman leaves you aching for more. Poor Snow knows that one day her step mom will try to kill her. That night comes in the form of seven huntsman, though they don’t want to kill her they want to use her. You slowly get to know each man and realize they seem like horrible beasts but they have a soft side and they help Snow find the wanton woman she is. I love reverse harem books for the simple fact that you get more book boyfriends from one book. I love the relationship dynamic that Snow and her men have. After Snow realizes she can’t leave and really doesn’t want to leave you find out each man loves her in a different way. The sex. Not only is each man different personality wise but each man is different in their sexual desires. These men will leave you searching for B.O.B. while wrapping you up in their seductive lessons. Seriously, I’m warning you. Read this at home, while tucked into bed alone. This isn’t one you should read in public, you will be squeezing your thighs at all the lessons Snow endures. The heat of this book is scorching. The writing leaves you panting for more. And Snow and her huntsmen leave you wondering where your rugged beasts are and why they haven’t kidnapped you! Authors: Zoe Blake & Alta Hensley Authors Zoe Blake & Alta Hensley This is no fairytale… precious… the Huntsmen’s hearts. Warning: In our Fairytales, there is danger in the shadows, the beasts bite and no Heroine is truly safe. If dark tales of danger, forced attraction and multiple partners offend you then please do not We are all attracted to the forbidden. Addicted to the rush we get from reading something naughty…something kinky. We love to lose ourselves in the fantasy. The powerful lord who sweeps the lady away to his remote estate to ravish her. The cowboy who takes the sassy city girl over his knee to teach her a lesson. The devilishly charming pirate who seduces his beautiful captive. those dark fantasies. She is also an Amazon Top 100 bestselling author. Being a multi-published author in the romance genre, Alta is known for her dark, gritty alpha heroes, sometimes sweet love stories, hot eroticism, and engaging tales of the constant struggle between dominance and submission.

ALL SEX DATING clear and disable history - dating for seniors website - Hosting free adult cam chat - four dating rules you must know - Adult chatbot boyfriend - Mobile chat sexy no register - dating rsvp - dating sites cost comparision - znakomstvadating com - Best free peer to peer video sex chat - speed dating lines - christian perspective on teenage dating - Video random cam sex Challenge men dating * Don’t make it look like your whole life revolves around social media.If you have too many photos or updates on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, and if it looks like you are always on line or on IM, it also suggests that you don’t have much of a life outside of the Internet.Cash, possessions and luxuries attract them and they value it a lot. While it’s a much better idea to ask a woman out in a real conversation rather than by text, this advice is unrealistic. A guy who texted you and did not get a response from you will likely assume that you are ignoring him and that you are simply not interested. If you want to send a message about your expectations, do it directly and text him: “If you want to ask me out, call me and do so. Some guys might not be able to handle such a direct approach, but many will appreciate it and find it very refreshing. Chances are that your life is not that easy either and you are quite busy yourself. It’s fine to send a cute text message every now and then, saying something funny or flirty, but there is no reason to send empty, meaningless text messages, such as “what are you up to? ” Both men and women are guilty of making this mistake, and it is an unattractive behavior, whether it comes from a guy or a girl. Being responsive is good, but if you always answer a phone right away, and if you always text back two seconds after he texts you no matter what time of the day it is, it makes it look like you have no life, and for a good reason. As bad as it is not being available to go out until three weeks from now, being available every single night at any hour is just as unattractive. Meeting nice single men in Challenge can seem hopeless at times — but it doesn't have to be! Basically looking for female partner for intercourse; someone in my age group. I don't take all this too seriously because I'm here for fun. Mingle2's Challenge personals are full of single guys in Challenge looking for girlfriends and dates. Exotic chickens & sheep r what I'm working with. While there is usually some truth to that, many women misinterpret the entire notion of challenge and completely misapply that advice to their own behavior: If you adopt all the bad advice out there for women that suggests that you should make yourself more unavailable than you really are, it’s going to hurt you more than help.If takes you three days to return a guy’s call or text message, if you need a three-week notice to set a date, and if you keep canceling and rescheduling dates over and over, a guy who is busy and who has a lot going for him will likely lose interest in you quickly, unless he already really likes you and finds you to be a very special woman.The last thing he wants to do is to struggle to get a hold of a girl that he likes and would like to spend time with and get to know.One best-selling dating advice book suggests that if a guy texts a girl to ask her out, she should ignore it until and unless he calls.So many dating advice books for women urge them to be a challenge when dealing with and dating guys.The writers suggest that men value a woman much more when it takes more work to get her interest and to attract her.But if you just recently met or if you exchanged a few messages on the online dating site, he is unlikely to feel that way about you, not yet anyway.Chances are that guy has to deal with all kind of pressures in his own life. He might be required to chase clients for his boss 18 hours a day.

If your answer to any of those last three questions is 'yes', be prepared for some shocking statistics. It's estimated that in 2003 about 50,000 women were raped in the UK, although just 11,867 went to the police. Of those cases, 1,649 went to trial but, appallingly, only 629 resulted in successful prosecutions. If you reported a rape in 2003 you had a mere 5.3 per cent chance of getting your rapist convicted. Worse, the conviction rate for rape in the UK has been sliding for years. In the 1970s you had a 33 per cent chance of getting a conviction. In 1985 it was 24 per cent. The 2003 figures, the most recent, are the worst ever. The frightening fact is that, in 21st century Britain, rape is a low-risk crime. The main problem, say experts, is our old-fashioned idea of what rape is. Professor Liz Kelly, who co-authored the report A Gap Or A Chasm? Attrition In Reported Rape Cases that revealed the low conviction rates, says: 'Almost everyone still believes a stereotype of what I would call "real rape": being attacked by a stranger, outside, who uses a weapon, plus the victim resists and reports it immediately to the police. But unfortunately many rapes don't fall into that category.' Statistics show most rapists are known to their victim, and can even be a current or ex-boyfriend. Often, they are acquaintances: a workmate or someone met at a club or party. But because we find it hard to believe that a rapist can appear normal - handsome, even - or can hold down a responsible job, have a girlfriend or a family, we're reluctant to believe a woman who says she has been raped by anyone other than a monster. Yet the 2005 report admits that 'rape is a much more frequent and mundane crime than is conventionally believed'. The experience of Glamour magazine readers bears this out. Louise was 17 when she was raped by a friendly, good-looking man she met on a girls' night out in Wales. They chatted in a night club, and when they bumped into each other at the end of the evening he invited her and her mates to a party. Louise's friends decided to get a cab home, and when Louise got to the 'party' she found just the man there. He raped her anally and vaginally, leaving her badly injured. Yet she found it hard to see what had happened to her as rape - 'I felt I must have done something wrong' - and didn't report it to the police until days later. Jill, 18, got a job at Gatwick airport, and after her first day's work went for a drink with two of her new male colleagues. They got on well and caught the last train home together. On the 15-minute journey, both men held Jill down and raped her, anally and vaginally. Again, she didn't report it to the police until a day later, by which time much of the forensic evidence had been lost because she'd had a shower. Victims such as Louise and Jill can't believe what has happened to them: they don't want to call it rape, because they believe in the 'real rape' stereotype that you're only vulnerable to attack by a stranger. It is hard to accept that a man who's funny and charming, a man you think you know, can also be a rapist. 'The fact is, any man can be a rapist,' says Kelly. Because of our mistaken beliefs about who rapists are, it is very difficult to get juries to convict. 'When jurors are presented with a clean-cut young man in a nice suit, they can't connect that with their idea of a rapist, so they believe him rather than the victim,' says writer and campaigner Julie Bindel. 'And if the victim was drunk, or dressed provocatively, or has had a healthy sex life, the chances of conviction drop even further.' Bindel believes that some rapists deliberately look out for a particular type of woman as their victim. 'The fact is many young women, through no fault of their own, fall into a cliché that makes them vulnerable. They're dressed up, in heels and short skirts, they're on the sauce, and they're more sexually open than previous generations. In my opinion, there's a constituency of rapists who know what juries don't like and target women accordingly.' The 2005 report acknowledges this, calling for further investigation into 'the significance of alcohol in rape', including 'the extent to which men target unknown women who are drinking'. Twenty years ago, if a woman wore a short skirt she was deemed to be 'asking for it'. These days alcohol is the equivalent of that miniskirt. When Louise reported her rape to the police, the male officers who took her statement said two things: 'You were drunk,' and, 'You went back to his house'. 'Like I didn't know,' says Louise. 'Two days later, I got a phone call from a CID officer. He said, "I would strongly recommend you don't proceed with this case, and if you don't I'd like you to retract your statement." I refused to retract, but they did nothing. They didn't even go to his flat and warn him off. As a result, I saw him out again. He just laughed at me. It was terrible.' The stereotype of 'real rape' - attacker is a violent stranger, woman is a sober virgin - has had a devastating effect throughout a legal system meant to protect rape victims and help them to convict their attackers. Some police officers disbelieve women's stories, but research shows only 3 per cent of rape allegations are false. Ann, 52, was raped by Antoni Imiela, convicted in March 2004 of seven brutal rapes and the indecent assault and attempted rape of a 10-year-old girl. 'If a woman wants to prosecute, she should be encouraged,' says Ann. 'Even if I had lost my case [she didn't], it was vitally important to me that I should have my day in court.' The problem is that, if the Crown Prosecution Service doesn't want to pursue a rape case, there's nothing practical a victim can do about it, as Jill found. CPS lawyers will take a case to court only if they believe there is a 51 per cent chance of winning. Prosecution lawyers, too, may have the 'real rape' stereotype in their heads. 'If the victim is a bit rough, was drunk and had a busy sex life, and the alleged rapist has a good job and looks respectable, they'll say the case hasn't a chance,' says Bindel. One CPS lawyer told me of a 16-year-old girl who had agreed to have sex with one man but was then raped by his friends: the CPS didn't take the case on because 'she'd had sex with the first one outside. She was the kind of girl who'd have sex in the bushes and that wouldn't have played well in court'. Which begs the questions: where else can 16-year-olds have sex? And why does having sex once mean you have to have it again when you don't want to? Even if the CPS does go to court (in 2002, this happened in only 14 per cent of cases), the victim is often at a disadvantage. She is just a witness and rarely kept in the loop, sometimes not meeting her lawyer until the day of the case. The victim is thus unprepared for what is likely to be a very harrowing experience. In contrast, the defendant's barrister will have been thoroughly briefed and the accused will have been well prepared and rehearsed - and will know that, despite recent laws forbidding mention of the victim's sexual history, many judges let things slide in the courtroom. 'The barrister will use the victim's medical history to slip in the fact that she's had an abortion, or many sexual partners, and the judge doesn't notice, or doesn't care,' says Bindel. Cross-examination is another problem: in a group-rape case the victim will be cross-examined by each defence lawyer for each defendant. Often, the prospect of reliving such trauma over and over again is too much for witnesses to bear, and sometimes they will simply pull out of the case. Can you blame them? Would you want to relive your rape just to watch your rapist walk free? Add up all the system failures, and those horrifying rape conviction rates seem almost understandable. And factor in the reality that most police authorities do not have access to a specialised rape investigation suite, where a female doctor can make an accurate forensic examination of victims in civilised surroundings, and the rates become inevitable. So what is being done? The Government is well aware of the low conviction rates and is belatedly trying to remedy them. It is encouraging the creation of more Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCs) - a one-stop service for rape victims where, unlike at the existing Rape Crisis Centres, which offer a more emotional form of support, they can be forensically examined. The results are recorded and stored, and victims can be given the morning-after pill and other medical care if needed, and receive counselling. At present, there are 13 such SARCs in England - three of which are in London (there are none in Wales and Scotland) - but if you are raped outside a SARC area, you'll have to fall back on whatever services your local police station provides. What the Government has not yet managed to do is find the funds for a nationwide rape-crisis telephone service. One victim I spoke to was given a helpline number by a police officer. When she called it, the line was dead. Louise asked for counselling on the NHS; there was a year-long waiting list. Nor does the Government appear to have plans for a national awareness campaign to target potential attackers as well as victims. 'We need a campaign to train people to understand that rape is not just "real rape",' says Bindel. 'Until we do that, juries will always be working with outdated notions of how a victim should behave, and what a rapist is supposed to look like.' In the United States, prosecutions for rape are far more successful than in the UK, says Bindel, who has worked with one of the US's special rape prosecutors. 'This prosecutor has achieved an 80 per cent conviction rate, simply because she's had proper training,' says Bindel. 'She knows everything: the difference between the physical trauma received by an 11-year-old rape victim and a 14-year-old one, how to interpret any psychiatric evidence, where a victim's statement is weak and likely to be attacked by a defence lawyer.' Why aren't our UK prosecutors so rigorously trained? Following Home Office analysis of rape prosecutions in 2003, the CPS began appointing specialist rape prosecutors - 520 out of a total of 3,000 CPS lawyers - but these steps did not go nearly far enough, says Bindel. 'These lawyers were given a bit more training, but it's basic and low-level and nowhere near what they need to do the job sufficiently.' If we want more rapists to be caught, tried and convicted, there needs to be a complete change throughout our national system. We need a 24-hour, nationwide, dedicated rape-victim phoneline, we need a SARC in every town, and we need a special rape police unit in every city. We need fully trained and specialised rape prosecution lawyers and a national rape-awareness campaign. And we need rape victims to come forward, to acknowledge that they have been raped, and to be brave enough to make a statement and be examined as soon as possible. 'I'm telling my story because it might help other rape victims to deal with what's happened to them,' says Louise, who eventually got the counselling she needed and is now at university. 'Even if you're drunk and you go back to his house, it's not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. You did not "ask for it".' But Louise's attacker is still at large. And, until we overhaul our rape investigation and prosecution procedures, more and more rapists will continue to walk free - at liberty to strike again. · A version of this article appears in the next issue of Glamour magazine, on sale from Thursday. What to do if you are raped Report the rape in person at a police station, Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) or the A&E department of a hospital. Tell a friend or family member so they can accompany you. Take a change of clothes - you'll have to hand over what you're wearing. Before you're examined, try not to go to the toilet or have a drink. Don't take a shower or wash. Keep all evidence, such as condoms and tampons. Try to tell as full a story as you can. Don't worry if you've taken drugs or are drunk - the police just want an accurate picture of what happened. Ask if there are facilities for your statement to be taken on video - it can be used in court later instead of you having to go through the whole story again. Try to get some counselling, either via a SARC, the NHS or privately; it will help you deal with what has happened.

Canadian series Mary Kills People is now playing in the US on LifetimeTV on Sunday nights. This is a recap of the first episode of the 6 episode first season. Caroline Dhavernas plays Dr. Mary Harris. She’s the divorced mom of two and an ER doc. In her spare time, she helps people who are terminally ill bring about their own death. The overly dramatic title Mary Kills People refers to her role in assisting suicide. Her life as a deliverer of death is illegal. She keeps it secret from her family. She uses black market drugs. Richard Short plays Des, her partner in assisted suicide. He’s a former plastic surgeon and former drug user. He has connections to the drug supplier Grady (Greg Bryk). He’s in charge of the money side of their operation. Episode 1 begins with what should be a routine event. An ill man drinks a cocktail of a killer drug and champagne. They think he dies and prepare to leave. When his wife comes home unexpectedly early, they have to sneak out. The dead guy starts to breathe again! Mary puts a pillow over his face until he’s really gone. Mary and Des run. Not a great introduction to how smoothly her side business runs. Mary hides her stash of drugs and her burner phone in her shed under the floorboards. Des is off to see the drug supplier to complain that the drugs were watered down. He gets new vials of drugs that haven’t been tampered with. Mary’s teenage daughter Jess (Abigail Winter) and her girlfriend Naomi (Katie Douglas) sneak into the shed to make out and smoke pot. They hear the burner phone buzz and find the drugs. At the hospital the next day, nurse Annie (Grace Lynn Kung) gives Mary two new files of people who want to choose their own time of death. One is a man with a brain tumor named Joel (Jay Ryan). Mary goes to interview Joel. She has sex with him. Yes. Crazy. But hang on, because he’s going to be important to the rest of the series and there has to be some way to get into that. So. Sex. She remarks post-coitus that he seems very healthy and dashes off. Joel follows her out and enters a van to talk with Frank (Lyriq Bent). They’re cops! It’s a sting operation. They want to put Mary and Des in jail. Frank is not happy about the tiny, unprofessional lapse of the quickie on the counter top. Mary joins her ex and her younger daughter to watch Jess in a ballet recital. Naomi is on stage too. She collapses midway through the performance. At the hospital, Mary learns that Naomi stole the drugs from the shed and took some before the dance. Thank goodness it was the watered down supply. Mary and Naomi are at an impasse: Mary can’t tell on Naomi to her parents because Naomi will rat her out. I suspect this tension between them will continue for a while – Naomi seems like the kind of kid who will use her leverage any way she can. Naomi mentions she is on birth control, which means she’s cheating on Jess. A few other characters I haven’t mentioned are introduced in episode 1, but this introduction to the series seems to have given us most of the major players. Assorted cops, medical people, and end-of-life patients will show up. (Charlotte Sullivan fans can rejoice. She’s in Mary Kills People, but only in two episodes.) Tara Armstrong created Mary Kills People. Holly Dale directed all 6 episodes of season 1. Women’s names are all over the list of producers and editors. I enjoyed the first episode and will continue to watch, so thanks to all these women behind the scenes who made this interesting new show. A series about a woman who helps people decide on the time of their own death may not be for everyone. Personally, I think it’s a practice that should be legal for those who need it. I’m not terminally ill, but I’m definitely on the downhill side of the mountain. I’d like to have the option to decide on my own departure time if something horrific and painful like cancer takes me down. The first episode was well directed, well acted, and brought us a unique new main character. Dr. Mary Harris is complicated, smart, imperfect, and independent-minded. I’m looking forward to learning more about her.

The weather is FINALLY starting to cool down here in California. I actually found myself wanting a cup of hot tea this morning. I dearly love tea, but this weather just makes it unbearable sometimes. So because I was finally getting down my tea collection from the cupboard to place on the counter for easy access during the winter I had to look up all kinds of pictures on pinterest that involved tea. This is just such an idyllic garden tea party spot. Oh I do wish I could just project myself into the picture. One scone with clotted cream and jam for me please! EJPcreations is a mad scientist of a woman specializing in creating tiaras, necklaces, and fascinators, with a noir, and gothic flair. All adornments have a hint of vampire elegance, a dash of Steampunk bravado, and plenty of Neo-Victorian sensibilities. Here are some of the Pretties I make... Web Store

A few springs ago I was making sex for numerous months with a wondrous gentleman who would later reveal himself to be a lying miscreant. He had many a character flaw, including poor communication skills, exclusively prioritizing his needs, and expressing romantic feelings that he didn’t feel. We had several serious talks about said character flaws and he promised he would work towards altering himself positively. Alas, he didn’t genuinely put in the effort to begin the journey of beneficial growth. He didn’t share my desire for ongoing self-improvement and his pride often prevented him from acknowledging certain issues within himself. Regardless of his reluctance to reform, he was eager to hear what I thought of him. He sought it out and was thankful when I took the time to explain him to him. One night at a bar he even said, “You know, you’re making me a better person.” I was so flattered to hear this and impressed by my powers of transformation. I was mutating him into a more extraordinary specimen and I thought that meant that I had a great influence over him. “He must respect me,” I concluded. “If my words are shaping his core personality, that’s something else, isn’t it? I’m honoured to perform this duty that I didn’t ask for and don’t really want.” Now when I think back on him superficially whispering, “You know, you’re making me a better person,” I want to vomit on the suit he wore unnecessarily at casual events. I do not possess the same perspective. When I remember this conversation I yell out loud, “Ah! Fuck you!” I shake my head when I recall smiling, holding his hand, and replying, “That’s nice to…hear.” NICE TO HEAR? Seriously, past Jess? WHY was this NICE TO HEAR? I mean, I know why: I wanted to affect him in any capacity whatsoever and if that meant my feedback about his idiocy was being absorbed into his psyche, then good. Even though it was so incredibly draining for me to constantly explain and elaborate and engage in frustrating serious talks, I assumed this meant he considered me to be a wise, observant person, someone he takes seriously and listens to because he’s falling in mad love with my brain. But in actuality, he just saw me as his development tool. The human bystander that he used, hurt, crushed and exhausted on his way to glorious improvement, or at least on his way to maybe possible glorious improvement. Of course he adored hearing my important thoughts about his existence because if I analyzed him critically and told him exactly what he needed to do to fix himself then he wouldn’t have to lift a finger. Having me around made things easy. I was his living, breathing, talking, walking moral barometer that explained right from wrong and hit a buzzer when he was being vile and gave him detailed advice on how to prevent his shittiness. When he behaved badly, I was there to slap him on the wrist and say, “Naughty boy!” and point out his mistakes. He wanted me around simply because he wanted free emotional labour that he didn’t return but was happy to take. He wasn’t the first straight man to brandish me the official development tool. I’ve had several guys arrive with the expectation that I would regard their behaviour, determine their faults, and list them off to their fragile egos. These individuals lacked self-awareness; if they were going to shed their asshole skin for their friends/colleagues/the next woman they pursued, they required a pro bono therapist who they also had sex with to listen, take notes, and lay out a solid path of progress. And when they veered from this path, they needed this empathetic fairy godmother/mistress to inform them of this divergence and give tips for how to get back on track. They may not admit that they hired me for this position, or even be conscious of it, but our interactions indicate that I was their patron saint of complementary guidance/blow jobs. Instead of these dudes attempting to accomplish personal advancement on their own via therapy, self-help books, dialogue with friends, meditation, or deep self-reflection, they handed off the responsibility of bettering their person to me. When I would tell them that they had upset me for whatever reason, they’d request that I clarify how their repeated actions were still not good. I would spend five hours doing so, and once again they’d declare that I was their guardian angel. Thank goodness I was around to inform them of when they were being rude to anyone and everyone. They were learning a lesson about themselves every single day and were grateful for the education. But that education meant my feelings would be brutally injured by their inconsideration and selfishness. Somebody was gonna get hurt en route to progress, and they were glad it wasn’t them. Although straight men are defined as “all powerful” by the patriarchy, it seems a good portion of them are incapable of independent self-improvement. There is this awful, sexist, pervasive idea in society that women exist to fix men. That we are their conscience. Their soul. Their softer side. We bring out the best in them in every situation, be it professionally, socially or romantically. We’re told that men can be themselves around us more than they can be around other men. Thus, we are meant to examine them and put lots of time, energy, and emotion into repairing their broken parts. A volunteer female life coach must be present in order for them to learn from their foibles. We have to listen, nod and react empathetically, even when they don’t inquire about our regrets, sadness, anger or heartbreak. The free labour is often not equal in heterosexual relationships. There would be a wage gap if anybody were actually getting a wage. I have noticed that the number of straight men I know who are in therapy is small. Meanwhile, the majority of women in my life are currently seeing a therapist, have seen one in the past, or are open to the idea of it. Pride is a big contributor to resisting help of any kind and unfortunately men are socialized to believe that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness. Many men I speak to can’t recognize the benefits of shifting the emotional weight from their tired partners onto an actual expert. Just the other month I was chatting with a man I was casually seeing in bed about how he was feeling down and achieving tasks was a struggle because of his mental health. I’ve had depression and anxiety for years so I understood exactly where he was coming from. I started to suggest that he talk to a professional but he instantly interrupted me to say, “No way. Fuck that. I don’t need therapy.” I attempted to enlighten him about the benefits of it. How he’d likely enjoy the process and find it fascinating and he’d learn a lot about himself that he couldn’t fathom before. “It couldn’t hurt,” I persisted. You might as well give it a try.” “Nope,” he replied. “I don’t need that shit. I’m doing just fine.” He then proceeded to spill his insides to me for another hour and ask for advice and request my analysis until I literally fell asleep as he spoke. Although I am typically gentle with fellow mental health suffers, I found myself getting more agitated and upset by his close-minded attitude. I’m aware that it can take a while to come around to the concept of speaking to a stranger about your problems, but this is such a popular knee-jerk response from the straight men I know. They’re fully on board with handing a woman a thousand-page novel on their inner demons, but they’re not okay with talking to an expert in the field? They’re not okay with picking up a self-book at the library or listening to a TED Talk about anger or reading an article about anxiety? They’re not okay with crying about it to their male roommate or writing in a journal or spreading that emotional weight around? Well, they’re gonna have to get okay with it, because it’s not a woman’s job to provide emotional labour and I am done staying up until 4 am having a one-sided conversation about how I can help fix their issues. Of course there’s going to be mutual growth in any relationship and that’s what makes human interaction so beautiful and magical and advantageous for all parties involved. We learn from each other and it’s gorgeous to witness. But there’s a difference between healthy mutual growth and toxic unilateral development where the scale is significantly tipped. Then it’s less of a partnership and more of a boss-employee dynamic: One partner consistently works hard at improving themselves and looking inward and striving to blossom into a stable flower and the other partner relies on external effort from girlfriend-teachers and unpaid emotion interns to light the flame of potential change. Everyone should attempt to improve themselves regardless of outside influence. I’m too busy working on me to also 100% lead the charge on my partner’s advancement. I don’t have the energy to simultaneously fix multiple humans, especially if my emotions are being bruised in the process. And I definitely don’t have the time to do it if I’m not getting paid an hourly wage.

You hear about it all the time: musicians of different bands getting together recording a cd. Sometimes this results in a disaster but in the case of Black Country Communion I would almost say it surpasses their own work! The energy that explodes out of my speakers tells me one important thing: These guys had a blast recording this silvery disc!! Joe Bonamassa is clearly in his element here playing one fat riff after another making me grab my guitar instantly… The thing I love most about this album is that its honest. Not hundreds of overdubs, almost like you’re listening to a live performance, so props to the man pushing the buttons! I was actually surprised that they have a keyboardist in the name of Derek Sherinian whom I remember of his time in Dream Theater This is probably because the electronics are not so much on the foreground in the heavy songs which I consider to be a good thing. It keeps everything intense and raw and I think you would have to switch off his handy work to find out that it is actually a very important part of the sound. In other words, everything blends perfectly and has its place in this group… What else is there to say, this is by far one of the best albums that I have heard in years! No tracks to fill the space, amazing musicianship, the voice of Glenn Hughes, the skills of Joe Bonamassa and then there is Jason! From experience I’ve learned that a drummer can completely transform the sound of a band, the energy it emits. Wrong drummer in the wrong place and a lot of the magic is gone. Jason is definitely the man for the Job here. That he is the son of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham doesn’t mean anything to me, he doesn’t need his daddy’s fame and shows that time and time again. I’m sure the genes have helped him learning his skills probably but even with the genetics on his side, he got where he’s at now because of hard work, dedication, passion, and last but not least his musicianship! Black Country Communion fills the need of millions of people who love that old skool rock music… Forget about Purple, Zeppelin and others for a while… There is a new gang in town and they mean business!! My Favourite TracksLittle Secret (3 great solos) Smokestack woman (great guitar main riff) Faithless (great composition) What I Love - Fantastic guitar riffs - Soaring guitar solos - Great compositions - Intense vocals - I could go on for hours... Not So Much - I hate it that I can't really find something to dislike For anyone who loves the old bands like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and others: check them out! But in general this is a great CD with a good mix of rock and blues influences. If you are an intermediate guitarist there is a lot for you on this cd to like and play...

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Julia Collins was just a little girl when she discovered her passion for food. Her grandparent’s home in San Francisco became a communal haven where she was able to witness how cooking brought people together. After attending Harvard University as a biomedical engineering major one thing remained: her love of food. This in turn inspired her to seek a career in the business. After developing two successful restaurants in NYC, Collins saw the opportunity to return to her roots in Silicon Valley and combine her love of food and technology with the development of Zume Pizza. Since co-founding the pizza company which is known for its robotic technology that makes pizzas, she is a unicorn in Silicon Valley with a company valued at $2.25 billion after raising an additional $375 million this year. With so much success in just three years with Zume, Collins is stepping down as President and preparing for the next phase of her journey in food tech and her goal of wanting her 11-month-old son to inherit a planet that’s healthier than the one that we’re living on right now. Ahead, Collins shared with ESSENCE her humble beginnings in the food industry, the challenges Black women face in Silicon Valley and what her plans are for her new company:How did you get your start in the food industry? There was nothing that would please my family more than for me to get this incredible degree in [biomedical engineering]. The problem is I wasn’t living my authentic truth. You know, even at 18 years old, I knew that it just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t until I came to Stanford Business School and I permitted myself to live in my authentic truth and to say to myself, ‘Julia, it’s food, this is what is meant for you. This is what the universe is calling you to do.’ I was fortunate that [restaurateur] Danny Meyer gave me my first job in the business. He took a chance on me, and that was the turning point in my career when I got to be a summer intern at Union Square Hospitality Group where the early Shake Shack was being formed. I can’t claim any success for that enterprise, but I had the good fortune of working for Randy Garutti who is now the CEO of Shake Shack and working for Danny Meyer, who’s been a most well-loved person in the world of restaurant development. I was working for Richard Coraine, who’s probably the smartest person in the world of restaurant development on earth. After that I knew that I couldn’t do anything else with my life. I had to be in the food business, and so when I graduated from Stanford Business School, I went back to work for Danny before going on to start my other food businesses. After building your résumé working with companies like Shake Shack and Murray’s Cheese and founding and owning two popular New York City restaurants Mexicue and The Cecil, why did you return to San Francisco?I knew that the timing was right. I knew that I’d be able to get traction for the idea [of Zume]. I knew that the investment community was beginning to think about food, and all the conditions were right for me to move here and build this business from the ground up, but it didn’t exist before I got here. Tell me about Zume.I’m so incredibly proud of Zume Pizza because it’s the first time in my career when I’ve had the opportunity to build a company that innovated across so many elements of the food industry. Not just the nature of work in the food industry, not only the quality of the supply chain in the food industry but also the health of the food and the taste of the food. That’s what was so exciting about Zume Pizza, and that’s why I knew that 2015 was the right time for me to move to Silicon Valley and work on this, because I could see that the market conditions were completely optimal. I was going to be able to get customers to love what I was doing; I was going to be able to get employees to want to come and work for us and I was going to be able to get investment from the investment community. Where do you see the food industry headed towards in the next few years and how is your company Zume leading the way?What has to happen is we have to make a significant correction regarding the way that we are eating, the way that we are growing, the way that we’re delivering food. By the year 2050, there’ll be 9.7 billion people living on planet earth. We have already reached the limit of arable land, and water in certain parts of the world over-consumption of beef in North America, combined with the rise of the middle class elsewhere in the world is creating a massive surge in global warming. Nitrogen runoff from agriculture and livestock is creating dead zones in our states, and we’re on the verge of a global ecological disaster. Companies like Zume are incredibly important because they’re using technology to create a better future for food. We’re using innovation in growing and distribution to shorten the supply chain. We’re using menu development to create an appetite for fresh produce so that customers lessen their dependence on red meat and replaced that with a joy and a love for vegetables and fresh produce. We do that by sourcing from local purveyors. We also have to think about the jobs that are involved in the food industry, and we were always very proud that through automation we were able to create better safer jobs. Eliminating tasks that are dangerous, like sticking your hand in and out of an 800-degree pizza oven and letting a robot do that task so that you preserve the occupation of being a cook. You preserve the job, but you remove the tasks that are dirty, dangerous and dull — all of those things that human beings shouldn’t be doing. Last year, your company raised $48 million. You’ve raised $375 million with Softbank Capital this year. What does it take to reach such milestones in two years? I want to preface this by saying I don’t value myself as an entrepreneur based on the valuation of my company. I don’t value myself as a leader based on the size of my last fundraising round. The point is the impact that we’re having with our company. If we think about a different milestone, how many jobs were created in a year, that’s a significant milestone and what it takes for me is a commitment as a leader to living your values. It’s a commitment to doing the right thing to being with your team and to putting your energy and putting your money where your mouth is. To go from just myself and the cofounders sitting on a card table, to having 270 people gainfully employed by our company in such a short time. That’s a huge milestone, but it takes a lot of hard work. I think it takes a commitment to live your values because ultimately your customers, your employees, and the investment community are going to measure you based on that. What were some of the challenges that you faced as a woman trying to raise money in food tech, and how did you overcome them? I was surprised when I got to Silicon Valley; the situation was as dire as it was regarding the utter lack of representation in the room. I rarely ever met a female investor, let alone a Black female investor. That has changed a little bit now that I’ve broadened my network in the Valley. When I did find a woman present in the room, it changed the dynamic. It felt like that team was listening to me in a way that I didn’t feel when I was in a room of all male investors…Many of these investors simply do not have friends of color. They do not have powerful friends that are women, and so the context that they’re always using is, ‘Well, maybe I’ll ask my wife if that’s a good idea.’ I think what happened is many of these investors move in circles that are homogenous and so when they enter the boardroom; they don’t have the experience of understanding how to see a Black woman, how to empathize with her. That’s one of the issues that I see; it’s just a culture of homogeneity that’s pervasive in both social and professional circles. One of the problems that we have is when people talk about diversity in the Valley, they’re not talking about intersectionality. They’re not talking about the unique experience of being Black and a woman or being differently abled and a woman or being queer and a woman. They’re just sometimes looking at increasing participation by women and if we’re only making a change regarding increasing the number of white and Asian women, if that’s what we’re doing, then we’re not solving the problem. You’ve helped to build this company you’ve created, you have 270 people who are gainfully employed. You’re making way with trying to create opportunities for other Black girls in Silicon Valley, so what’s next for you? I am so excited that I have the opportunity to use all of the learning and all of the momentum that I gained while I was at Zume to build my next company. The company is going to be the first food company built on a 100 percent regenerative supply chain. This means that we’re moving beyond just organic food or moving beyond just sustainable food. We’re moving into food and food products that actually regenerate, replenish, and heal the earth. For example, if Americans ate 10 percent less red meat and replaced that red meat with beans, lentils, lagoons, we could reduce global warming in America to the tune of something like taking 25 million cars off the road. I’m building a food company that relies on a regenerative supply chain so that we can begin to turn back the hands of time. With regenerative agriculture, we can do that. The other thing I care a lot about is social justice, and so I’m doubling down on the work that I’m doing with Black Girls Code and I’m also going to be doing some angel investing, really focusing on female entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color and I’m going to be launching both of those initiatives in 2019. Why did you decide to leave Zume at this moment, a company you’ve worked so hard and long to build, what does it feel like to step away? I can only tell you that it’s bittersweet. The hardest thing to leave behind is the team. This is the first time in my life when I truly have the freedom to do absolutely whatever I want, and although I’d been an entrepreneur in the past, I’ve never had the level of knowledge, momentum, and access, that I do now. I feel like to whom much is given, much is expected, and because of all the incredible fortune that I’ve had to this point, I think that it is my absolute duty to create something to create a business that has the maximum amount of impact.

Famous for our pitch-perfect patter and tall tales, it's no great surprise that some of the best Scottish books ever written are set in Glasgow. Many of the novels are gritty narratives detailing the triumph and travails of ordinary folk, with the occasional smattering of murrderr (insert Taggart-style accent here) and mystery to keep us on our toes. To celebrate Book Week Scotland, here is our rundown of Glasgow Live's favourite reads that feature our fair city. The heart of Glasgow - Jack House Perhaps one of Glasgow’s greatest ambassadors, Herald columnist Jack House was Mr Glasgow and spent his life telling the city’s stories. Packed with these little anecdotes, ranging from the mundane to the momentous, The heart of Glasgow is more than just a history book but a love affair in print and a fitting record of a great writer’s works. The Dear Green Place - Archie Hind 1960s Glasgow is artfully drawn by Hind in this story of wannabe writer and working-class hero Mat Craig. Mat hails from a large family who look down on his literary aspirations. The novel documents his inner conflict as he shelves his dream to work in a slaughterhouse, only to eventually pack it all in pursuit of his calling. A tragic tale that ponders the conflict between social obligations and the pursuit of art. Laidlaw - William McIlvanney It begins with one of the most gripping, stylish openings, a breathless sprint that sets Scotland’s greatest crime novel off at a frantic pace. Others will point to the likes of Ian Rankin and Denise Mina and argue that they are more deserving of that accolade. But this is where ‘Tartan Noir’ all began and you can vividly picture Glasgow in every scene. How late it was, how late- James Kelman You could really have picked a number of books by James Kelman but his 1994 Booker Prize winner is an obvious choice. Telling the story of Sammy, a man who wakes up blind after a beating, it is a grim and completely gripping tale of poverty and hopelessness in Glasgow. It is also written entirely in the vernacular, with Kelman paving the way for the likes of Irvine Welsh and other Scots writers. Buddha Da - Anne Donovan This tale of a Glasgow painter's religious awakening is written entirely in the local dialect - which can appear impenetrable to the uninitiated. A lyrical observation of an ordinary man's struggles to bridge the gap between his personal life and his spiritual curiosity, a chance meeting with a Buddhist monk leads to Jimmy seeking more out of life than the mundane but it's a journey that wreaks havoc on his family life. The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh Another writer who sets up Glasgow as the perfect backdrop for another unnerving thriller. The discovery of a pornographic snuff collection sets the protagonist off on a quest to find out the identity of the woman in the images. It also sends him into the darkest recesses of the city. A film of the book, which was set to star Robert Carlyle was briefly floated and sunk, which is unfortunate because the Cutting Room is a story worthy of a movie adaptation. Driftnet - Lin Anderson Another great Glasgow crime novel and one of those ideas that just grabs you from the outset. A forensic scientist is called to investigate the death of a young rent boy, found strangled by a silk rope. But is he the son she gave up for adoption 17 years earlier? Driftnet became the first of eight novels to feature the main character, Rhona MacLeod. Young Adam - Alexander Trocchi Set on Glasgow’s canals, the protagonist, a drifter and failed writer called Joe, finds the body of a young woman floating in the water and is connected to her thereafter. But as the story develops, an existing thread between the two is found. A grim and bleak tale that leaves a lasting impression and like his other great work, Cain’s Book, reflects the writer’s own experiences. The Thistle and the Grail - Robin Jenkins This might just be the greatest piece of football fiction ever written. Okay, so Drumsagart isn’t Glasgow, but it’s Lanarkshire and, for the purpose of this article, that’s close enough. The book tells of their toiling local team’s pursuit of ‘the Grail’, the Scottish Junior Cup and of the many subplots and intrigues that surround their season. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is some impenetrable sporting tome, it’s life - as everyone on the west coast of Scotland knows it. Garnethill - Denise Mina Another exploration into the dark underbelly of Glasgow, Denise Mina's suspenseful thriller is the first in her gripping Garnethill trilogy. When Maureen O'Donnell finds her married lover and former therapist murdered in her flat all signs point to her as the perpetrator. That she is a former psychiatric patient with an accusatory alcoholic mother and overly fond of a dram herself does nothing to help her case. Determined to clear her name but doubting her own version of events, Maureen charts the victim's last days and is plunged into the murky depths of deceit, murder and scandal. Lanark - a life in four books - Alisdair Gray Set in Glasgow and the sunless town of Unthank, a facsimile of it's sister city, Gray's surreal allegorical novel Lanark has been hailed as one of Scotland's finest literary works. Detailing a modern vision of hell, the novel charts the protagonist's search for love in a stark and largely loveless world. Fantasy and reality fuse in this chaotic romp that hooks you from it's opening sentence. Prepare to be entertained and occasionally confused - but in a good way.

Panic Bodies 70 minutes,16 mm, 1998 “A meditation on the after-life that’s as powerful as anything in cinema …one of the truly defining movies in Canadian filmmaking history.” (Peter Goddard, Toronto Star) “We have come to expect only the dazzling and uncommon from the prolific, prodigiously talented, and frequently transgressive Mike Hoolboom, perhaps the most important Canadian experimental filmmaker of his generation, and the startlingly beautiful Panic Bodies delivers the potent goods. Like much of Hoolboom’s gorgeous, unsettling recent work, Panic Bodies is infused with an AIDS-era horror at the body under siege, with a palpable sense of wonder and revulsion at our flesh-and-blood corporeality, at ‘being a stranger in your own skin.’ The film’s multi-levelled meditation on morality moves from rage to reverie, and unfolds in six often-hallucinatory episodes: Positiv, a multi-screen monologue about AIDS; A Boy’s Life, a masturbatory revel; Eternity, a reflection on Disneyland and death, 1+1+1 a devilish, pixillated black comedy; Moucle’s Island, a nostalgic lesbian idyll; and the concluding, elegiac Passing On.” Jim Sinclair, Pacific Cinematheque “Filmed in the shadow of AIDS, Panic Bodies is Hoolboom’s testament to the permanent impermanence of the flesh. The film’s six parts show the range of Hoolboom’s engagement with mortality, from rage to reverie… Whether he’s remixing Terminator 2 or concocting a female paradise, Hoolboom finds a balance between razor-sharp intellect and palpable love for images and sounds. To watch Panic Bodies is to see what it means to live and die in the cinema.” Cameron Bailey, NOW “Often challenging, always mesmerizing, Panic Bodies is an intensely moving meditation on post-AIDS mortality, from one of Canada’s leading exponents of fringe film. Structured in six self-contained segments, ranging in tone from rage to reverie, Hoolboom confronts his own HIV+ status, the impermanence of the human body and the frailty of human existence. An eclectic ensemble piece, Panic Bodies draws its inspiration from a number of sources: science-fiction old and new, found footage and home movies as well as collaborations with Ed Johnson, Tom Chomont and Moucle Blackout. Wildly playing with genre and gender, Hoolboom’s film combines masturbatory ‘monodrama’ and pixilated slapstick, lesbian idylls and memento mori in a virtuoso feat of technical skill and cinematic imagination.” London Lesbian and Gay Festival “Paul Ricoeur said the two toughest things humans have to face are that we will die and not everyone loves us. Panic Bodies catalogues earthly attachments-physical, material-as part of the spiritual process of acknowledging mortality, of preparing to die.” Steve Reinke “Panic Bodies is Mike Hoolboom’s new feature-length experimental film in which he confronts and displays his own battle with AIDS and explores the body’s various transformations in sickness and in cinema. One of Canada’s most important filmmakers and art activists, Hoolboom (who collaborated on Matthias Mueller’s Pensao Globo) mixes visual poetry and personal confession with visceral, transgressive explorations of the human body.” San Francisco Cinematheque, Winter 1999 “Canadian experimentalist Mike Hoolboom is less ‘persistent’ than Van der Keuken by about twenty years, but his career is also full of treasures. Among these is Panic Bodies (1988), a six-party study of the beauty of the body and its tragic temporality. Hoolboom has turned his own experience as an HIV-positive man into art, drawing on such disparate elements as home movies, microscopy, found footage from a 1930s ‘naturist’ film, and a whimsical miniature melodrama about a man in search of his lost penis. In a voice-over to the last segment, Hoolboom talks about the ‘conspiracy of chromosomes’ that make up the human being, but the phrase is ironic; for him, nothing is more human or felt than what that conspiracy has created.” Gary Morris, SF Weekly, April 21-27 1999 “Panic Bodies is an astoundingly beautiful cavalcade of images that explores the ephemeral nature of life as seen through the eyes of a filmmaker with AIDS; it is also a paean to the body as a site of sexual pleasure and beauty, one that ultimately betrays the filmmaker. The narrator remarks that before learning he was positive, ‘life had a unity of design, and that shape was my body.’ The six parts of this elegant film are heartbreaking in their relentless celebration of daily life. The first section, Positiv, unfolds with icons of childhood, doctors and old wrestling films; the simple act of telling seems to foster the accretion of memory. Eternity takes the form of a letter about fighting disease and practicing loss, superimposed over haunting images of old teacups, people in boats and water. Moucle’s Island is a lovely reverie of naked woman on a beach playing ball and leapfrogging. Passing On mines memories of siblings, parents and an estranged aunt who whispers presciently to the filmmaker at age sixteen, ‘Never grow old.'” San Francisco International Festival, 1999 “Using studiously chosen dreamlike images, Mike Hoolbooom’s six-part experimental feature examines the body. One of Canada’s pre-eminent avant-garde filmmakers and a master in the art of found footage, Hoolboom draws compelling images from many sources, including films, music videos, home movies, scientific filmstrips, as well as his own newly shot footage. The six chapters of the film all work together to evoke dreams, memories and the stark reality of bodily experience. Even at his most abstract, Hoolboom has complete command over the form. His montage of sound and image convey notions of morality and impermanence in a continually inventive and eye-opening manner. Panic Bodies is experimental filmmaking at its finest-stunning, lyrical and deeply reflective.” New Festival, NY, June 3-13, 1999 “An ambitious and provocative blueprint for love and death in the 21st century, this six-part journey through the body rubs up against American pop culture, archival porn and home movies to find a room of its own. Poetic and sensual, this is a kaleidoscopic exploration of AIDS, death, sexuality, memory, spirituality, relationships… Hoolboom sets the tone with Positiv; a monologue about AIDS told in four split-screens featuring pop-culture images, home movies and footage of visits to the doctor. A Boy’s Life follows up with a first person monodrama about a man fleeing from childhood sins into a masturbatory revel. In Eternity Disneyland is juxtaposed with a letter speaking about the white light after death. 1+1+1 is a pixilated black comedy about the relationship between a couple of devils. Poignant and playful, Moucle’s Island features Viennese filmmaker Moucle Blackout in a reverie which combines an older woman relearning childhood gestures with a nostalgic lesbian idyll. Passing On concludes the journey.” Ken Anderlini, Vancouver International Festival, 1998 “Canadian avant-gardist Mike Hoolboom’s Panic Bodies is an abstract meditation on AIDS, mortality, and the vulnerable human body. Likely to baffle or offend some viewers, it nonetheless offers complex aesthetic and thematic layers for discerning audiences to explore. Gay fests and experimental showcases are signaled. The movie is in six parts, each of which could stand alone as a short. One combines multiple images of home movies, medical reels and classic commercial features while a voice-over muses on loss of control over the body; others feature a masturbating man comically (and literally) losing his member and the reading of a letter relating a man’s protracted death from Parkinson’s disease. Last, longest and best section, Passing On, is potent enough to lend the whole feature a certain unity and sense of summation, as it poignantly mixes the personal, lyrical and spiritual. Hoolboom deploys a wide mix of visual tactics throughout, from borrowed footage to tinted, sped-up and upside-down images. Earle Peach’s sound design is equally adventurous. Though many viewers likely will find it too nonlinear, and perhaps too explicit in occasional sexual content, Panic Bodies rewards the patient with a deeply affecting afterglow.” Dennis Harvey, Variety, May3-9, 1999 “Mike Hoolboom is a sentimental cinematic predecessor to the late David Wojnarowicz. Divided into six sections, this feature races against mortality. Positiv sets the tone, its four-panelled screen barraging the viewer: Hoolboom shares intimate narratives and steals pop imagery, turning it into the stuff of dreams. Likewise A Boy’s Life moves porn from the rote ‘real world’ it usually occupies (tacky apartments, etc) placing it further into the subconscious. 1+1+1 accelerated identity-swap scenario is suffocating while its fluorescent color bursts are breathtaking. The final sections tap into the inherent poignancy of home movies. Spinning backward on a merry-go-round of memory in Passing On, Hoolboom stares at the viewer with a face that conveys many emotions. Merriment isn’t one of them.” Huston, San Francisco Bay Guardian “An abundance of material is being used by Canadian Mike Hoolboom in Panic Bodies, a film of feature-length and one of the most outstanding films of the festival. From the very beginning he calls for the audience’s full attention, when on a split screen shots taken from Hollywood movies, video clips and home movies as well as the filmmaker himself can be seen and heard in his monologue on AIDS. The subjects of disease and death have been treated by Hoolboom in his previous films. Panic Bodies is composed out of various parts designed in different styles with the furious beginning being joined by the appearance of a performance artist. This part deals with the dramatic consequences of masturbation. In the next section, inserted text fragments derived from private correspondences depict a very personal story of two brothers, before one is allowed to drift into dreaming while watching scenes of a vintage porno movie. The cycle is closed by its longest part, re-introducing Hoolboom in a reflection on the loss of loved ones integrating home movies material. In spite of being in danger of falling apart, Hoolboom succeeds in keeping our interest alive because of his use of very diverse formal means.” Johannes C. Tritschler, epd Film, 7/99 “In a year full of Armageddons and an industry full of Cubes, it’s nice to see iconoclastic experimental local filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, two-time winner of the Toronto International Festival’s award for best Canadian short film, still doing his elegiac, hypnotic, emotionally grueling thing-and, even better, getting it shown (courtesy of those fine folks at Pleasure Dome). Four years in the making, Hoolboom’s latest-Panic Bodies-is a 16mm opus cut together from six different shorts, the longest of which clocks in at a svelte (by Hollywood standards) 20 minutes. Thematically, all touch on the personal and philosophical implications of his own HIV-positive status; qualitatively, they’re pretty much either brilliantly engaging or trance-like in their own inaccessibility. But the pleasures of the former, to my mind, far outweigh the momentary boredom of the latter. Stand-out honours go to Positiv, the program opener, which reproduces and elaborates upon the same quadruple-exposure hijinks Hoolboom first patented in Frank’s Cock, and Eternity, which uses a Steve Reinke-like combination of repetitive sound and image (light on water, birdcalls) and superimposed words to recreate a man’s last letter to a dying friend. The rest is borne on a boil of overlaid, self-referential and poetically repetitive imagery-stock footage, original material, home movie loops-which packs all the forlorn punch of shreds torn from a stranger’s memory: freeze-frame poetry, projected from the brain on outward. Hoolboom’s work continues to produce some of the most heartfelt, least common denominator commentary on Canadian culture available today. And much like this fever-dream we call life, the mere act of viewing Panic Bodies provides a truly unrepeatable experience, half transcendence and half tedium-a fleeting pleasure which we owe it to ourselves to savor as long as possible, before the inevitable fade to black.” Gemma Files, Eye Magazine, Oct. 8, 1998 “Having been diagnosed HIV positive, Hoolboom received a new impulse. The presence of the virus and its hiddenness evoke a chain of illusions and biological visions, new exercises in his film memory. The obsessive presence of sex/injury perseveres. However, it is no longer a shock of explicit nudity. Sexuality is an elegiac demonstration of incompatible, random beings. In the director’s version, the film undergoes the same kind of transformation (decay: film, a body without organs), but the loop of eternal return provides the film with a true resurrection. The film is divided into six parts. The opening section (Positiv) is the director’s collage of porn, popular scientific films, detailed footage of cells as well as sequences from classical films of big narratives. The picture is divided into four-one of them features the director and his soliloquy about AIDS that comments on bodies entangled in sex and death. The film’s second part (A Boy’s Life) is a bizarre kaleidoscope about masturbation and the loss of penis, an ironic reminder of men’s giant fear. In the third part (Eternity), a letter of Tom Chomont overlaps footage from a family archive. The words are suddenly more important than the picture. It is a long passionate confession about dying and light, which does not hurt the eyes. In an experimental ‘fiendish’ romance (1+1+1), a manual work with the film is dominant along with scratches, spilled paint and an industrial soundtrack. The work of Moucle Blackout, an Austrian filmmaker born in Prague, became an inspiration of an impressionistic idyll in the film’s next part (Moucle’s Island). Several decades old footage shows naked women at play. Archetypal nudist sweetness that evokes a remote innocence is an intermezzo, which precedes the final part (Passing On). The director’s suggestive confession is fully focused on death: fatigue is endless, the betrayal of the body (conspiracy of chromosomes) is irrevocable. There’s nothing left to do but compose a sad song in a long loop of solitary walks.” Jihlava Documentary Festival “Panic Bodies consists of six parts or chapters, varying in length and style. Each suggests a new approach to these returning questions: what does it mean to have a body; to be a body, and what does this body want? Hoolboom appears in the framing chapters, and in between others take his place, submitting their bodies to a probing research. The treatment and effects of AIDS reform these subjects, but also the sexual body with all its desires and questions, and the almost dying body that can temporarily leave the world to be absorbed by what is called ‘the white light’ in Eternity. Voice-overs and intertitles alternate and speak sometimes in loaded (quoted) words, and then again in casual little lines like: “I am writing these thoughts because they relate to that moment in my kitchen when we speak and what happens to us.” This intimacy is typical of Panic Bodies. The voice speaks directly to the viewer, confessing, admitting, raising questions. A theme that recurs over and again in Hoolboom’s work is: looking and being looked at; how we are using images, how images are using us and how our memory is mediated by all this. In Panic Bodies Hoolboom joins questions from and about our body and our relationship to our death, to issues of memory and the image. Panic Bodies’s opening chapter, Positiv, shows the filmmaker in a small enclosure, speaking about becoming a body and AIDS. Around him three accompanying screens fill with the manic refuse of the mediaverse, providing counterpoint and juxtaposition to the flow of language. The second chapter is a wordless psychodrama, entitled A Boy’s Life, which shows a man in search. Beautifully photographed in close-up, this haptic quest narrative is shot from inside the body, out into a world which it also imagines as a body. The third chapter is entitled Eternity and features a video letter which appears over barely visible pictures made in Disneyland. The letter is by Tom Chomont, subject of Hoolboom’s next movie, and relates the death of his brother, and the white light which accompanies the beginning and end of life. The fourth chapter 1+1+1 is also the shortest, a stop motion romance repeated three times in successive waves of legibility, as two battling lovers arrive at a place where the Other becomes visible. The fifth chapter is entitled Moucle’s Island and features Vienna avant filmmaker Moucle Blackout. It rhymes her movements with the gestures of a small child, and then projects her into a dreamy sexual reverie. Each of the first five chapters might be read as portraits and these are drawn together in the concluding chapter, Passing On, which is the longest and most elaborate chapter. Elegiac in tone, the filmmaker returns to host a succession of vanishing friends and familiars in an avant-garde home movie that is also a ghost story.” Esma Moukhtar, Montevideo Catalogue “The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time… They are also in the ground of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.” (Don DeLillo) It is a movie about AIDS, the body, about living and dying. It begins, in positiv, with a monologue, which is metaphorically replayed in A Boy’s Life showing (again) a male solitary who tries to reconcile himself as a body of parts. Eternity is a film letter about the white light often experienced in near-death situations. 1+1+1 is a series of three variations on a couple trying to find their way together. Moucle’s Island shows a woman alone, recalling childhood, miming its gestures, and then slipping into a reverie of pastoral dykedom. Passing On is the closing note, an elegy and way of saying good-bye to those no longer here. Positiv (10 minutes) A monologue about AIDS, rendered in split-screens generously furnished with images from Terminator 2, science flicks, Michael Jackson and home movies. Positiv is for those who find TV too slow, though its roots lie in a multi-channel universe accessible by remote control. Its four screens play simultaneously. In the upper right hand corner a man speaks about the body and AIDS. On the upper and lower left hand screens a storm of pictures issue, culled from science films, rock videos, horror flicks and sci-fi movies. This montage of association features bodies grown large and small, frozen and burning, crumbling to ash and reforming, tortured and pleasured. On the bottom right hand screen, home movies show children at play, and then visits to the doctor, blood tests and drug inhalations. Here the body has been divided, cracked open, its myriad reflections in the media allowed to issue like an open wound. A Boy’s Life (15 minutes) Featuring Toronto performance artist Ed Johnson, this first person monodrama shows a man in flight from the sins of his childhood, his attempted escape through a masturbatory revel that is so shattering he loses his prick, and his ensuing search for his missing organ. Eternity (10 minutes) A film in the form of a letter written to me by New York filmer Tom Chomont. In it he speaks of the white light after death, Parkinson’s, and his brother’s last moments in a New York emergency ward. The scrolling text appears over dark pictures shot in Disneyland, its architectures designed to stage the family, its dark inhabitants floating on rivers of light and sound. 1+1+1 (8 minutes) “A pixilated couple plays dress-up and undress-up as Earle Peach’s industrial-strength audio track pulsates and ebbs with churning tides of sound.” (Geoff Pevere, Images Festival Catalogue) Devils fall in love in Seattle in a black comedy of sex, machines and flight. Photographed a frame at a time over three days, 1+1+1 casts Boughton and Ramey as unlikely lovers, the first appearing as a hovering devil in flight, excreting a vegetable life, while Ramey’s clock-spitting, bathing-besuited countenance lifts weights in a frank measure of indifference. Their touch promotes a shimmering aura of light, a celestial forcefield which they lash against, finally retiring to the kitchen with a gaggle of tools to fine tune desire. Donning each other’s clothes, they fly off together to the strains of Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. “Howling sirens and film which seems to be burning evoke the violence of war. From the ruins of the images, a man and a woman gradually emerge. Without a word but with a powerfully suggestive soundtrack, Hoolboom sets the stage for a strange dry-humoured theatre. Particularly daunting is the role of the woman who ironically delights in doing violence to the man. With its great formal inventiveness combining accelerated sequences and pixilation, this film is as jarring as the lives of many couples.” Jean Perret, Visions du Réel Moucle’s Island (12 minutes) Featuring Viennese filmmaker Moucle Blackout, this all-woman reverie centers on two kinds of recall, the first to childhood where the untrained early gestures are re-learned as an older woman, and the second in a lesbian idyll, looking back in joyous nostalgia at a geography that might bear, if only for an afternoon, the impress of one’s own naming. Passing On (20 minutes) “Children playing emerge from overexposed film spoiled by time. It is snowing. These solarized images deal with memory in this film of maturity by Mike Hoolboom. The tone is serious; his voice evokes his brother, his parents. The people appear on the screen as though they were disappearing. Hoolboom records the loss of loved ones whose features he stares at with lasting affection. Beautifully simple recurring shots of the white square with black lines crossing it represent the realm of the hereafter, where the ghosts go. With contained and poignant lyricism, Passing On addresses itself to death as something familiar, death which prowls and throws into relief the images of a cinema trying to resist another death, no doubt worse, a white death of memories forgotten, without images.” Jean Perret, Visions du Réel “Passing On was the densest and most exciting experimental film in Oberhausen since Pat O’Neill’s Water and Power in 1989. The reflections on death, mortality and our common fate of passing are expressed in a technical sophistication and mastery rarely achieved by other filmmakers. Images in a deep sepia tone never seen before on screen are combined with refined multiple exposures and outstanding compositions. On the same level of quality are the poetic eloquence of the reflections and the sensitivity of the voice-over. Mike Hoolboom from now on has to considered equal to filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage or his fellow-countryman Michael Snow.” Georg Immich, Film + TV Kammermann, issue 6/98, June 98 “Portrait of the filmmaker as a busy young man” by Liam Lacey (Globe and Mail Oct. 10, 1998) Experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom is a prolific figure, but tonight he outdoes himself: he’s unveiling both a feature-length film (Panic Bodies) and a book (Plague Years: A Life in Underground Movies) which blends film scripts and autobiography. Hoolboom has made more than 25 films (and more than 40 if you count the pieces out of which some of his movies are assembled) in the past 18 years, shown his work in more than 200 film festivals and twice won the award for best short film at the Toronto International Festival. Often cited as one of the most important Canadian filmmakers of his generation, Hoolboom is also one of the best chroniclers of other fringe filmmakers. He has written more than 80 articles and essays for film journals, and his book Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada has an introduction by Atom Egoyan, who cites Hoolboom as one of the filmmakers who inspired him. If there has been a quality of urgency to Hoolboom’s output, it’s understandable. Ten years ago, after going to donate blood, he discovered he was HIV-positive, an event which he writes in his new book, “did wonders for my film production, and while my earlier movies were slow open fields where viewers might graze and push on, the new work turned behind a different pace car.” In the two years following, he produced ten films which he describes as characterized by a “frantic, near hysterical montage, with bodies shattered into parts, and an underlying feeling of dread.” The pace has barely slowed, but the frantic quality is less evident. At 70 minutes, Panic Bodies might even be described as his first feature, even though it consists of six separate films. It represents four years of work and a demonstration of a wide variety of approaches to one prevailing concern, the fact of living in a body. You can think of it, says Hoolboom, “like an accordion that folds out, and shows you all the different bodies you’ve ever been. Like a body, the film has different parts. It’s a film that deals with AIDS, which fragments the body, so it’s a film of fragments.” The film shows Hoolboom speaking directly to the camera in one of four separate films running together on the screen. Sometimes it uses images from Hollywood movies and rock videos, home movies, vintage porn, a pixilated pantomime between a man and woman in a kitchen, or scenes of people masturbating. One segment puts on the screen the text of an entire letter from a friend, about watching his brother die. The fact of being imprisoned by an aging body is the subject of another. In a segment entitled Moucle’s Island, Hoolboom decided to do an experiment with a friend, Moucle Blackout. He asked her to move again as a child, filming her crawl through tunnels as if they were a birth canal, and later intercut images of children climbing into chairs, added an old porno film of women frolicking and finished with a shot of Moucle masturbating while being washed in water. Occasionally, in Plague Years he writes of filmmaking as a kind of mourning, although mourning, as he explains it, is not quite the same as grief. “Filmmaking is inherently an attempt to capture something that disappears,” he says. “It’s a recuperative business. There are early playbills for movies which declaim a promise that, with the coming of sound and colour, death itself would not be so final.” From experimental filmmaking, Hoolboom believes, there is a model of future relationships, of intimacy constantly being mediated through technology, pushing the boundaries of sexuality and taboos. “We’re moving to a different kind of post-literate world. Readers are like books: they’re private. You can’t tell a book by its cover. What the postmodernists are always on about, is how we’re becoming a world of surfaces with no interiors, no private lives. I really think we’re heading that way.” Hoolboom, for his part, is bucking the trend. Currently, he’s writing a novel. “It made me realize that filmmaking is ninety percent running errands. With writing I just need to stay close the place where the words come from.” As a filmmaker and a champion of other filmmakers, he’s driven by a couple of motives. One is the reluctance to makes films that are more of the same in a world too full of copies. “It’s a way of saying no to the Titanics of the world.” It’s also a chance, on a grander level, to talk about the growth of consciousness. “When you were a kid, and the career choices were offered to you-doctor, policeman, fireman-no one ever mentioned “artist.” I’ve been back to my old high school to talk to classes. I’m fascinated how one person’s original idea can becomes everyone’s. There were notions that were only the province of a handful of people 300 years ago that are now taught in high schools. When it comes to exploring what’s new, fringe film glows very brightly.” “Panic Bodies: A Blueprint for Love and Death in the 21st Century” by Tamara Faith Berger (Lola Winter 1998) Panic Bodies is built like a body-a copulation of six films conceived as a whole. It has its head and feet (Positiv and Passing On), and its viscous guts (A Boy’s Life), pumping blood (Eternity), hairy skins (1+1+1) and fat cells (Moucle’s Island). In this body, memory and physicality are intertwined—the head cuts off the feet, the feet stomp the head, and the innards churn and beat, erupt and erode. If Panic Bodies is a film about this body dying, it is amazing because this body is speaking fearlessly. If Panic Bodies is a movie about this body living, it is amazing because this body is telling the bedtime story of death. Within this elliptical form, Panic Bodies becomes both horror and narrative. In one sense, the filmmaker is the slashed-up victim, running through the streets ten feet behind the camera, horrified, bleeding, and holding the weapon he wrestled from his murderer, screaming, “Come! Look at me! Help me! Save me! I almost died!” And at the very same time, the filmmaker is the yarn-spinner whispering to the audience, “I am talking to you, look what I have seen, look what I have known, I am showing you my wounds as they are opening and closing…” Experimental filmmaking usually opposes the structure of mainstream filmmaking, which doesn’t need the participation of the audience to tell its tale. Experimental filmmaking (of which Panic Bodies is a torch-setting example) wants to bring the audience closer to its process and performance, so it can implicate them with every new image and utterance. It follows that most experimental films are not 70 minutes because most makers do not have this much faith in (implicating) their audience. Faith, however, is the quality that unifies Panic Bodies. (This is more startling than one might think.) Hoolboom’s faith in communicating with his audience generates a strange kind of empathy as the audience sits in the dark and watches his throbbing constructions. This is the dis-ease of Panic Bodies—the feeling that we are all dying together. I’m not sure how, but somewhere in this revelation, I meet my equal. I can walk with him into the screen. I have never felt this before. Panic Bodies embraces me even if I don’t want to be embraced. I think this experience of cinematic conviviality runs counter to what Hoolboom himself believes about the deathliness of images. He says that there is something inherently deathly about cinema because the link among all movies is that everyone in them is dead or will pass on. Yet Hoolboom’s film invited me to be vivid-to be as potent and as sad, as full and as sick, as aggressive and as tender, and as urgent as he was, and as his film was. I was not mourning for the passing on of images because I was overcome with the memory of what sadness feels like.” “Fringe Filmmaker Flaunts Subconscious in Ode to Mortality” by Cameron Bailey (Now Magazine cover story, Oct. 8-14, 1998) Mike Hoolboom leans back in his chair and confesses. “I had this dream over the weekend.” Behind him, a bloodied mannequin child protrudes from high up on the wall. What’s that about? I never ask. “I hardly ever remember my dreams,” he says. “I’m underground, putting together two small buffed metal pieces. One has a small stick shift on it which makes for a very satisfying motion. They snap together with a magnetic charge. I do this over and over on a long conveyor belt. I realize that all the things I do in my life-talk, hang my friends, fall in love, answer the phone-are all coming from this action. It all boils down to this. Then the camera zooms out and I see that there are millions of people around me and they’re all doing exactly the same thing. We’re all putting our little metal pieces together. I have this great feeling of communion. We’re all one person after all. At that moment the spotlight shines down on me and I’m scooped up in a net. I look down and realize I’ve been replaced by a machine doing the same thing. It’s putting together the metals, and I scream, ‘No robot could do what I do!’ But of course it could.” He searches me for interpretation. “Anyway that was my dream.” Welcome to Mike Hoolboom. Even his dreams come with camera cues. Hoolboom is one of the world’s best at what he now calls fringe film. They lavish him with retrospectives in Europe. His films play everywhere people demand more from a movie than escape or information. He’s shown more films at the Toronto International Festival than any other Canadian filmmaker. He’s won the award for best Canadian short twice, for Frank’s Cock and Letters From Home. Hoolboom started out when ‘fringe’ was ‘experimental’ and it was all about exploring the tangible qualities of the medium-focus, grain, time. Its highest principles were abstract. But over the past 18 years, his films have evolved from aggressive aesthetic experiments-jumping geometry in Grid, a blank screen in White Museum-toward something both larger and more intimate. He’s telling stories now. He’s put his subconscious on display. The body of his work ranges from the gentle study of light and shadow that underpins Eternity, a part of Panic Bodies, to a ferocious streak of transgression in Shiteater, one chapter of House of Pain. More and more, Hoolboom’s films weave confession, polemic and pure visual poetry into something beyond the fringe. More and more, his work is shaped by the fact that Hoolboom has AIDS. Outside his window, huge construction machines plow steel pillars into the ground. They’re building condos. This is something robots can do. “I think my early movies were like a long handshake with the medium,” he says above the noise. “But after becoming positive, it became incumbent upon me to make work that tried to deal with the things that came up-like mortality and this very odd, new place that my body was in. You look in the mirror and you’re one person because you’re one body. But all of a sudden, you’re not one body any more, because parts are filled with this foreign thing. So maybe I’m more than one, I mean, in the act of contagion, where does one body begin and another end?” Ten years ago, a doctor told Hoolboom he was HIV-positive. He gave him some pamphlets. “I wasn’t certain how to proceed,” he recalls wryly, “but I imagined that the end was not far. In a way, it fit in with how I was living anyway-kinda fast, thoughtlessly, drinking too much, not too… reflective. I just kicked the accelerator into everything I was doing. Made more films. Did more work. Repressed as much as I could and tried to fill my days with stuff. Activity. I got an enormous amount of work done.” Hoolboom cranked out film after film. He took a job as the experimental film officer at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center. He helped create Pleasure Dome. he began editing a new journal, The Independent Eye. “But I was living in a hysterical state. It took leaving Toronto to finally get some distance.” In 1990, Hoolboom began a three year exile in Vancouver. “I moved to a city where I knew nobody, and was alone for a year. I stopped all the drinking, saw another doctor and tried to eat differently. My (T-cell) counts were falling. I knew I had to do something.” His work changed in that time, but it didn’t change into just one thing. It expanded. He collaborated with Kika Thorne, Steve Sanguedolce and with Ann Marie Fleming, each of whom brought new colours to his work. He made Kanada, an experimental feature about a future where people with AIDS were quarantined by the Gretzky government. He discovered Madonna. Hoolboom’s recent films often throw pop culture up against avant-garde rigour. He’s mined the Madonna image trove at least three times, and his new book, Plague Years, includes a hilarious fake memoir of meeting the goddess-commodity in high school. To Hoolboom, aesthetic isolation is for fools. He thinks of how the marketplace has swallowed fringe film techniques and snorts. “Hand processing? The National Football League uses that for its promos now. The only thing that’s avant-garde is commercials. People with money are in the avant because they know where we’re going. It’s the 90s. People are following money. And yes there are these eruptions of dissent, and that seems to belong to the fringe.” But he insists, “Fringe film is so valueless now. Its ideals belong to another time. It’s like a hangover of the 50s beat, pseudo-anarchistic thing, coupled with 60s social movements.” So this is the end of an era. “It’s so clear now. There’s one lab left in town that will do colour 16mm film. There’s one guy left who knows how to do opticals. When he’s gone, you won’t be able to get those done in Toronto anymore. I’d be shocked if 16mm lasted more than a couple of decades.” New times demand new methods. So Hoolboom is doing something fringe purists usually scoff at. He’s listening to his audience. “I took Panic Bodies through a test run in Germany,” he says, ” It played in half a dozen spots, and in the last place I saw it, I knew what was wrong with it. So I recut one section, a lot. Remade the music and sound effects and started shooting again. Cut some more and kept at it. I’ve spent most of the last three years recutting my films,” he admits, “House of Pain is down to 50 minutes from 80. Kanada is down to 45 from 60, and then I threw it out. Valentine’s Day went from 80 minutes to 18 before I threw that one out too.” As he remakes his past films, Hoolboom keeps pushing the limits of his future work. Since he released his searing eight-minute Frank’s Cock in 1993, his films have confounded notions of queer against straight, cerebral against emotional. Now he calls his films “documentaries of the imaginary.” “They’re more faithful renderings of how I dream, or imagine the world to be, or imagine my place in it,” he says. “In my dreams it’s normal for me to become a woman, who becomes a man, who turns into a table. Gender is not such a fixed thing. That’s more reflected in my work now.” Hoolboom has always been his own severest critic. But the way his recent films, especially Frank’s Cock, have reached people emotionally is what keeps the fire burning now. “I needed to try harder, make better work,” he says. “The feeling that I got in the theatre was unmistakable, it was so good, and I wanted more of it. It was a reminder that you can out razzle-dazzle the best that’s ever been, and people may applaud politely. Or they may leave. But if you can connect and move people, that’s film. It’s the magic of sitting with all those people in the dark and giving yourself over to the light.” “Stranger In A Strange Skin” by Kathleen Pirrie Adams (Xtra, Oct. 8, 1998) Death is inevitable. And death has an aesthetic. Disease only claims the latter. For underground filmmaker Mike Hoolboom the advent of HIV and AIDS has place the challenges of disease and dying centre stage. It’s a personal issue, a social issue, a question for art. His response over the last decade has been a powerfully creative one. Hoolboom is perhaps best known in the queer community for Frank’s Cock, an intense elegy for a lost lover built around a monologue tenderly delivered by Callum Rennie. Then there’s Hoolboom’s Madonna video remakes (Dear Madonna and Justify My Love), which push the desperate longing of the fan right into the idol’s frame. His latest work, Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body’s betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body’s fragile claims on time and space. It’s about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets—as much a tradition of gay art as, say, irony or camp. And it is filled with beautiful editing that pull teen-angst icons Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke into the artist’s own story of leave-taking, or that match vintage erotica with childhood games. The complex whole is held together not just by its recurring themes, but also by its studious attention to the luminous beauty of the film image and its lyrical use of shades of blue and orange. Even so, not all parts are created equal, and each viewer is bound to revel in some sections and reject others. The first part, Positiv, bears the closest resemblance to Frank’s Cock. using a four-part screen, it sucks in fragments of its super-saturated image-environment: home movies, medical footage, Hollywood blockbusters, and the artist’s diary of domestic routines and trips to the doctors. Although at first it looks like the medical will steal the screen, in the end, it is the insistence of imagination that wins out. Perhaps one of the most powerful moments in the sequence is when the narrator creeps into the hole in the head of the “other”—the uninfected—where he hears the empty echoes of the clichés of responsibility and self-determination. “All this could have been avoided if only you’d been a little more careful…” It’s the moment when the armor of judgment and rational risk-calculation retreat, when AIDS becomes, as Steve Reinke writes in the introduction to Hoolboom’s book, Plague Years, “not a disease, just another compelling symptom of a diseased lifestyle.” Moucle’s Island is another intriguing chapter of Panic Bodies inquiry. Found footage of a baby’s birthday party and a nudist sailor girl frolic are intercut with shots of an older woman crawling along paving stones, rolling across a pebble beach and with great effort, up a concrete furrow. The Kodak moments and vintage erotica wind a 30-year string of cinema history around the time-worn body of Hoolboom’s colleague, Viennese filmmaker Moucle Blackout. Panic Bodies pushes beyond panic without abandoning its own basic mission: To record life as it is lived in a world where stains don’t just disappear with one cool shake of the tail. For those afraid of non-narrative film or fearful that the deeply personal will embarrass either the artist or the audience, Panic Bodies is probably not going to provide a conversion experience. But for those who think it’s interesting—even necessary—to think about what disease and death mean for the psyche or for culture, Panic Bodies will demonstrate how bloodletting can possess a magic comfort. “Panic Bodies: The tragedy of the temporal dominates the work of this gifted Canadian experimental filmmaker” by Gary Morris (Bright Lights Film Journal, April 1999, Issue 24) In the opening segment of Panic Bodies (1998) Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom talks poetically about the inevitable sense of displacement that accompanied his HIV diagnosis: “I felt like a virus that’s come to rest in this body for awhile.” But Hoolboom is no ordinary filmmaker, and Panic Bodies never succumbs to the gross sentimentality that marks much of “AIDS cinema.” He in fact finds a curious solace in his betrayer, as if a kind of body logic and pathos coexist with the disease: “My life possessed a shape after all, a unity, and that shape was my body.” The beauty of the body and its tragic temporality are the driving motifs of this powerful six-part experimental feature (70 minutes). The opening segment Positiv, splits the screen into four smaller ones, with one occupied by Hoolboom monologing about AIDS and the other three filled with such varied treats as home movies, found footage, porn samples, microscopy and pop culture imagery from Michael Jackson to Terminator 2. Hoolboom is sometimes serious and sometimes mocking in his words (“I wanted to be a fat ice cream queen with nice skin”) and the bright, flashing images often play off them. When he talks about how “600 cells die in the body every day, and every six years we’re a new person” one of the smaller screens show a riot of microscopic cell activity. Typical of Hoolboom’s skill is his rapid intercutting of an atomic bomb explosion with a single hand, a telling image of the kind of individual apocalypse that, for the director, is woven into modern life. A more whimsical sensibility emerges in the next segment, A Boy’s Life. Toronto performance artist Ed Johnson appears as a naked man haunted by his childhood (seen in fractured home-movie inserts) and even more, on his prick, which he plays with so much that it falls off. While Ed is busy searching for his lost appendage, Hoolboom is playful, reminding us of Ed’s quest with a cut-out penis shape through which we see the action. Of course, this is not exactly standard light fare. A scene where Ed eats a baby doll that’s been halfway up his ass recalls Goya, while scenes of multiple Eds masturbating (seen through a kaleidoscope are as unsettling as they are amusing. The next part, Eternity, is a 10-minute exegesis of The End, in the form of a letter from Hoolboom’s friend Tom Chomont describing the latter’s experience with “the white light after death” and his overseeing of his brother’s demise. Much of this segment was shot in near-total darkness, as befits the subject; any illumination comes from the words, which again have a simple poetic resonance: “Then just at the last, concern for someone I knew pulled me back.” Some of the works here are more accessible than others. The next segment 1+1+1 shows a drunken couple laughingly assaulted each other, dressing and undressing and generally carrying on behind Hoolboom’s opaque mise-en-scene, which consists of scratchy footage, colours that bleed all over the action, and a throbbing industrial soundtrack. But the director kindly shows us some of the same scenes again without the obscuring overlays. Part five Moucle’s Island stars Viennese filmmaker Moucle Blackout in some of the action, but most viewers will be more intrigued by interpolated ancient footage from some forgotten Naturist epic of the 1930s. This one turns a mock-innocent boat cruise and naked volleyball game into a blissful lesbian idyll, with the coyly cavorting women an ideal symbol for Hoolboom’s obsession with the sweet moment in which the body is free, even if only in an old porn film. The last, and longest, segment is Passing On, a lyrically typically confessional effort that encapsulates what’s preceded it. Hoolboom’s dance with death-a motif acknowledged in the medieval woodcut segues between segments-resonates in double-exposed shots of anonymous people simply crossing a square, some of them “real,” others shown as faint, literal “ghosts” co-existing with those still in the temporal present. In voice-over Hoolboom talks about the “conspiracy of chromosomes” that make up the human being, the phrase is ironic; for him, nothing is more real, or human, or felt, than what that conspiracy has created. Looking for Troglodytes: an embodied rumination on experimental cinema by RL Cutler (Front Magazine March-April 1999) December 20, 1998 was a cold and bitter day. Xmas was around the corner and, unusual for Vancouver, snow was on the ground. I needed a diversion, from the December consumerfest and so, on that freezing Sunday afternoon, I made my bundled way to Gastown. I had discovered that Mike Hoolboom’s Panic Bodies would be showing at The Blinding Light Cinema, that fabulous fringe cinema space. I had heard his work mentioned many times by the film buffs and hipsters who populate this metropolis, sequestered in their non-profit offices, or critiquing from sofas from both sides of Main. This was my chance to see the work of a respected, contemporary experimental filmmaker, and I would not let snow, nor sub-zero temperatures get in the way of the experience. I thought that Mr. Hoolboom’s work would be able to entice more urban troglodytes from their bunkers. But upon entering the theatre, I quickly realized that I was on my own, quite literally, in this crazy peccadillo. Just as the show was about to begin, my solitude and reverie were punctured by another spectator entering the dimly lit space; here I thought was a comrade seeking solace in the comfort of strangeness and cinematic form. But, alas, he belonged to a different breed of troglodyte and left the theatre half-way through the film. In the introduction to his book, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada, Hoolboom cities Barthes’ description of leaving the movie theatre: “The subject who speaks here must admit one thing: he loves leaving a movie theatre. finding himself once again outside in the illuminated and half-empty street (somehow he always goes to the movies on weekdays, and at night), limply heading toward some cafe, he walks in silence (he does not care much to talk after seeing a film); he is stiff, a little numb, bundled up, chilly: he is sleepy irresponsible. In short, he is coming out of hypnosis.” Roland Barthes, Upon Leaving the Theatre Hoolboom interprets this passage as an example of the collective dream produced by the cinema experience, sitting both alone and together in the dark. On this cold afternoon there was no communal experience nor group anonymity within the Blinding Light. Through a haze of hypnosis and somnambulism, Barthes’ Paris facilitated a saunter to the local café. Vancouver’s cold air inflected my own narcosis of reflection, en route to my rental cave. As the publicity points out, Hoolboom’s film celebrates the complexity of themes addressing the life of a body. “Drawing from sources as varied as hyped-Hollywood, obscure 20s porn, and his own treasure trove of gorgeously shot original footage, Panic Bodies is a complex and visually arresting study of life, love, death, family, obsession and being a stranger in your own skin.” I was particularly interested in the elliptical and synthetic form Hoolboom developed to impart this vision. It integrated a range of techniques and modes in order to describe the complexity of human experience. The hybrid nature of Panic Bodies signals a fusion of past experimental styles into a synaesthetic effect. What appears to constitute contemporary experimental film is a combination of technological innovation, challenging subject matter (libidinal and excessive where possible), and space for reflection. To this end, Panic Bodies can be situated inside a broader consideration of experimental film. During the last few months of 1998, I accepted the task of teaching studies in Experimental Animation/FilmVideo at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. It seemed epistemologically necessary to come up with some definition for experimental film. Not surprisingly, there is no single description for the subject. Its various labels highlight this: avant garde, poetic, visionary, materialist, formalist, conceptual, fringe, alternative and of course underground. These terms reflect the often heated debates circulating at the time of the film’s initial screenings and they resonate very disparate agendas. Since film became a cultural product at the end of the last century, experimentation has been central to the practice. Consider George Méliès fantastical play with editing and special effects. Although the Lumiére brothers’ projection of still photographs provided the illusion of movement and writing of light, theirs was more of an experiment driven by scientific curiosity. While new technological features have always excited the makers of time-based media, “a horizon line of the real, a line separating the simply visible from the impossible” distinguishes truly cinematic work. The surrealists, progenitors of experimental film, understood the fragmented ontology of moving images which allowed for juxtaposed scenarios and imaginative aesthetics. Maya Deren, with her surrealist and ritualistic sensibility, demonstrated how space, time and illusion were the perfect subjects for film By the fifties, experimental film had been influenced by the progress of modern art, specifically highlighting a self-reflexive and formalist agenda. To those who appreciate the non-commercial, experimental filmmakers can stretch form and content making new experiences for the embodied mind. Although there is a large and diverse output of experimental film, it is difficult to actually view these time-based objects. While paintings and sculptures take up residence in galleries and museums, screening ‘art films’ is still a tricky venture. In part, the paucity of venues for experimental film is due to problems of funding, distribution, and a colonial unconsciousness. By this I am suggesting a uniformity of cultural and social experience that colonizes the imagination. What makes films like Hoolboom’s so fascinating is that they do not simulate reality nor the reality of mainstream film but articulate an alternate or parallel consciousness. Many experimental films have imbibed the evolution of film production and employ various strategies or modes of visual experience. Narrativity is fused with the awareness of one’s own perceptions. “Thus one invests the experience with meaning by exerting conscious control over the conversion of sight impressions into thought images.” Experiments in material construction are juxtaposed with political and challenging content. Panic Bodies was a treat in that it fused the numerous styles of experimental film into a millennial hybrid, weaving sharp observations with aesthetic wonder. Structurally, the film was separated into six vignettes, each preceded by a black and white etching of a Renaissance subject and a title, including Positiv, Passing On, Eternity, 1+1+1, Moucle’s Island and A Boy’s Life. Part personal narrative, part libidinal spectacle, and with an arsenal of visual pyrotechnics, Hoolboom’s film challenged the viewer to participate—to become embodied. The scourge of AIDS on the narrator’s body elicited personal recollections of the body in pain. This is a film about death, which means that sex is never far behind. The libidinal was explored both in a kaleidoscopic vision of penis play and the jouissance of vulva masturbation. Both scenarios were mesmerizing especially due to the jarring soundtrack that accompanied them. I had hoped to encounter other troglodytes on the my way to the cinema. None had emerged, and on my way back I had occasion to reflect on the nature of that day’s experimental film. Hoolboom’s Panic Bodies is a death poem in six acts, representing a body in pain and a body in life. Though the air was bitter when I left the theatre, the body that carried me home was alive in the cinematic afterglow. Hoolboom ranks with Snow, Weiland, Cronenberg by Peter Goddard (Toronto Star, Friday Oct. 9, 1998) Panic Bodies, the Mike Hoolboom film at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall tomorrow night at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm, goes through hell to get to where it wants to be. Hell is the here and now. It’s the funny/toxic/grotesque media-blitzkrieg bombing Panic Bodies split screen—and our heads—for the first ten minutes of the films 70 minutes length. The section is called Positiv. Fans of Hollywood’s kind of narrative filmmaking might not want to deal with this mountain of visual rubble which is piled higher and higher on the imagination. It’s as daunting as the hot sex bits, Terminator snips and sci-fi clips careen into a heavily treated segment of a Michael Jackson video which in turn morphs into something else. Even indie-film fanatics may get twisted around by Hoolboom’s manic montages, which are mostly a riff on the real music to come. With this bravura visual set-up, Hoolboom gives us exactly what we’d expect from an adventurous filmmaker who has won a number of awards for two of his previous efforts, Frank’s Cock (1994) and Letters From Home (1996). The image barrage is the nightmare before the dream. And this is a dream, a film, a meditation on the after-life that’s as powerful as anything in cinema. In fact, to go ever further out on a critical limb-Panic Bodies, a companion to the filmmaker’s recent memoir, Plague Years, is one of the truly defining movies in Canadian filmmaking history, a genuine successor to Michael Snow’s pioneering work, Joyce Weiland’s Water Sark and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, just to name a few of the more visually-charged films the country has produced. Neither of the program’s co-presenting groups, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Pleasure Dome, put any qualifiers in its all-out praise. Hoolboom is described on one press release as “the most important Canadian filmmaker of his generation.” Hype like this might be expected from institutions hoping to drum up business, particularly for someone like Hoolboom who’s less than a household name. But in his case, they’re mostly right. Hoolboom’s influence on alternative filmmaking has been enormous as a filmmaker, an arts-organizer (who helped start Pleasure Dome) and as a theorist (Fringe Film in Canada, published last year, has interviews with many of Hoolboom’s alternative film peers). In some ways Panic Bodies continues Hoolboom’s thinking about gay culture in a high-tech world and reflects his deeply-felt autobiographical urges. Yet in many more ways, it goes an enormous distance beyond what we saw in Letters From Home, as the five sections which follow Positiv flow visually and intellectually away from the opening’s scarred and tattooed surface. In Panic Bodies the look and the very idea of the film mesh. “Ever since becoming HIV-positive, I’ve felt like a virus that’s come to rest in this body for a while,” goes Hoolboom onscreen, only as a distant face floating in the screen’s upper right-hand corner. “That it really doesn’t belong to me anymore. Like I’m trying on a new suit that won’t fit.” Elegiac in tone, Panic Bodies is Hoolboom’s own out-of-body experience, section after section. In A Boy’s Life a man (performance artist Ed Johnson) masturbates away his youthful guilt-and loses his penis in the process, only to fish it back again. (We’re talking about a real hook on a real line. The penis, one hopes, is not for real). Eternity meditates on death’s seductive grace. 1+1+1 turns modern romance on its head, with a slamming techno-track and a pair of happy, hammer-wielding lovers. Moucle’s Island is a wonderfully dreamy feminine sexual fantasy, with some vintage porn. Passing On is about memory itself. Not everything works. Some of the jokes-the penis-fishing bit for one-fall flat. The repetitions in 1+1+1 feel just that: repetitive. But what a great motion picture! Film so good, it ruined my day Highly personal work looks at the diseased boy and the filmmaker living inside by Mark Caughlin (Manitoban April 7, 1999) Perhaps the best thing about experimental filmmaking is not so much the startling originality of the visuals, but rather the highly personal tendencies of the form. And when the creator of such films is living with AIDS, the touch of death tends eventually to find its way into that author’s films. Diagnosed as HIV-positive ten years ago, Mike Hoolboom kicked his filmmaking into high gear at the time and, by his own account, repressed everything he could. Panic Bodies, however, marks a turn toward a calm, bold candor: it’s a meditation on flesh, on death and on the disease inside Hoolboom’s body. It’s equally a set of hallucinations, an exercise in memory and an elegy to himself that (of course) recognizes his own continuing existence. While the experience of watching Panic Bodies one afternoon left me depressed for the rest of the day, it did so in a meaningful way. The film avoids being emotionally manipulative, making its impact in a way that only a well-crafted film can. Hoolboom may address the audience directly, he may flaunt nude bodies—both healthy and lesion-ridden—but he’s not out for his audience’s sympathy, nor is he out to shock. Rather, he’s groping towards understanding, and he’s sharing that process with an audience. But while he’s considering a whole range of questions besides disease, the body is clearly at the forefront. In the last section of the film, for instance, he contemplates the fact that, as humans, we are contradictory, incoherent beings. Ironically, both our memories and our existence itself are anchored by our body, which is at once our most fundamental imprint, but also the part of us most subject to vulgar decay. For the filmmaker, film stock is equally the most important imprint—however fragile. In Hoolboom’s hands, it undergoes the same sort of mutation experienced by the body. The Vancouver-based artist shoots new footage and mines home movies and other found images, then processes, blurs and cuts them up, all in order to make things both more personal and more detached and, above all, to re/member. Critics like to highlight the fact that Hoolboom uses footage culled from rock videos, porn and documentaries, but aside from the film’s first section (Positiv), the found image that he uses are not so much pop-culture cut-ups as they are integral—if contradictory—contributions to more extended meditations. And because death doesn’t often come in the form of a dagger in the guy right before the curtain, Panic Bodies broaches its topics idiosyncratically. Divided into six distinct parts varying from 8 to 20 minutes in length, the film comes together in an uncertain whole. In the first segment, the screen is divided into four sections. In one of them a man (Hoolboom himself, presumably) delivers a monologue about AIDS. The accompanying sets of images ironize, (de-)contextualize and expand on what’s being said and felt. A Boy’s Life, like Moucle’s Island, begins by using the body as a canvas and a mirror, before becoming the story of a man who loses his penis. Moucle’s Island, by contrast, moves into the realm of 20s/30s lesbian fantasia. Hoolboom reduces film stock shot in Disneyland to flecks of light and deep shadows, focusing primarily on sounds of lapping water in Eternity. Over the visuals, he scrolls a letter from a New York filmmaker that talks about seeing the “light” and his brother’s own death. Hoolboom calls his films “documentaries of the imaginary.” As such, this film belongs firmly within the “avant-garde” camp. But it’s not only worth seeing because it’s aesthetically on the edge, arty, or because it makes you think—although it does—but more importantly, because it makes you feel. Worth its Weight” by John Griffin (Montreal Gazette, Feb. 4, 1999) Toronto filmmaker Mike Hoolboom’s Panic Bodies is a 70-minute portrait in six parts about life, AIDS, death and memory and our ultimate corporeal betrayal by time, disease and decay. It is not Toy Story 2. It is, however a profound reverie upon the impermanence of all flesh and the powerful pull of whatever comes after we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Less feature film than collection of found or retrieved objects, Panic Bodies feels like treasure unearthed in a loved one’s attic after the loved one has left. It is the key to the sanctuary of psyche. Hoolboom’s most recent opus was three years in the creation and is divided into separate pieces of a whole. It begins with Positiv, a monologue about AIDS told on four screens with images from Terminator 2, science films, Michael Jackson and home movies—to name a few. Next is A Boy’s Life, which features T.O. performance artist Ed Johnson, Ed’s johnson, the sins of childhood and the possibility of escape through what your priest called self-abuse. Eternity is a film in the form of a letter written to Hoolboom by a friend in New York about the afterlife. And 1+1+1 follows a couple dressing and undressing against a soundtrack wall of industrial noise by Earle Peach. Moucle’s Island is an all-women daydream featuring Viennese filmmaker Moucle Blackout, while the final segment, Passing On, is an elegiac, hypnotically rhythmic look at family history seen through over-exposed film, as if from a great height, or a greater beyond. It is strange and familiar and almost unbearably sad. Panic Bodies can make for some heavy emotional sledding and might drive those unused to experimental filmmaking to the wall. But those willing to be carried by it will find the experience fulfilling, fraught with identification and quite unforgettable—which might explain why such a theoretically difficult piece won the Telefilm prize for best Canadian feature at the last Festival of New Cinema and New Media here. Great art will out, regardless of content. Hoolboom isn’t modest about Panic Bodies. He isn’t boastful about it, either. Speaking from his home in Toronto this week, he seems to regard the work as an extension of himself, something he does because he has to. It is who he is right now, in the way that earlier short and medium-length films like Frank’s Cock, Kanada and Valentine’s Day were him in the early 1990s. “The film represents a lot of work over a lot of time. it was made cheaply, with portraits of people and parts of my life. It’s like a deep and intimate talk between friends before going off to our own solitudes. For me, it’s a way to reconfigure the world and find a shape to everyday life.” Hoolboom slips into the mystic when he explains that “the finished film exists before I make it. The journey as a filmmaker is to find the place where it is. The piece has inclinations and rhythms of its own. You have to listen to find them. Listening is central.” He says Panic Bodies and his life in general have been “scrambled together by a combination of doing seminars, getting grants, writing books and living in a rent-controlled apartment,” and cheerfully admits his film isn’t likely to open widely in the multiplexes of the country any time soon. “It’s feature-length but not a feature film—there’s no narrative trajectory. It’s hard to carry around something long, ‘difficult’ and ‘experimental.’ To the extent that I can do it, I become my own distribution company, sending out duplicates to festivals and taking the film places. It’s trundling out into the marketplace at its own steam. One imagines that movies are fixed objects, but I’ve found that it looks different in different places. In experimental festivals it looks mainstream, yet at conventional festivals it seems transgressive. Film itself is interesting. It’s a living, breathing thing. Our experience of watching is really watching the process of film dying.” To: Ken Anderlini, Programmer, Vancouver Film Festival From: Mike Hoolboom Hi Ken. So sorry I can’t step on the airplane tomorrow and come and see you and live inside the festival. Spoke with your assistant yesterday who said she’d pass on word of my not coming. Earle Peach composed most of the music, as well as doing the soundwork/mixes for the film, and am hoping he’ll show. He lives in Vancouver. Had also hoped, to make up for my absence, that you might be able to read out the following as an intro to Panic Bodies before each of its two screenings. Here goes: Big hugs to Ken for taking my film so late and to all of you for coming. Sorry I couldn’t be here to speak with you. I’ve been sick, mostly, this past month, remembering again the link between illness and movies—both are mediums which make certain expressions possible, others impossible. Both are communicated, usually, in public, though they are understood, and most deeply felt, in private. The film you’re about to see was conceived in illness. There are folks much stronger and nobler than I who do other things: like work at a food bank or retreat into Zen monasteries. But as a child of network televison, I’m too lazy, instead I get sick. Through my illness the chatter of small voices and small duties manage to leave me at last, and I am transported from my world of daily banalities into another one, the real world, whose incandescence I manage to dull eventually with habit. Panic Bodies is a film that has taken the shape of a body or a house, it exists in many parts which don’t resemble one another. The bathroom, for instance, doesn’t look like the kitchen. The first room you’ll encounter features a kind of buffet. And maybe it’s true what they say, that the mouth is a wiser organ than the eye. Because when you’re invited to a buffet dinner, you know that you’re not going to eat every last bit of food on the table. But the eye is a greedy place. It wants everything. In the first room you’ll enter, the buffet tables are full, and I worry that if you try to see everything, you might wind up catching not much at all. I would suggest instead that you make a choice, and that you be guided in your selection by the first principle which guided me in this film’s making: to move towards all that gives you pleasure.

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I have a Couple of Promotions coming up this week! Countdown: October 15-20 “Countdown” is a companion story to “Departure.” Andreada is only 20 and looking forward to the second half of her life before she has to step through the portal into the unknown. She’s young, in love with Navine, and leads the typical care-free life of those who reside in the city. After a terrible mistake, she is left with only two choices: step into the Justice portal reserved for criminals and misfits, or flee to The Bower district, a lawless undercity with no rules, no laws, and no place for a scared young woman on the run from the authorities. 22,000 words / 75 pages The Minotaur: October 18-20 The Minotaur is a collection of Short Stories and Novellas in the Horror and Science Fiction genres (not appropriate for children or squeamish readers): “The Minotaur” – 12-year-old Billy Jacobs battles the devil for his soul in a game of pinball. “Members Only” – How much would you pay to experience your darkest desire? “Symbiosis” – ‘I know how you feel’ is no longer an empty platitude thanks to the latest STRIKE therapy for soldiers returning home from combat. “Paradoxis” – A serious vehicle accident ruins Anthony’s day, but it’s only the beginning… “A Christmas Tale II” – A dark tale of Santa, stressed-out parents, and naughty little children. 42,000 total words (200 pages) If you’re interested in Countdown and have yet to read Departure, you should grab that one (for free!) while you’re at it! Today is my 40th birthday. It’s also my last day on Earth. I get to do anything I want today, within reason, as long as I make it to the portal before my time is up. What I want is to spend the day with Cara and my two young children. I don’t know what awaits on the other side of the portal, I only know that certain death awaits me here if I refuse to go. Some light adult content 14,600 word short story/novella

Do you remember the second person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean? How about the second person to walk on the moon? No. That doesn't ring a bell? Being the first at something is a big deal. It sets you apart and is an easy story to communicate and remember. But what happens when you haven’t created something equivalent to the iPhone or self-driving cars? What happens when you have a great product but it’s not the first of its kind or the most innovative? In the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout explain that if you can’t be the first, then it is worthwhile to create a new category all your own. Take the example of the Trans-Atlantic Flight. Charles Lindberg went down in history as the first man to cross the Atlantic while the predecessor, Bert Hinkler, ended up in obscurity. The real pity is that the history books don’t even mention Hinkler. A quick google search cited Amelia Earhart as the second person to fly across the Atlantic. Hinker didn’t even get a footnote. How can that be? Well, in the case of Hinkler, it might have something to do with the fact that Amelia Earhart not only crossed the Atlantic. She was the first woman to do so. Earhart created a new category altogether– creating an exciting story that was easy to share and communicate. That is the value of being the first. It’s easy for people to understand and it’s exciting news. But if you aren’t the first to offer your product or service, don’t fret. There are other ways you can differentiate your business. In Jim Collin's book, Good to Great, he introduces an idea called the Hedgehog Concept. It is a framework that helps you to determine your business’ unique selling point. Collins explains the Hedgehog Concept as, “A simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, and 3) what best drives your economic or resource engine. Transformations from good to great come about by a series of good decisions made consistently with a Hedgehog Concept, supremely well-executed, accumulating one upon another, over a long period of time.” In a world that is flooded with overwhelming options, there is value in adopting Collin’s approach. Understanding the real, unique value your business offers the world and communicating that in a clear and consistent way is a winning strategy. Ready to find your edge? Then listen up to this week’s episode. 👇🏻 You'll also love... Victoria is a Marketing Mentor to early-stage founders. She has built compelling brands around the globe and has worked as a marketing director across several verticals. She is passionate about helping women think BIGGER about their businesses and giving them the tools to grow. She'd love to connect on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].

Campbell McKellar is one cool chick. While working for a Manhattan real estate firm, she received her boss’s blessing to work remotely for a few months from the scenic landscape of northern Maine. She was happy and more productive than ever. That’s when it hit her: Working remotely doesn’t have to be all pajamas and couches. In late 2010, she started Loosecubes, a service that matches restless mobile workers with office workspace in locations all over the world, from Paris to Savannah, Georgia. It currently boasts a network in 347 cities across 47 countries. But before getting the company off the ground, McKellar faced the same problem she was trying to solve. She says the solution became the most valuable investment in her company so far. Here, she talks to Inc.com’s Nicole Carter. What was the best money you have spent on your company? It was $150 on a co-working membership. After my amazing trip to Maine, I decided to start the company. But then it was back to the same issue I had before. I spent very, very long days working in my apartment in sweat pants. My boyfriend would leave me in the morning, return at night, and I would be in exactly the same place on the couch. I needed to get out. Then a friend told me about a co-working place called New Work City. It’s basically a shared office space in SoHo. The membership, at the time, cost me about $150. Why was it crucial to your business? It’s really the community of people there. I learned so much from them that I otherwise might not have known. The environment and people were really open and willing to share. So what kinds of things did you learn? Well, the first day I was there, I learned how to use Twitter. Now, Loosecubes has a pretty robust Twitter presence, and I love using it. I also met a woman who did PR for a music business, and she gave me some advice on how to best approach getting press for my business. My first media mentions came directly from my connections and friends at New Work City. There was another guy who had a Facebook application, and he taught me the Facebook API. I had never heard of that before. I learned all of these things and made a group of friends that were going through the same journey as me. They were all starting their own businesses. It wasn’t competitive at all? Not at all. It was like, if someone didn’t know how to do something, we all tried to help. We had our ups and downs, but there was always someone there to talk to. How long were you there? It was about a year. And by the end of the time, around December last year, I had brought on about five other people. They joined New Work City with me, and we basically ran the company from the place. They have meeting spaces, so we could brainstorm or check in. It just really made us feel more productive. Now we have our own offices, but I’m not sure we would be where we are now without those memberships. feature courtesy of Inc.com

It occurred to me recently that America’s a funny place. I mean, most places are funny places in the sense that they’re full of funny people who do funny things for funny reasons, but America is funny in an Itchy and Scratchy type of way instead of a Monty Python type of way. Take the recent hoopla over the Queen Mum’s diamond jubilee: an entire nation – with the notable and slightly bitter exception of Prince Charles, perhaps – looking on to collectively celebrate sixty years under one monarch. I don’t claim to know anything about British politics beyond Ed Milliband’s dweebish caricature in the press and that some dude exists named Nick Clegg. And this critique certainly isn’t meant to offend Her Majesty. But to an American, the entire idea of a Diamond Jubilee is a pretty silly concept. Setting aside for the moment the adorable name – a jubilee! – this entire affair smacks of a family gathering for Grandma’s birthday, only on a much larger scale. Some siblings adore her, some abhor her, and all are just sort of… waiting. “Congratulations for living another year! You’ve made it now! You’re sure you’ve got your will signed?” Which brings me to America and how it’s funny in a much less charming way. While Britain swirled with the excitement of a jubilee this week, we Yanks latched on to a story (or series of stories, rather) about zombies. Of course, I (and apparently most other news outlets) adopted the colloquial “zombie” term because it’s easy, vivid, and fun. What we were actually tracking was a homicide where the killer was a weird guy on weird drugs. After considering the memery of cannibalism Stateside and the Buckingham blowout, I tried to think – really, think – of someone the entire country could rally around in the way that Britain’s rallied around the Queen this week. It almost certainly couldn’t be a politician. I say this partly because of the way the media frames politics as a bitter, partisan, zero-sum game, but also partly because of the growing multitude of communication channels that exist among the electorate. People are encouraged to project their views in ways that were never available before, and we all know what opinions are like. So, as sad as it is, we’d probably have to rely on some celebrity if we want to stand united behind someone. But it’s got to be the right celebrity. Could you imagine the fallout from Tim Tebow Day? As much as I’d love to celebrate that holiday by circumcising poor Asian children and shouting 58 Hail Urbans, a vast majority of the country wouldn’t see things my way. Perhaps you’d prefer Kim Kardashian’s Rhinestone Jubilee?comment (1) In general, writing about politics is a bad idea. Wait, scratch that: writing about politics in a forum where lots of other people will read it is a bad idea. So I’ll continue. But first, a disclaimer: I hate politics. That’s a funny thing for a former political science major to say, I know, but I mean it. After spending the four most formative years of my adolescence sitting in classrooms learning about Washington’s committees, subcommittees, whips and weasels, the promised land of graduate school has offered a welcome respite from the sort of tug of war approach to political discourse that most of my classmates engaged in. It’s not that I didn’t like my classmates as humans (for the most part), but I found it pretty sad that they fell so easily into the common trap of treating politics like a baseball game: I root for my team, you root for yours, and we’ll see who can hit the ball farthest when it’s my turn to bat. Maybe this is the cynic in me, but it seems like this rah-rah competition is not the most efficient way to govern. After all – and I know a lot of people would disagree vehemently with this assessment – most politicians are pretty similar. Sure, they might have widely different priorities in terms of particular issues. But the end of the day, most politicians are slaves to the ballot box and, above all, human. Given my understanding of the way this country works, I do as any normal person who’s upset with the system would do: I treat politics as the biggest, most convoluted reality television show ever conceived. Catty congresswomen, old white bigwigs who can’t keep their junk in their pants, an insane billionaire looking to hijack the most powerful office in the world – America has it all. So, you’ll forgive me if I perceive people who are staunch supporters of either side as the equivalent of Team Snookie. The way the electorate clings to one party line or the other without considering the strengths and weaknesses of other opinions seems pretty silly to me. In school, kids learn about the ever-important “marketplace of ideas.” This term no longer applies to American political discourse, however. Now, political junkies do their idea shopping at one of two strip malls on opposite sides of town. Very impractical. Which leads me to the news du jour: the recent assassination of international terrorist and all-around bad guy, Osama bin Laden. Like most Americans, I waited with bated breath for Barack Obama’s announcement in the late hours of May 1. And like most Americans, I was thrilled when the announcement came. But what struck me about the news was not the event itself, nor the reaction to the event, but the secondary reaction to America’s initial reaction to the event. In the hours and days since a gaggle of George Washington University students – college kids, mind you – triumphantly gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue, it has become chic for bloggers, tweeters, and serious media people to reflect back upon that night’s scenes of euphoria with reserved derision. To cheer the murder of another human, they reason, is uncouth. Some have even suggested that when folks lit off firecrackers in front of the executive mansion, a bit of American credibility was lost in the eyes of the world. Ah, just what Americans love: other people telling them how they should feel. I think much of this backlash to the initial jubilation can be attributed to the Internet. Before social media, people actually had to – gasp! – talk to other people. While I can’t speak for anyone else, I find that I’m moderately reserved when talking to others: if possible, I try to avoid potentially divisive political discussions because, sadly, many people judge others for their opinions. To disagree with this generation of cable-fed political know-it-alls could be detrimental to one’s social life. Luckily, the invention of social media has allowed us to compose updates that touch on topics we wouldn’t usually pursue in the course of an old fashioned conversation. After the initial reaction to the news died down on May 2, I was barraged with countless tweets, status updates, blog posts, editorials, and columns decrying the initial American response of elation as detrimental to the ideals of peace and harmony. The simple fact is that as long as humans have free will, fish swim in the ocean, and there is an episode of To Catch A Predator airing on some station deep in the recesses of my 2,000 cable channels, there will not be peace in the world. And to operate under the illusion that America has a responsibility to promote such peace by not doing whatever is necessary to rid the world of crazy people like bin Laden is naive and childish. True, some would concede: the elimination of Osama was necessary, but the American reaction to the news wasn’t proper. Instead of engaging in a solemn period of reflection, America did what it does best: it reverted into a country of screaming, passionate homers. Of course they did! And that was probably the best thing about that entire evening. Americans rarely agree about anything. Usually, the only times Americans band together in unity is in the aftermath of great turmoil or great success. Sadly, the former seems to occur much more often than the latter. On this night, something was different. Gone was the baseball game mentality between folks at different ends of the political spectrum. Gone were the cheers and jeers amongst the electorate of government officials. Sure, there were people in front of the White House with Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden campaign signs that likely wouldn’t agree on much, but everyone could agree on one thing: this was great news. I’ll admit that America’s jubilant reaction to the news might rally anti-American sentiment abroad, sure. But perhaps it was worth it. After all, what doesn’t seem to provoke those who hate America? The War on Terror hasn’t provided much good news around which most Americans could rally in a long time, but Osama bin Laden’s extermination was a welcome diversion from the silly two-sided battle Americans fight every day. The fact of the matter is simple: this inning, everybody won. Enjoy it, because it probably won’t happen again for some time.comment (1) Just a quick thought on the Twitterverse fodder of the day: I think Joe Wilson is doing a great service to America by gradually introducing a House of Commons type discourse to the Congress. If we could get anything half as entertaining as the Prime Minister’s Questions, CSPAN could well become a legitimate factor during sweeps week this year. Oh wait, it would be going up against Jay Leno’s new show. Never mind, I think Congress is more entertaining as it is.comment (0) Oh, Barack Obama. It must be pretty comforting to know that after your Presidency is complete in eight years, you will have quite a source of income based solely on your image. Think about the possibilities, dude. When you leave Washington to go back and farm corn or whatever it is those in Illinois do, you can simply live for the rest of your life by selling stuff with your face all over it to the legions of Americans who think you are Jesus. I’m talking about an action figure line, maybe some designer clothes at Wal-Mart a la the Olsen Twins, maybe even a blockbuster action film! Seeing the countless racks of wares with your (likely unlicensed) image throughout the last few months, I have come to the conclusion that this whole Presidency thing is more of a time killer until you can evolve from the prince of politics into the messiah of the marketplace. Barack Obama t-shirts, Barack Obama stationary, Barack Obama DVDs, and Barack Obama salad dressing to take the place of Newman’s Own. Heck, it’s only a matter of time (read: a month) until kids start showing up to school with Barack Obama valentines for all of their good friends. The possibilities are endless! Bitter? No. I just wish people would pay to have my face on crap.comments (3) If you know me, you know of my traitorous opinion of my own major. I’m a political science major, but I work in the Journalism School. I hate the kids in my classes. And yes, I couldn’t stand the last election. My political leanings aside, these past few months have been a complete burn on my patience. It seems that ever since two months ago, legions of folks who had little to no knowledge of or interest in politics suddenly came out in droves to support their candidates and strive to alienate anyone and everyone that disagreed with anything they said. If you don’t believe me, check the archives of the Alligator from the last few months. Politics really does bring out the worst in people. But that is only half of my disgust with the entire process. Beginning on the day students came back for the Fall semester, there were countless political activists all over campus. First, it was whether or not I was registered to vote in Alachua County. Then, it was whether or not I was voting early. Then, it was whether I supported Senator Obama or Senator McCain. Jesus Tapdancing Christ. It was so annoying. I couldn’t walk from class to class without being ceaselessly pestered multiple times. I know this sounds petty, but I’m sure that anyone who was on campus for these past few months will agree with me that it got a bit out of hand. I’m looking forward to getting back to dealing with Brother Micah telling me that I’m going to Hell and the Gideons giving out free Bibles. Now that it’s over, though, I am elated to not have to deal with the sheep of both parties suddenly caring more about the direction of our country than they ever had. Now we can all concentrate on the most important things of the season: my birthday and football. Oh, how glorious it will be.comment (0) Okay, this is going to be my only post on this topic for two reasons. First, I hate politics and talking about them (perfect for a political science major, right?). Secondly, this topic is being covered extremely well at a multitude of other Web sites, like Aaron Sharockman’s blog at the St. Pete Times site. But, here goes. Recently, the Rays have proposed a new waterfront stadium in downtown St. Pete at the site of Al Lang Field, where innumerable baseball greats have played for almost a century. To me, this is an excellent thing. It will get rid of seriously outdated and ugly Tropicana Field and make St. Petersburg a popular destination again. However, there are quite a few dissidents to the idea. The movement against the idea of economic prosperity and all-around awesomeness that will arise from a new stadium is led by a certain group of old farts who will not be alive in a few years when the stadium becomes a reality who call themselves POWW (Preserve Our Wallets and Waterfront). See, all of the members of POWW rely on misinformation and the art of crying loudest about the whole ordeal. Let’s look at some of the silly things they have to say: They claim that building a new stadium would take money from the pockets of current residents of the county. It won’t. The Rays are fronting much of the money, and the remainder will be paid by existing hotel bed taxes that Pinellas residents do not pay and the sale and development of the land upon which Tropicana Field sits, which borders on slum land at present. They claim that it is “too darn big.” To support this claim, they show us an image of how big the (awesome looking) stadium would be compared to the Bank of America building. Here it is (notice that there are absolutely no measurements nor sources on this image): Now, look at a similar image I made, using their outline of the Bank of America building and a scale of 1 foot = 1 pixel (you will have to click to see this image full size): Yes, it seems that in POWW’s image, the stadium is magically taller than in my measured and sourced image. Curious. They claim that the whole new stadium would be a traffic and parking nightmare. It won’t be. The Rays have done copious studies and have discovered that there will be plenty of spaces around the stadium. And if we have to walk a few blocks to see the game, what of it? It’s Major League Baseball. Only 29 other cities in America have the privilege to watch this great sport, and I guarantee you that most of them require folks to walk a little bit to get to their stadiums. Lord. Quit your bellyaching, everyone. As for traffic, has anyone thought that this new stadium will be only 15 blocks away from the current site of the Trop? I don’t know about everyone else’s experiences, but I have absolutely no trouble going to and from a baseball game currently, and I am sure 15 blocks will not suddenly cause me to sit in traffic for hours before and after a game. And even if traffic is worse, I would have no problem with it. Have you ever been to a major city like Chicago or New York during baseball season? Any traffic jams we might have in dinky little St. Petersburg will pale in comparison to the traffic jams baseball fans have been dealing with for a hundred years. They claim that the new stadium would be bad for business. Yes, I understand fully how building a new stadium on the site of a completely vacant baseball field and attempting to redevelop 86 acres in an area that is in dire need of financial upbringing could be terrible for business. Wait, what? POWW would like to have us believe that these promises of economic prosperity were made and never delivered upon when the Florida Suncoast Dome (now Tropicana Field) was built in the 1980s. Of course your economic revitalization will fail if you have an empty dome in the middle of the ghetto for half a decade. Jeez. They claim that there would be terrible environmental damage if the stadium is built, since the plan calls for filling in .6 acres of Tampa Bay and turning it into land upon which the stadium can be built. Now, excuse me here, but Jesus Tapdancing Christ. This is the lamest excuse they have. It’s a little over half of an acre. And to save what? Manatees? Christ. What have manatees ever done for us? Oh, that’s right. Nothing. I’m not even going to go into the ridiculous hippie nature (no pun intended) of this argument. Moving on. And of course, they claim that there are better alternatives. On their Web site, under this category, they have a photo of some little leaguers. Now, if that isn’t trying to appeal to people’s warm and fuzzy emotions, I don’t know what is. Sure, POWW can throw a bunch of alternatives up on the board that help their cause, but I have yet to see any solid redevelopment plans that go so far as to revitalize a dying cityscape. Another thing I’m so sick of hearing about is the heat. People whining about the warm weather in Florida. I love it. Listen, Minor League Baseball has existed in Florida for decades upon decades. Those games occur at the same time of day and the same time of year as Major League Baseball games. I have never had a problem with them, and neither have all the folks who go out to see the Clearwater Threshers, Brevard County Manatees, Jacksonville Suns, or any other minor league affiliate in this state. There will be a sail to cut down on sun on particularly hot days and there will be air conditioning in the concourses. Quit your bellyaching. Heck, join me for a Gator game in the middle of September at 12:00 with body paint clogging your pores and sweat glands and then we can talk about heat. Gosh. The final misconception about the stadium that is really bugging me is the notion that the Rays are threatening to leave the Tampa Bay area if they don’t get their stadium. They are not. Stuart Sternberg has clarified time and time again that they are not using this whole idea to hold the city hostage. They will stay in the Trop for the remainder of their lease (until 2027, I believe). For those that say they will buy out their lease and move elsewhere, where will they go? There is no market as large and potentially profitable as the one here in Tampa Bay. If you add the Orlando TV market, we would have the fourth-largest television market in the Majors. It would make no sense to leave the area. None. Well, there you have it. All of the misconceptions and my responses thereto. Before this post ends, though, I would like to mention one thing that I found the other day. The folks who want to “Preserve Our Wallets and Waterfront” have a page on their Web site about “Secrecy and Fairness.” I think this is ironic, because of the images located on their “About POWW!” page. There, they have a photo of the Al Lang site as it is now, with green grass and water in the background. Below it, an image of the proposed stadium, which they credit to the Rays’ Web site. This is all well and good, but something struck me about the second image. I opened it in Photoshop, and I opened the original Rays image. I was astonished to find two things: 1. The POWW image is 8 pixels narrower than the original image from the Rays. Is this a subtle way to highlight the height of the stadium (which, I might add, was misrepresented, as you saw earlier in this post). 2. Even worse, POWW actually darkened the original photo. Darker Skies, dimmer water, everything. Any high school journalism student could tell you that this is the pinnacle of unethical photo editing. I emailed the good folks at POWW about it (to their “Invite Us to Speak” email, since they have no other way to electronically correspond), and I have yet to get a response. As of today, the image is still up on their Web site. Here are the two images (click the thumbnail for a larger version): It’s interesting that a group so adamantly against the stadium that relies on “fact” would have to go so far as to subtly brainwash the public into thinking that the Rays proposal would be so terrible. They rely heavily on misinformation, conjecture, and unethical behavior. Heck, I could yell really loud and be right, too.comments (7) Lately, the talk of global warming has enveloped our dear society into an intense struggle between people who think the world is going to end because I drive a car and people who know for sure that our recent climate change is a mere cyclical happenstance. Well, I prefer not to take sides in this debate, so I offer the topic of an actual conversation I had with a female petition pusher with a boy haircut I had on campus today. While I concede that global warming could indeed be a possibility, I maintain that I don’t really care, at least for the time being, and I offer the following as my reasoning. The state of Florida, if global warming is a real threat, won’t be underwater for some time. At least, not in my lifetime. And they keep telling me to care about the fact that the environment is going to Hell in a hand basket and that I should take preventative steps to reduce its effect for my children’s’ sake. Well, if that’s the case, I’ll have to have children, right? If that is the case, I will have to, at some point in my existence on this big round ball, plant my seed inside a woman. Ergo, I will have to find somewhere a female who will allow me the privilege of breaching her floppy V. So, if and when a woman decides it necessary to make love to me, I will begin caring about global warming for the sake of my little sideburned flagellate friends. The moral of this story: girls, if you really care about the environment, you will have lots of hardcore sex with me. Do it for me. Do it for the environment. But most of all, do it for the children.comment (0) Watching the CNN/YouTube Republican debate last night, only one issue was on my mind. Tom Tancredo: Mr. Roper reincarnate?

Domestic violence is all too common in American families. In almost 20 percent of all marriages, couples slap, shove, hit, or otherwise assault each other. Emotional abuse—verbal threats, humiliating or degrading remarks, and controlling behavior—is even more common. If you or someone you love is in an abusive relationship, help is available. Marital violence is especially common among young couples, and, without intervention, may escalate in intensity or frequency. In many marriages, violence begins with shoving or pushing. Couples frequently ignore early aggressive incidents and believe that once current stressors end, the violence will end. However, even minor acts of violence can escalate over time, increasing the risk of injury or even homicide. There is no single type of marital violence. Sometimes, controlling behavior on the part of her husband is a woman’s first sign that she may be in an abusive relationship. Her husband may prevent her from seeing friends or family and make her feel guilty or afraid if she chooses to spend time with others. Physical assaults coupled with increased social isolation strengthen his control. Over time, a woman can come to feel like a hostage in her own home. In other relationships, the violence is different. Both the husband and wife slap or shove each other when they get angry. Often, they are more concerned about the content of their disagreements than the violence itself, and neither partner sees themselves as being abused or controlled. However, even violence that is not part of a controlling, frightening relationship can devastate a marriage, lead to criminal charges and injuries, and have long-term negative effects on children who witness it. There is help for couples like this, too. How can I get help? Since domestic violence is a crime, one way to get help is to call the police. If you have been hit by your partner or are afraid for your safety, your first response needs to be to protect yourself and your children. The police can be your first line of defense. You can also call the local Battered Women’s Shelter Organization, community crisis line, or community mental health agency to find out what services are available to you. Most communities have offender treatment, victim support services, and access to a shelter where you and your children can go if you are afraid. If the violence has not escalated to the point that you are fearful, but you or your partner recognize that the way you argue is not healthy and want to prevent destructive arguing from destroying your marriage or escalating to battering, there is a variety of options available to you. Most communities have anger management or men’s treatment programs that can be found through the mental health services agency. These programs help you learn skills to resolve conflict and handle anger without letting it escalate. Support groups for victims can also help you maintain a commitment to living in a nonviolent household. In addition to anger management and victim’s support groups, you may want to seek marital therapy if you are both committed to ending the violence and improving the marriage. Marital therapists work with couples to develop strategies for resolving conflict without violence. Make sure that your therapist knows about the violence in your relationship and has experience and training working with marital violence. Through domestic violence–focused marital treatment, couples are given tools to eliminate violence, resolve conflict, and improve marital relationships. If you decide to leave a violent relationship, a marriage and family therapist can help you and your children deal with the changes in your lives and with the trauma you have each experienced. A marriage and family therapist can help you access your strengths and coping skills to move forward. What to do if a Friend or Family Member is in a Violent Relationship If someone you care about is in a violent relationship, let them know you care for them regardless of their decision to stay or leave their partner. Women stay in violent relationships for many reasons, including the mistaken belief that they cannot make it on their own. Many battered women feel isolated and have no one to talk to with about the violence they are experiencing. Ask gently about any injuries or emotional upset you observe and listen without passing judgment. Find out about resources for battered women in your community. If your friend decides to go for help, you may need to accompany her. Most women eventually leave violent situations through the ongoing support of a caring friend or family member. The text for this brochure was written by Sandra M. Stith, Ph.D. Use the AAMFT Consumer Update "Domestic Violence" pamphlets to market your practice. Additional Consumer Resource: HopeLine from Verizon Connects survivors of domestic violence to vital resources, funds organizations and protects the environment. Verizon collects no-longer-used wireless phones and accessories and turns them into support for domestic violence organizations nationwide. Through HopeLine, hundreds of thousands of phones have been donated and awarded millions of dollars in cash grants to partner agencies.

Checking for flaws In The Practice of Writing, a series created especially for readers of MONTAGE, award-winning novelist, poet and critic Yasmine Gooneratne considers aspects of literary composition from a writer's point of view. Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne I have listed for you some of the flaws that I look out for while I am reading and editing my own or someone else's completed manuscript: (1) Vague abstractions. Avoid them. Avoid words such as actually, nature, factor, undoubtedly, substantial, absolutely, definitely, terrific, great, fabulous, fantastic, pretty, massive, graphic, exotic, Here is a stylist of past times, Jane Austen, letting one of her characters deliver a homily on the subject of the word 'nice': `But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the `The nicest; by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.' ‘Henry,' said Miss Tilney, `you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is for ever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word "nicest", as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way'. `I am sure,' cried Catherine, `I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?' `Very true,' said Henry, `and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! it does for every thing. Originally, perhaps, it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word'. (From Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1817) You will find among Jane Austen's letters, some written to her nephews and nieces, aspiring novelists who asked `Aunt Jane' (known within the family circle to be a published author) for her advice on their manuscripts. In one she advises a nephew to delete a passage in which his character, romantically named `Devereux Forester', plunges into `a vortex of dissipation'. It is not, she wrote, that she disliked the thing itself, but she simply abhorred the expression, it was so old a clichè (she said), that Adam must have come across it in the very first novel he read. Jane Austen knew that words and phrases quickly fall out of fashion, having been overused, and rapidly become meaningless. Look out in your own writing for phrases such as undoubtedly a factor, definitely the case, conditions of this particular nature, strictly speaking, at this point/moment in time. Cut them out, and substitute for them something specific, something pointed. (2) Look out for jargon. If you are writing something technical, one of your characters being a librarian involved with preserving old manuscripts, for instance, then you will actually need some technical language relating to methods of drying, inking, temperature control, and so on. That's fine. In fact, I've met readers who say they love finding in a novel information about some technicality they knew nothing about previously. (Michelle de Kretser's first novel, The Rose Grower, tells you everything you'd ever want to know about growing roses. Alexandre Dumas's novel The Black Tulip, does the same for tulip culture in the Netherlands.) Don't overdo it, though! Part of knowing the world of your story involves knowing more about it than you actually write into the story. Kipling's novel Kim surprised me, when I re-read it recently, with unexpected but entirely accurate references to Buddhist practice and belief. They were also relevant: Kim's companion on his long journey is an elderly Buddhist mendicant monk from Tibet. Ernest Hemingway's superb story, The Old Man and the Sea, reveals an intimate knowledge of the life led by fishermen of the Gulf of Mexico. But his knowledge of that life, of the tides and seasons, is not presented as knowledge though it underlies every word he writes. He explains: `If it's any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the ice-berg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he doesn't know it, then there's a hole in the story.' The kind of jargon to avoid is a pretentious imitation of technical language, words such as parameter, etiolated, traumatic, interpersonal, in respect of, relate, concept, paradigm, motivation, liquid position, in terms of, conflict situation, viable, context. I'm sorry to say that several prizewinning books that have come under my eye use this kind of (3) Look out for tautology. Tautology repeats ideas. Quite obvious, completely empty, adequate enough, in between, link together, follow after, early beginnings, descend downwards are examples. (4) Look out for echoes. The unintentional use of the same word/phrase within a few lines, so that it clangs unattractively on the reader's ear: this can very easily go undetected, unless you concentrate and read aloud. (5) Look out for unintentionally comic effects you have achieved because you have placed words in the wrong sequence. (Don't worry about this - we all do this in the excitement or flow of writing, and you've got to edit ruthlessly.) Examples are: `The wind blew across the desert where the corpse lay and whistled', `In 37 wrecks only 5 lives were fortunately lost'. A different type of mistake, but equally comic, would be `He threw his eyes at a tree', or `Her breath came and went in short pants'. For this part of editing, you have to be alert to the multiple meanings of words. (6) Paragraphing. Watch for unreasonably long paragraphs, or unreasonably short paragraphs. Journalists write paragraphs that are one sentence long (because they have to fit into columns). Fiction is not (7) Beyond these, you should ask yourself the following questions. * Is each sentence clear? Is it to the point? * Is my use of pronouns clear, i.e., where two characters are involved, both of the same sex, is it clear that `his' refers in a particular sentence to Mervyn and not to Milinda? * Have I relied too much on adverbs? (If `yes', DELETE!) * Have I used a long/jargon word for which there is a short equivalent? (If so, SUBSTITUTE. Write in `use' for `utilize', `see' for * Does each paragraph contain a number of sentences concerning one idea and its modifications? * Has each of my chapters a central theme, or is it merely a series of loosely connected passages? * What is the tone of a particular passage? Have I captured the tone and idiom of my character? Read the passage aloud to yourself, remembering that age, background and education affect the kind of language a character uses in speaking. Would So-and-so, an elderly Sri Lankan from a provincial background, on tour in Europe or America, actually speak like this? Does the dialogue move things along, emotionally? Does it discreetly advance the plot? Are the sentences too long for natural speech? * Are there any passages I especially admire? If so, are they imitative of some other writer? (If `yes', DELETE!) Are the words used for their own sake rather than for the sense they create, do they in fact create `purple prose'? (If `yes', DELETE or MODIFY.) * Have I checked my quotations? Have I acknowledged their source? Don't `leave it for later', and don't leave it as a job for your agent or publisher to do. Do it now, and do it yourself. The computer search engine makes this very easy. And it's quickly done. * Have I double-checked punctuation? Have I used single/double quotation marks consistently? Alternatively, have I consistently used the system that allows me to begin each speaker's contribution to a dialogue with a simple dash, e.g. * What about a walk? It looks like a good day for it. * Yes, I suppose we could do that. It would be a way of killing time, * Look, you can't spend every hour of every day waiting around for the postman to ring. * No, you're right. I'm being silly, aren't I? Besides, you never know, Emma, we might meet the postman on our way. Things to look out for in the way of punctuation flaws include sentences that aren't sentences (lacking a verb, or trailing off without a conclusion); use of a comma where a full stop is necessary, because a sentence is complete and/or you have started off on a new thought; over-use of a particular punctuation mark (comma, colon, semi-colon, dash, and EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!); use of `and' to join thoughts that aren't closely or causally connected, each of which should be accorded a separate sentence). If you know your sense of punctuation to be weak, ask someone whose punctuation is good to read your ms before you * Have I mixed my metaphors, with unintentional comic effect? * Have I used images or metaphors that betray an authorial, rather than a character's, attitude to a topic? e.g., a young and uneducated man or woman would be unlikely to use the images/metaphors used by a well-educated and older individual simply because such images/metaphors would not naturally have found a place in their reading and therefore in * Have I kept to the rule that I should in all situations try to `show', not merely `tell'? Always reveal, don't explain. Be specific, use telling detail, and describe for your reader, but not to the point of clogging up the story's momentum. Avoid generalizations, they are opaque, the reader gets nothing from them. * Have I been accurate? You have to know the `world' of your story, as well as the worlds of your individual characters. For example, you wouldn't have characters sitting down to breakfast in Paris and being served steak. If your characters are Sri Lankans on tour for the first time, you might get some mileage out of their expecting to be served roti or indi-appa, and being surprised or irritated at getting croissants and hot chocolate instead. Continuity is an important part of accuracy. You may have noticed that in a serial such as `Yes, Minister', Sir Humphrey Appleby wears an elegant dark blue tie in one scene, and a few seconds later, in the course of the same scene, the camera shows him wearing a crimson one. The continuity man/girl has slipped up there, it was his/her job to make quite sure the tiniest details remained When an editor was reading my first novel, A Change of Skies, she drew my attention to the fact that a married couple in an early chapter, having just disembarked at Kingsford Smith airport, was driving into the city in the same taxi, BUT he was registering the loops and curves of the road as it goes from Pyrmont to Iron Cove to Gladesville, while she was describing the Harbour Bridge. They are travelling in the same taxi at the same moment, Fiona pointed out, but they seem to be taking different routes. Of course I adjusted the text immediately. A really good job of editing your own work can determine whether your work is taken up by an agent or a publisher. Everyone receives rejection slips, you should not see these as outright rejection. You might not have done your homework accurately: (a) your writing has not been edited according to the guidelines suggested by your publisher, or (b) you have not bothered to complete the final stage of the writing process, the editing before submission which should really be regarded as essential, not optional, since it becomes a part of the creative

Sci-Fi buff and ‘amateur’ film critic that I am, two theologians and fellow friends of mine (Brian Bantum of Seattle Pacific University and Willie Jennings, my colleague in arms at Duke University Divinity School) told me that I had to check out the movie Avatar. I finally got around to it, and I’m so glad I did. The film is food for thought in trying to understand what lay at the heart of some of the deepest questions of identity, the deepest questions regarding what Hannah Arendt called “The Human Condition,” that still confronts us. The film is a cinematic window, an aesthetic tour-de-force, into matters of identity (especially around race and gender), sexuality (particularly, boundary crossing love), ecological concerns and land issues, nationalism (especially regarding militarism and the performance of citizenship), and finally globalization (particularly, the intersection of globalization and capitalism). But perhaps, most interesting of all is the religious aesthetic, and more specifically, the troublesome Christian social imagination that underwrites the film, an imagination that goes back to the dawning moments of New World conquest. Indeed, the film raises what in Christian theological parlance are questions of soteriology: What does it mean to be saved? What are the social processes and the processes of identity formation and construction linked to Christian rhetorics of salvation, which this film provides a window into? And is their a way to imagine soteriology, or what it means to say “I am saved” and “I am Christian,” beyond what is disclosed in this film? That Avatar provokes these issues and questions means that it requires serious theological analysis, which I will not pretend to fully offer here. I offer just a few thoughts about the film. Avatar in 1492 Avatar is a film that in effect tries to renarrate modern colonialism into the ‘New World,’ or in the Americas. The date associated with this is 1492; the figure, Christopher Columbus. (There was also the conquest just preceding the conquest of the Americas in the mid-15th century when the Portuguese first took black bodies as its cargo from Africa into Lisbon, thus beginning modern chattel slavery. But I need not go into this here.) It was during this time that the racial imagination as we now know it in all of its complexities and the very of the human as we know perform and live into it, was first born. Key to this was the Iberian, and more particularly the Spanish, invention of whiteness. We know of the horrors that ensued from this moment of conquest: land taken from native peoples, the genocide of many of the native populations, hierarchies and systems of valuing and evaluation being socially constructed and performed within the human, the dawning of modern capitalism, and finally all of this being enacted in deep connection with Christianity, indeed, as a Christian social performance tied to white masculinity. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” done in 1487, just on the eve of Columbus’s Iberian adventure across the Atlanta Ocean, and the painting by the Renaissance artist Jan van der Straet in 1575 on the “Discovery of America,” are perfect bookends around this world-changing event conquest that gave rise to the modern world. These pieces represent a cultural aesthetic of “the good, the true, and beautiful” as bound to the figure of the European (and eventually the Euroamerican), or put in racial-gendered terms, the white masculine. Such a figure is the social space into which all others must enter. Further still, the van der Straet painting portrays this figure as a warrior-Christian, a figure of violence and a man of war, who stands sexually over against the bear-breasted native woman in an edenic scene in which she is connected to the earth, to the land, and he is poised, at her seemingly inviting arm (note her left arm) to take it (see the image in this post). But his militarism is masked (his sword is hidden behind his cloak, invisible to the native woman, but visible to the viewer of the painting). What is displayed are the two sides of the project of Western civilization: science and knowledge in the discoverer’s left hand (the astrolabe; internet technology in the 15th century) and religion (the crucifix staff in his right hand, which imperceptibly merges into the sheath of the sword hidden behind the cloak). Both science and knowledge function are tied to commerce and trade in van der Straet’s painting. They are tied to an emergent capitalism internal to which is a profound hierarchical vision of the human and a system of evaluating and thus valuing the human. Avatar‘s Basic Storyline As a film, Avatar is trying to overcome this narrative. In the genre of science-fiction, it’s trying to tell a different story, one that redeems the narrative that I’ve given in rough draft here. Staged on another “New world” paradise, which is a different planet that humans are colonizing, the film tells the story of Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), a crippled ex-Marine who was wounded, interestingly enough, on a military adventure in Venezuela in South America. As a result of the Venezuelan adventure, Jack finds himself in a wheel chair. With his usefulness exhausted on Earth, Jake enlists in an inter-plantary science/military operation that if all goes well, his legs will be medically treated back on Earth. He will be healed. The wounded one will become the healed one. But what must he do on the planet? Jake is caught between two masters, as Daniel Mendelsohn recently put it in a New York Review of Books essay, between two ways of pacifying the planet and its inhabitants, the Na’vi. The one road is the way of science (don’t forget: the van der Straet’s Discoverer carried an astrolabe or the instruments of science and civilization) and the other is the way of violent, military conquest (again, the don’t forget that van der Straet’s Discover was also a warrior, carrying a sword). Jake is caught between these two modes or styles of conquest, between military imperialism and cultural imperialism. The avenue of science is where the avatar comes in. A team of scientists, lead by a chief scientist and specialist on the Na’vi played by Sigourney Weaver (who conjures all of the Alien movies and who plays the role of the white feminine), have figured out a way to clone creatures using DNA from humans and DNA from the Na’vi. The clones or avatars look just like the Na’vi. Indeed, they are in every way like the Na’vi except that they lack mind and soul. They lack mental faculties and consciousness. Solution to the problem: the scientist have found a way to transfer brain functions from a human being into the avatar, the clone. The human-occupied avatar can now infiltrate Na’vi society and negotiate peacefully—this the wish of the scientists—with the Na’vi to resolve their cultural and political impasse. Jake’s avatar plays this key role. He is to be the cultural infiltrator and negotiator with the Na’vi with a view to avoiding violent, all-out war with them. Avatar & the Struggle of Imperial Man But let’s get back to the cultural and political impasse. What impasse? Why is war even on the table? Well, as it turns out the place where the Na’vi live sits on a vast reservoir of minerals that the humans want, for it will turn a vast profit and cause the stock prices of the company backing the venture on this planet to sore. We are no longer dealing with global capitalism; this is now inter-planetary capitalism. On the other side of things is the military, which is clearly working with this unnamed business company. With little patience for diplomacy (because it believes it won’t work), the military is ready to go in and take the land from the Na’vi by force. The movie chronicles Jake’s vacillation between two masters or loyalties, the military master or the master that is science and civilization. As he continues to be embedded or become more and more “incarnate” (my christological language is intentional here) in Na’vi society, eventually taking up a love interest with a Na’vi women (you know this had to happen!; it’s a stable of genre; and remember again van der Straet’s Discoverer is sexually positioned in relationship to the native women) and becoming one of them, Jake moves toward a shown down with the military officer, the symbol of the old order of white male, warrior existence. This struggle takes place near the end of the movie, when Jake-the-Avatar or Jake in a Na’vi’s body and the military officer in a robotic or machine body fight to the death. But it is Jake’s love interest who finally saves Jake in the battle and ultimately facilitates his struggle to become permanently one of the natives, one of the Na’vi. There is much more that could be said about this movie. And heck, I have a feeling I’ll have more to say about it. But this is the point I want to make for now: When all is said and done, Avatar turns on this motif of the healing (or not) of a white man, of white male existence, and if so, how shall that healing take place. David Brooks in a New York Times op-ed was not far off the mark in identifying a “Messiah Complex” in the movie, a messianism aimed at “saving” the natives of the planet, who are called the “Na’vi.”He’s absolutely right that “Avatar” is a racial fantasy par excellence. And further still, he’s right that It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration. It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains. As far as this goes, Brooks has some good points. But what’s troubling about this film works at an even deeper level, for what Brooks totally fails to grasp is that the messianism of James Cameron’s 3-D adventure, which itself (that the movie’s in 3D) is vitally important because it enlists the viewer as participant, is aimed not just at the culturally different, the Na’vi, which surely it is. On this level this is a film about how white male identity functions as the space in relationship to which other identities are constituted. But beyond this, and this is what Brooks altogether misses, the movie’s primary target is whiteness itself and the meaning of white existence for the future. The movie is about the future of whiteness. This is an epic that has at its heart a basic question: Can white existence be save? Can the white masculine be redeemed? Can it overcome its wounds, it wheel-chaired status? Will it walk, stand erect, again? And if so, what will its redemption look like? The movie, in short, is trying to imagine the next phase of white (male) existence. The movie portrays whiteness in this regard at war with itself regarding its future (see image below). What answer does it offer to this problem? Avatar proposes what may be called a benevolent imperialism. Such an imperialism is not unlike that form of imperialism proposed at the dawn of the 19th century by Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, and by a host of subsequent intellectuals (like Matthew Arnold and even some contemporary intellectuals). This new mode of empire was being imagined as the next phase in the History of White People, to invoke the title of the brilliant, recently published book by historian Nell Irvin Painter. In this next phase, domination takes place on a global scale through and as difference itself. As an aside, I’m reading a lot by theologian Karl Barth these days. And it strikes me that his critique of religion and of the “No-God” in Roman II, written in the post-World War I moment, has precisely this phase of domination in the crosshairs of its critique of ideology. But to return to this film, it seems to me that Avatar answers the question of the redemption of whiteness with a hard-fought, and an aesthetically “beautiful,” Yes. What does this redemption look like? It is represented through the protagonist Jake, who casts his lot with the Na’vi. He makes their existence his own, thus making the avatar or the mask of difference the new form of his being. Now one with the Na’vi, he rides in on the proverbial white horse—in the film, this is the wild bird-like that even the Na’vi had been unable to tame—to save the day against the militaristic form of imperial domination (as embodied in the military colonel). Avatar is an amazing, aesthetically robust, but profoundly troubling film—both culturally and theologically.Culturally, because the film does not escape the history of imperialism. It reinscribes it precisely in the register of difference, in the register of becoming one with the Na’vi, the natives, those deemed different. Difference becomes the form of conquest. Theologically troubling because, Avatar continues the narration of white male existence as soteriological space, the space of the atonement, or more simply, the space where salvation happens, where what it means to be saved takes place. White existence continues as the space of redemption. However, now the space occupies or is the multiculture itself. Paul Laurence Dunbar once wrote a poem, We wear the Mask, the second stanza of which says, Why should the world be overwise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. How right Dunbar was. His poem haunts us in the wake of this film, which I hear director James Cameron is planning fill out into a trilogy. The movie leaves us with continuing questions of representation, what social processes are being performed inside and in relationship to claims of salvation, and the continuing New World saga of identity as extended into our postcolonial moment. This film acknowledges the the ground is shifting around whiteness. However, the film makes the shifts part of the strength of whiteness. It remains the space of salvation even as it incorporates the logic of difference as part of its ongoing saga and history. And through 3D, it incorporates us into the story. We participate, as actresses and actors ourselves, i the story—which raises a whole host of new questions about agency and participation. I’m not done thinking about this movie. But I am done for now. My verdict—Avatar: an amazing and profoundly troubling film.

There are some movie directors who can conjure up an image or a mood just by the mention of their names. John Ford -- Westerns and valor. Frank Capra --1930s and 40s America and patriotism. Steven Spielberg -- Epic films and adventure. Martin Scorsese -- Crime films and redemption. Alfred Hitchcock -- Suspense films and, well, suspense. Hitchcock is a particular favorite of mine. He was a master manipulator of his audience’s emotions. Watching his films, you couldn’t help getting caught up in the story he wanted to tell. Hitchcock would telegraph his next move, increasing the viewer’s involvement and dread. Sometimes knowing what’s coming is worse than the shock of a something totally unexpected. As a member of the audience, you can do nothing to stop the turn of events being played out before you. And yet we’re like little kids who love playing with a jack-in-the-box. We know that the jack will jump up to scare us, but we keep turning the crank, waiting for the thrill of that moment. That’s why we keep going back to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. We just love that suspense and that thrill. Hitchcock is still an influence in movies today. A well-crafted suspense film is invariably called “Hitchcockian.” A mysterious blonde woman is called a “Hitchcock blonde.” But while many filmmakers copy the master’s style, remakes are rarely undertaken. Instead, two upcoming films deal with Hitchcock’s life behind the camera. Hitchcock, a theatrical release coming early next year, stars Anthony Hopkins as the director and focuses on the making of the classic Psycho . The Girl, an HBO production scheduled for later this month, stars Toby Jones as Hitchcock, and examines the director’s tumultuous relationship with actress Tippi Hedren (played by Sienna Miller ) and the making of the movies The Birds and Marnie . If you’re interested in the kind of suspense movie they just don’t seem to make anymore, we’re fortunate to have many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films available to check out here. Some of my favorites are listed below. Rebecca (1940) – Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, George Sanders Foreign Correspondent (1940) – Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten Lifeboat (1944) – Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, Walter Slezak Notorious (1946) – Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Raines Strangers on a Train (1951) – Farley Granger, Robert Walker Rear Window (1954) – James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr To Catch a Thief (1955) – Cary Grant, Grace Kelly Vertigo (1958) – James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes North by Northwest (1959) – Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau For more insight into Hitchcock and his work, check out The Dick Cavett Show. Hollywood Greats . Or any of the following books. Alfred Hitchcock: a Life in Darkness and Light – Patrick McGilligan Alfred Hitchcock: Filming Our Fears – Gene Adair Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho – Stephen Rebello The Alfred Hitchcock Story – Ken Mogg Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies – Donald Spoto Finally, you can also see Hitchcock himself in introductions to his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents . The series ran from 1955-1961, with the director greeting his audience with the words that I used for the title of this blog.

I’m taking a class at Pratt called Installation Art: Design & Change, and we’ve been pairing up installation works as a weekly assignment. This is my first one! Postcommodity, Repellent Fence / Valla Repelente, October 9-12, 2015. Between the US/Mexico border cities of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora . Twenty-eight tethered balloons, 10 x 10 feet each. Steve Messam, PaperBridge, May 8-18, 2015. At the top of the Grisedale Valley, Patterdale, Cumbria, UK. 20,000 sheets of paper, four tons of found stone, 16.4 x 5.9 x 2.95 feet. Both temporary installations in different kinds of wilderness, Postcommodity and Steve Messam’s work cross very different boundaries. Messam’s traverses a natural barrier while Postcommodity’s bisects a manmade one. Repellent Fencewas a community-backed two-mile long fence that traced an ancient trade route from Mexico through Arizona, nearly perpendicular to the border. The “scare-eye” design has indigenous origins and is still used to repel birds. Here the design seems to repel people—ancient indigenous travelers and their descendants in particular—warning them that the route is no longer safe because the US (a comparatively new nation) is obsessed with border security. At the same time, the two-mile installation sutures the divided nations together again. While Repellent Fence confronts conceptual boundaries, Paperbridge defies physical ones. The paper’s wood pulp material mimics the wood that typical bridges are made of, while its bright red color lights up the landscape. Both works defy gravity in their own way. Repellent Fence flies 100 feet above the desert landscape and Paperbridge uses pressure to push out and up to allow safe passage over a stream in the northern UK. But the motivations behind the creation of these installations could not be more different. Postcommodity is a collective of three indigenous artists using projects like Repellent Fence to bring attention to oppressed Native Americans and migrant workers, while Steve Messam was commissioned to create Paperbridge. I learned about Repellent Fence through an interview with the artists I worked on for ART21 Magazine. You can also read my classmate’s pairings for this week on the Pairings: Blog set up by our professor, Kim Connerton, PhD. GD Star Rating The Arab Spring that shook the Middle East saw two huge waves of protest in Egypt, both with nationalist and feminist undertones. The first in January 2011 overthrew President Hosni Mubarak whose 30-year reign saw a massive oppression of the Egyptian people perpetuated through overwhelming police brutality and corruption of power. The second began in June 2013 and overthrew newly elected President Mohamed Morsi whose rewrite of the Egyptian Constitution granted himself unlimited governmental powers. The Internet’s social tools gave these movements a global audience, and many women were directly involved in the organization and rallying of these revolutions. When the protests themselves transformed into a place of abuse and harassment for women — both by government forces and fellow protestors — outrage sparked a galvanized feminist movement desperate to protect Egyptian women from further harm. This movement was visualized on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura and Suez, where images of powerful women were painted as a feminist voice amongst the revolutionary graffiti that gave the uprisings a uniting cultural vision. The newfound unification of the Egyptian people against their tyrannical government erupted on January 25, 2011, and was fueled by women as much as men. Young bloggers like Asmaa Mahfouz and Esraa Abdel Fattah rallied all Egyptians to join the protest through flyers, Youtube videos and blog posts. In the days leading up to Mubarak’s resignation, the women protesting in Tahrir Square accounted for 40-50 percent of the activists, when in previous protests they had accounted for 10 percent at most. Following the overthrow of Mubarak, all sense of solidarity between genders, religions and social classes seems to have vanished. In March 2011 a march in honor of International Women’s Day in Tahrir Square ended disastrously. After weeks of protest groups numbering in the hundreds of thousands, only a couple hundred women and a handful of men gathered in support of giving women a voice in the formation of a new Egypt. The protestors were soon surrounded by swarms of men hurling insults and even sexually harassing and groping women. Sami Sade, a journalist for Rose Al Youssef said, “They were shouted at by some men who told them to ‘go back to the kitchen.’” The protesters were chased from the square and those who returned the following day only found more hostility. Amnesty International reported that on March 9, 2011, 18 women were detained and tortured by security forces. All but one were strip searched and forced to undergo “virginity tests.” Several received one-year suspended sentences for charges including disorderly conduct, destroying property, obstructing traffic and possession of weapons. The abuse of women only continued throughout Egypt’s subsequent protests. On the second anniversary of Egypt’s revolution, 43-year-old freelance journalist Hania Moheeb went to Tahrir Square to join the celebration, but the atmosphere was remarkably different than it had been two years before. “Something was wrong. There were negative vibes in the air,” she told the BBC, “All of a sudden I found myself inside a very, very huge circle of men who were attacking every inch of my body.” Hundreds of men participated in and witnessed Moheeb being stripped, brutally raped and strangled with the scarf around her neck. The attack lasted for more than a half hour, and five of her attackers even followed her into the ambulance where they continued assaulting her. This is only one horrific example of the violence inflicted on Egyptian women by men who face no consequences for their actions — often security and government officers are the ones perpetrating the abuse, whether verbal or physical. Ninety-nine percent of Egyptian women have reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, and 96.5% reported some form of physical violation. The 10 days of protests that ousted President Mohamed Morsi in June and July 2013 saw 186 reported cases of harassment and abuse. In 2013 Thomson Reuters found Egypt to be the worst country for women outranking Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The so-called “circle of hell” ambush Moheeb experienced has become so common in Egyptian protest environments that Researcher at Nazra for Feminist Studies, Masa Amir has identified the strategy as a premeditated trap where men comb the crowd looking for women to attack, and as many as three circles of men surround her and prevent her escape. The circle closest to her strips and molests her, the second circle acts as if they are trying to get past the innermost circle to help (but when and if they do only perpetrate more abuse), and the third circle distracts the other people in the square from realizing what’s happening. More than three such circles surround the woman in Egyptian artist Mira Shihadeh’s mural depicting the trauma suffered by Moheeb in Tahrir Square in 2013. Titled “Circle of Hell,” the painting shows a saddened solitary woman gazing out at the viewer, surrounded by those three circles of attackers on either side, with the crowd of thirsting men appearing to continue endlessly in the background and foreground. Blood pours from the men’s mouths and two knives point toward the woman’s neck. A reminder of a horrific event that’s become commonplace and inconsequential, the mural speaks to Egyptian women as a warning, and Egyptian men as a cautionary tale, or in some cases a mirror. Shihadeh’s work might be syntactically simple and formally caricatured, but its basis in real-life events and the Egyptian flags that fly in the background reveal just how unsuccessful the Egyptian Revolution was for so many of the people who fought for change. “Circle of Hell” Mira Shihadeh and El Zeft Shihadeh has painted other images of women suffering at the hands of men, but her most recognizable piece is a woman fighting back. A woman in heels with her hand on her hip uses a can of spray paint to drown miniaturized figures coming toward her. Shihadeh has painted multiple versions of this image; sometimes the woman is veiled other times her hair flows free, sometimes she’s dressed in red, other times in white, and in still others she’s just a silhouette. But in every iteration the words “no to sexual harassment” are written in Arabic beneath the outpouring of paint from her can. “Girls and Boys are equal” Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo, 2011 The incredible increase in violence against Egyptian women since the Revolution has sparked the creation of dozens of murals and stencils painted in public spaces; works intended to humanize women, both by revealing the despair of their helplessness like in “Circle of Hell,” and by showing how powerful women are and have been throughout Egypt’s history. Many of the murals and street artworks created have been supported by newly formed graffiti and street art organizations, determined to foster social change with just paint. Artist and activist Merna Thomas cofounded the community NooNeswa (Noon El Neswa) in 2012 as a way to combat the graffiti that appeared during and after the January 2011 revolution that spoke just to men and were often derogatory towards women. On the one-year anniversary of the “virginity tests” that occurred the day after the failed International Women’s Day march, the group launched their project “Graffiti Harimi,” a graffiti campaign that created stencils of powerful Egyptian women alongside text advocating for women’s equality. One of the most popular stencils depicts iconic Egyptian actress Soad Hosny above the text “A Girl is just like a Boy.” In an interview for the documentary “Shout Art Loud,” Thomas said “Graffiti has this power to insert some images or some messages to people very subliminally or very unconsciously because if you’re passing by an image for a long time, for months, for a year, it starts talking to you, you start having a dialogue with it.” Another of NooNeswa’s stencils shows the outlines of three women’s faces: the first wears a niqab that covers her head and face, the second wears a hijab that covers her hair and the third wears no headscarf at all. Beneath reads the text “Don’t label me,” a powerful message that illustrates the choice of veiling as the personal decision it is, one belonging only to the women who choose to wear it. “Don’t label me” Stencil design, 2012 Another influential street art group is the organization Women On Walls (WOW) which began in 2013 as women-empowerment graffiti initiative. Its first edition included a collaborative mural covering the inside of a cement garage in Cairo and additional murals in Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor and Mansoura. Prior to painting in Mansoura, the WOW artists engaged the local women in a discussion on the issues that concerned them most so that the walls could be a direct reflection of the community’s needs. While sexual harassment is at the forefront of women’s issues in Cairo, in Mansoura the women said they’re worried about money and the role their appearances play in attaining financial security. In response, artist Ghadir Wagdy painted three successive women’s faces with free flowing hair and their mouths wide open, tongues stuck out in an act of rebellion. WOW has brought subsequent editions of its campaign to Egypt each year since its launch. In 2014, 20 Egyptian artists collaborated on murals for two additional Cairo walls that focused on the theme ‘Women in the Public Space.’ In 2015 they organized a week-long graffiti celebration called WOW Unchained, which included film screenings and a closing event of music and performances. Twenty artists from all over the Middle East and Sweden gathered to paint together on a wall at Cairo’s technology office park, the GrEEK Campus. The building’s face included an open graffiti wall that invited the public to write and draw messages and images in support of women and women’s rights. Although most women unsurprisingly feel more comfortable painting in large groups with organizational support, many brave women go out to stencil or paint their work alone. Hend Kheera, a 28-year-old structural engineer and fashion designer first started stenciling during the 2011 uprising. She goes out early in the morning to paint before heading to work, “so no one gives me any trouble,” she told Rolling Stone in a 2012 interview. She’s painted many political works directly antagonizing Egypt’s disappointing series of failed leaders, but syntactically her works resemble NooNeswa’s “Graffiti Harimi” project. She creates portraits of famous Egyptian celebrities above text demanding that women be respected. Generally her work is more controversial, as the text she includes often forcefully demands or threatens men on behalf of women, taking an aggressive and some might even say masculine approach to address abusers and harassers. One of her most well-known works shows the back of a woman’s silhouette; she has one hand on her hip and another on her shoulder in an exaggerated pose, surrounded by the words “Don’t touch or castration awaits you.” “You write on a wall in the street to speak to people,” Kheera said, “[Artists] have a tool not many people have — to express themselves — and maybe they can capture something nobody notices, focus on it and somehow show it in a visually beautiful way.” Another woman working to change how women are viewed through street art is Lebanese-Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab who created the “A Thousand Times No” campaign during the 2011 revolution. “I am a quiet person, I don’t know how to scream,” she told Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2014. “My contribution to the revolution was to paint on the walls, was to be an artist.” The title of the series comes from a common Arabic saying that’s meant to confirm and emphasize rejection. She collected a thousand symbols that play on the word “no” in Arabic script and represent facets of oppression in Egypt’s long history. These she transformed into stencils that demand a stop to the tyranny, to the burning of books, to military rule, and to the stripping of women. That last one took the form of a stencil of a blue bra accompanied by the text “No to the stripping of people” — a direct reference to a video that surfaced during the 2011 protests of a woman being beaten by police who stripped her of her clothes and revealed her blue bra. “The blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street,” Shehab explained in a 2012 TED Talk. The blue stencil is often accompanied by a footprint that reads “Long live a peaceful revolution.” “My work is more concerned with memory, because of the intensity and speed of events people tend to forget,” she said. “No to the stripping of people” Some street artists refer to themselves only by their tag names, so there’s no way of knowing if they’re men or women. One such artist is The Mozza, a street artist working in wheat paste throughout Cairo. The Mozza’s work is exclusively portraits of women, usually done in black-and-white with intricate patterns inscribed within the folds of their clothing and veils. Some of the women are conversing with one another, some are solitary figures, but all of them are faceless — a circle of white devoid of a mouth to speak their minds and eyes to bear witness to what surrounds them. These works simultaneously speak to men and women, confronting men about the way they see women as objects undeserving of what makes someone human. Alternatively, the series allows both men and women to see themselves or their loved ones faces within the figures, in a sense transforming them into representations of the every-woman. Perhaps the most important are images created of women in positions of power. In one piece completed in Cairo, a crowned woman seated in nobility is holding the abstracted framework of a building in her lap. Her air of authority and the fact that she’s not overtly female makes the image more approachable to men, while showing every girl and woman the queen she can be. Suburb of Cairo, 2014 “Marching Women / Women Climbing Ladder” Male street artists have also played a huge role in creating women-centric works in Egypt. Alaa Awad is an artist and Assistant Lecturer in Fine Art Luxor’s painting department. In 2012 he painted neo-pharaonic scenes of powerful women. “Marching Women/Women Climbing the Ladder” was compositionally based on a carving in the wall of the Ramesseum temple, the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II constructed in the 13th century BCE. Awad’s large-scale mural painted in Cairo shows one group of women holding scrolls representative of knowledge walking forcefully in unison towards three women climbing a ladder. In the depiction in the Ramessuem temple the ladder leads to the afterlife where the deceased Pharaoh waits for them, but in Awad’s depiction the ladder leads towards progress, and only women see the necessity of reaching the top. “Baheia, your voice is rising” This and many of Awad’s other works visually express the importance women have always had in the fostering of Egypt: “We can’t know our future if we forget our past,” he said. Popular Egyptian street artist NeMo has also created works in support of women. A 2013 mural painted under a bridge in Mansoura is titled “Baheia, your voice is rising.” It shows the profiled silhouette of a woman with her head scarf and hair flowing out beneath her, the waves of black echoed in the leaf-like pattern surrounding the portrait. Baheia refers to a common Arabic name for girls that means “beautiful” or “brilliant.” Perhaps the most famous example of feminist street art in Egypt is El Zeft’s 2012 portrayal of 14th century BCE Queen Nefertiti with a gas mask on her face. He shared a photo of the work online with the caption: “A tribute to all women in our beloved Revolution. Without you we wouldn’t have gotten this far. Thank you.” Nefertiti stares straight at the viewer with a look of defiance, protected both against the tear gas unleashed on protestors and against the fumes from her own spray paint cans. A small victory for this movement was won when sexual harassment was criminalized in June 2014, punishable by up to five years in prison. But unfortunately vaginal penetration is the only form of abuse that can be prosecuted, so women who are molested in other ways still have no protection. The rising violence against women has been combatted with art in numerous ways both indoor and out, but this essay samples the most well-known and widespread examples. The earliest works were direct references to specific traumatic events, like a visual memory bank reminding the Egyptian community that the 2011 uprisings brought suffering along with the success of ousting the Mubarak regime. Nearly all of the street art supporting Egyptian women is figurative, collectively working to visually separate a woman’s body and face as entities distinct from her value as a human being. The inclusion of text takes some of these works a step further, ensuring that the meaning isn’t misinterpreted. Some of the pieces use aesthetics to draw the viewer in to contemplate meaning, but all of them share the common message that women contribute value to society outside the home. “In our case, we are not trying to install beauty. We have not yet reached that level,” Bahia Shehab said, “We communicate ideas of change to society. Because we believe in change and we believe in art as a tool for change. We are still in survival mode.” Alaa Awad — the artist —. علاء عوض. “The Missing Murals.” Accessed October 17, 2015. http://alaa- awad.com/the-missing-murals. Amnesty International. “Egypt: Admission of force ‘virginity tests’ must lead to justice,” May 31, 2011. Accessed October 15, 2015. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2011/05/egypt-admission- forced-virginity-tests-must-lead-justice. Biggs, Cassie. “Women make their power felt in Egypt’s revolution.” The National, February 14, 2011. Accessed October 14, 2015. http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/women-make- their-power-felt-in-egypts-revolution. Coletu, Ebony. “Visualizing Revolution: The Politics of Paint in Tahrir.” Jadaliyya, April 18, 2012. Accessed October 16, 2015. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5136/visualizing- revolution_the-politics-of-paint-in-ta. Downey, Michael. “The Writings on the Wall.” Rolling Stone: June 2012. El-Rifae, Yasmin. “Egypt’s Sexual Harassment Law: An Insufficient Measure to End Sexual Violence.” Middle East Institute: July 17, 2014. Accessed October 21, 2015. http://www.mei.edu/content/at/ egypts-sexual-harassment-law-insufficient-measure-end-sexual-violence. Guerin, Orla. “Egypt sex assault victims face long wait for justice.” BBC News: Cairo, October 24, 2013. Accessed October 14, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24657713. Kearl, Holly. Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World. (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015), 41-45. Khamis, Sahar. “The Arab ‘Feminist’ Spring?” Feminist Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, Feminist Histories and Institutional Practices (Fall 2011), p. 692-95. Louisiana Channel. “Bahia Shehab: Art as a Tool for Change.” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: 2014. Accessed October 15, 2015. http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/bahia-shehab-art-tool-change. NeMo .. Just Street Artist. “صوتك طالع يا بهية Baheia, your voice is rising.” Accessed October 20, 2015. http://egynemo.blogspot.com.eg/2013/10/baheia-your-voice-is-raising.html. Pangburn, DJ. “Street artist El Zeft pays tribute to Egypt’s female rebels.” death and taxes, September 27, 2012. Accessed October 19, 2015. http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/189107/street-artist-el- zeft-pays-tribute-to-egypts-female-rebels. Patry, Melody. Shout Art Loud. Cairo, Egypt: Index on Censorship, 2014. https:// www.indexoncensorship.org/shoutartloud. Schultz, Colin. “In Egypt, 99 Percent of Women Have Been Sexually Harassed.” Smithsonian Magazine, June 13, 2014. Accessed October 14, 2015. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ egypt-99-women-have-been-sexually-harassed-180951726. Shehab, Bahia. “A thousand times no.” Filmed June 2012, TED Talk. Accessed October 13, 2005. https:// www.ted.com/talks/bahia_shehab_a_thousand_times_no. Sholkamy, Hania. “Women Are Also Part of This Revolution.” In Arab Spring in Egypt, edited by Bahgat Korany and Rabab El-Mahdi, 153-174, American University in Cairo Press, 2012. The Mozza. “in the daytime….” Accessed October 20, 2015. http://themozza.tumblr.com. Thomson Reuters Foundation. Annual Report: Inform. Connect. Empower. London: 2013. Accessed October 15, 2015. http://www.trust.org/documents/annual-report-2013.pdf. United Press International (UPI). Activists: Rapists use ‘circle of hell.’ Cairo: February 21, 2013. Accessed October 14, 2015. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/02/21/Activists- Rapists-use-circle-of-hell/UPI-61851361480254/#ixzz2LvSOXlfp. Women On Walls. “About WOW 2013.” Accessed October 12, 2015. http://womenonwalls.org/in- mansoura-join-us-or-if-you-cant-follow-our-daily-journal-and-flickr. Women On Walls. “Site 1: Boursa Cafe’ Area.” Accessed October 12, 2015. http://womenonwalls.org/ site-1-boursa-cafe-area. Women On Walls. “WOW UNCHAINED.” Accessed October 12, 2015. http://womenonwalls.org/wow- unchained. GD Star Rating This past weekend three different art fairs decorated the San Francisco peninsula. One of them, Art Market SF, comes around every time this year, but the two others celebrated their inaugural opening. The Parking Lot Art Fair let artists set up booths in parking spots on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting as early as 5am. They didn’t even announce which parking lot they’d be momentarily filling with art until the day before the pop-up fair opened. But my favorite was the stARTup Art Fair, an independently produced contemporary collection of unrepresented artists. The fair was held in the open-air grounds of Hotel Del Sol, a 1950s motel turned boutique hotel, which housed one exhibitor per hotel room during the three-day event. More than 3,500 people came to browse the hotel filled up with art. Here are a few of my favorite rooms: Joshua‘s work breaks memories down into hues and shapes set against solid neon color. Because our conceptions of the memories that shape us can’t always be explained through smiling grainy photographs. A day on the beach is a chaotic pile of planets and geometric debris, a shovel lost in the mix and the beachball nearly out of sight. A cluster of palm trees are ringed like Saturn in blue, but they stand against a bright yellow backdrop, a line of ugly tall brown sand hiding not-so-conspicuously behind it. How many our happiest childhood moments have been reshaped by the reflections of all the happy images we’ve seen in ads and TV shows since? The way Joshua paints them, I definitely prefer the messy bright amalgamations of color to fading, disappointing memories. “The deconstruction of both form and subject reveals the fragile fabrication of the facade, as well as equating the surreal deterioration to our capacity to retain memory and the inevitable fleeting of the details. color and suggestive shape alone play a huge part in tickling the senses. Even the most gestural marks in context with each other can suggest something so real to our memory.” Light touches Theresa‘s subjects the same way we imagine clouds splitting to shine down eternal wisdom. She paints skin with a soft, glowing brightness that gives way to all the tender muscles and bones struggling quietly underneath. And yet her faces and gestures are delicate and relaxed, thick brushstrokes interpreting each figure and scene through a silky haze, like when you first see the world with your eyes half-closed each morning. “I aim to find what is interesting in what is ordinary; an appreciation for the every day experience. Through close observation, I use the versatility of oil paints to capture the interesting abstractions found in even the simplest of objects… My work is centered on drawing attention to what we might otherwise take for granted.” Rodney‘s work uses black and white text and images to prove that the world could never be that simple. Splashing watercolors are dissolved away by salts that further fade each figure, as if these canvases held the histories we’re so in danger of losing. But the one part of each figure you can always see unmistakably is a pair of eyes peering out, sometimes with hope and other times with defiance, but always witnessing the circumstances that surround them. Some in our country jump to say the roots of these problems don’t exist anymore, but the politics behind thousands of years of racial injustice should feel very real when our cities are rioting because sons and fathers aren’t safe. “While debating demanding topics such as race, religion, or war, it is simple enough to become polarized, and see situations in either black or white, right or wrong. These tactics may satisfy individuals whose position depends on employing policies or implementing strategies that promote specific agendas for a specific constituency. But as an artist, it is more important to create a platform that moves us past alliances, and begins a dialogue that informs, questions, and in some cases even satires our divisive issues. Without this type of introspection, we are in danger of having apathy rule our senses. We can easily succumb to a national mob mentality, and ignore individual accounts and memories. With my work I am creating an intersection where body and place, memory and fact are merged to re-examine human interactions and cultural conditions to create a narrative that requires us to be present and profound.” Margaret‘s needlework pays homage to the art of sewing while relaying quips that definitely wouldn’t land as hard in another medium. Something about cross-stitched letters begs you not to take them seriously, and in this case that intuition happens to be exactly right. Motivational statements like “Life is short,” and “Eyes closed head first can’t lose” are funny stitched out, and intentionally silly pieces like “Bacon of light,” “There’s no crying in baseball,” “Hello? This is dog” and “Her?” are borderline hilarious. Jessica‘s paintings play with reflection and memory in an art-historical way, using color schemes and scene framings to give her work a stunning voice. The line between what’s real and what isn’t doesn’t matter in a world where what’s tangible serves as the backdrop to representations of a memory or frame of mind. “In my pictures, I manipulate the body’s position in space to explore the dynamic between place and identity. My paintings often reflect the decentered, placeless zones of suburbia or urban peripheral as a function of a dislocated identity or collective fantasy. I construct narrative clashes, where the protagonist participates in the pictorial space of the painting surface, residing in the logic of an allegorical perspective.” GD Star Rating

Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961 Classic Movie Reviews Directed by Blake Edwards Starring Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard Buddy Epsen and Mickey Rooney Struggling writer Paul Varjak moves into a New York apartment building and becomes intrigued by his pretty, quirky neighbor, Holly Golightly. Holly's lifestyle confuses and fascinates Paul; in public she flits through parties with a sexy, sophisticated air, but when they're alone she changes into a sweetly vulnerable bundle of neuroses. Based on Truman Capote's best selling book, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a film about the fear of being yourself. This film is like an analogy of high school, with everyone playing certain roles to get what they think they want. Audrey Hepburn plays the classic role of Holly Golightly, a woman who is the ultimate role player. And what happens when people play roles for so long is, they forget when the role started, and who they were in the first place. Tiffany's is the place where Holly can remind herself of who she is, as the store represents the metaphor of knowing you're not completely lost if you have a place to go to feel free. Along comes Paul 'Fred' Varjak, a stuggling writer who seems to have lost his way. He moves into the same apartment building as Holly and they soon become fast friends. Paul is fasinated by Holly and her life. He first meets her playing a role, then during a moment of comfort, she begins to subconsciously open up to him. She becomes one person when others are around and another when she's alone with him. Of course they are falling in love with each other because they are making each other better people. But having faith in yourself to be who you actually are is one of the hardest things for some people to do. It's a very scary thing, and at its core it's because they don't love themselves. In order to love someone else, you must be yourself, and in order to be yourself, you must love yourself and who you actually are. George Peppard's character Paul is the heart and soul of this film. He, like Holly, uses his body to earn his keep, and is deeply dependent on others to survive. He was a writer, but it's hard to write when you don't like yourself, and Paul is completely blocked. (Ironically the writer himself, Truman Capote, found himself in the same boat after publishing his book In Cold Blood. Capote developed writer's block because he couldn't stand himself after his sketchy dealings in manufacturing the drama in his non-fiction crime drama, and never wrote another book again.) Paul and Holly have a lot in common, and share an instant connection. The best scenes in this film are the ones between Paul and Holly. When they're together it's like they are both far away from the rest of the world. The fears they have about the world are gone, as they both feel free and open for the first time in their lives. This film is not a dark, gritty and moody character-study like the book. It's bright, comical and flashy, as director Blake Edwards really counters the subtext with a candy-store-style background in New York City. The art direction and cinematography are bright and positive during these otherwise sad and painful scenes. It's a masterstroke in storytelling, as Edwards shows us that this world and these characters are a lot like other people. We think we want certain things because it will make us happier, but what really happens is that going after superficial things pushes us farther away from who we really are. This is a movie that any fan of film should see, as it's very much a universal movie, with a theme that stands the test of time. The only real tragedy is the role of the Chinese upstairs neighbor played by Mickey Rooney, who is obviously not Chinese. It's disgusting, actually, watching this completely stereotypical role, and is an insult to the Asian population. But bear through those scenes and enjoy the rest of this truly classic film.

After 26 years as the high-profile rabbi of Orlandos Congregation of Liberal Judaism, Larry Halpern left Central Florida earlier this year in large part to support the career of the woman he loves. Halpern said there were other, unspecified reasons for his departure, but he did acknowledge that the move gave his wife, Rabbi Ariel Stone-Halpern, the opportunity to achieve her goal to get back into the pulpit. Rabbi Stone-Halpern is the new associate rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, a reform synagogue in Portland, Ore., with a membership of 1,000 families. Since Larry Halpern assumed the pulpit at the Congregation of Liberal Judaism in 1970, the temple grew from 150 families to nearly 800 families and embarked on a $1.3 million expansion campaign. A hallmark of his pastorate was the observation and celebration of life cycle events: birth, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, funerals and holidays. Beyond the walls of his synagogue, Halpern was equally active in Jewish affairs. He established the Jewish chaplaincy program at Rollins College and was the only rabbi to serve as president of the Jewish Federation of Central Florida. He also led campaigns in support of Soviet Jews and of Israel. Halpern was also a civic and political activist who was frequently in the spotlight. He served on the Mayors Commission on Civil Rights in the early 1970s and later founded the Mayors Commission on Human Rights. He served on the committee that brought public radio to Central Florida. In 1995 Halpern joined with a group of like-minded clergy to establish a local chapter of the Interfaith Alliance, an ecumenical organization, which the rabbi said was needed to create a religious response to that of the right. Despite Orlandos conservative atmosphere, Halpern said he always found there were people who were willing to work with me not as many as I would have hoped willing to struggle and reach out. Last December, Halpern announced that he was leaving the Congregation of Liberal Judaism to move to Atlanta, and earlier this year he was feted by a gala sendoff dinner in June at the Marriott Expo Center that drew numerous community leaders. One of the speakers at the dinner was the Rev. Jim Armstrong, of the First Congregational Church in Winter Park. Larry Halpern represented all things good in this community, Armstrong said in a recent interview. He championed the causes sometimes unpopular that extended ministries of compassion and understanding to the oft-neglected and oppressed. He believed in civility in discourse and respected the views of those with whom he disagreed. He is sorely missed in Central Florida. For a while, Halpern busied himself with plans to establish a Jewish funeral home in Atlanta, teaching classes at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center and a local Reform synagogue. But plans for the funeral home didnt work out, Halpern said, and when Ariel Stone-Halpern was offered the pulpit in Oregon the couple moved again. What was unspoken but widely understood in the Orlando Jewish community was that Ariel Stone-Halpern could not expect to get a pulpit in Central Florida, for a number of reasons. At 33, she is more than two decades younger than her husband. Larry Halpern had officiated at both her conversion to Judaism when she took the name Ariel and at her bat mitzvah. She had served as a rabbinic intern at the Congregation of Liberal Judaism in the mid-1980s, before attending seminary. In 1989, when Halpern the father of two grown children divorced his wife of 25 years and began dating Stone, some in the congregation disapproved. The couple married in 1995. For one of the few times in nearly 30 years, Larry Halpern was not busy working on his sermons for this weekends High Holidays. During the holiday services, Ill be sitting in the congregation, kvelling over my wife, he said, using the Yiddish term for brimming with pride. I even volunteered to be an usher. Halpern still maintains his ties to the Orlando community, flying into town in August to conduct a bar mitzvah for old friends. As for the future, Halpern said he is looking for work in the Portland area. He said he would absolutely be willing to share a pulpit, even as associate rabbi to his wifes senior position. Shes the best rabbi I know.

Wedding rings are, perhaps, the most favourite ornament both for men, and for women. Often not too big ring becomes the real symbol of accessory each other, a reminder on that day when the man and the woman stopped being simply loving couple, and became a family. And in order that ornament as is possible pleased with the appearance more long, it is very important to choose correctly material of which wedding rings are made. Yellow gold in this plan is considered the most traditional metal. Wedding ring from yellow gold as the symbol of family life, is recognized as the most acceptable option in all world cultures. Merits and demerits of yellow gold The most important advantage of this precious metal is color – truly «gold» as we understand it. Has no other appearance of gold so obvious yellowish («solar») shade. Not without reason in the West wedding rings which lemon gold casts thoughts of this bright star, are in the highest demand. There is even the standard opinion what exactly the yellow precious metal is the best symbol of matrimonial love and a warm attitude to each other. Thanks to color it can’t simply be mixed with one another. And if at a view of a ring from white metal it is possible to think still: gold it or silver, a yellow shade of a ring tells for itself. One more advantage of yellow gold was noticed by psychologists. And again it is about the color of a ring reminding of the sun and hot summer. Owners of such ornament are less subject to the melancholy and melancholy developing when on the street gloomy weather reigns. This property for wedding rings is especially characteristic – that is jewelry which the majority of us wears, without removing. Yellow gold is unreceptive to various atmospheric influences. It doesn’t grow dull from moisture or bright beams of the sun, doesn’t spoil on a frost or in hot weather. And still the jewelry having a yellow (lemon) shade perfectly approaches all dresses and styles, pertinently looking in any situation. But, despite all these advantages, it is possible to call yellow gold practical material only with a big stretch. In most cases the wedding ring from yellow gold has the 750th test, that is 75% of pure metal are its part. It is known that it is very soft material, it is possible to bend or break products from it without big work. And pure gold can be cut by means of a usual kitchen knife.