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Theo's Gift
Fleeting, and oftentimes hypocritical, opinions on pop culture, politics, television, comics, and Cosby.
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Mastodon City Begum Lives
Shin Chan
Friends' Blogs Politics/Society Entertainment Sports Video Games/HD Tech Space News Comedy Misc.
Profile
All you have to do is follow three simple rules. One, never underestimate your opponent -- expect the unexpected. Two, take it outside -- never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary. And three, be nice -- until it's time not to be nice.
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Thursday, September 04, 2008
Per pound, what's the most valuable stuff on Earth? 1 lbs of anti-matter will set you back $24 quadrillion. Somewhat more down to Earth is the drug, LSD. One pound of it will cost $55 million. Yep. Two nations...And people wonder why the GOP has such a chip on its shoulder when it comes to the media.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
On Conventions You know, the Temple of Obama and the secular deification of the Male Palin was tough to stomach last week. But you know what's worse? The ongoing "Passion of the McCain." If I have to hear in gruesome detail for another thirty minutes how McCain suffered for his country -- how he was beaten, how he was abused, how he drank blood and slept in a pile of pig crap -- I'm going to lock myself in a bamboo cage and draw crosses in the sand. The Big Speech I give it a B, maybe B+ if I'm feeling generous. The beginning was tricky/rough, with the partisans acting like fanatics and throwing off Palin's timing. In these first ten munutes, she sounded a bit like a librarian reading a book to kids. But it got much better very quickly. It's tough, though, to judge convention speeches because the audience loves everything. So who knows how it'll go over. I actually enjoyed Rudy's speech the most. Sure it was the usual Rudy schtick, but it was so quick and mean-spirited it felt almost cathartic. Okay, this is funny. My favorite joke is that his only experience is that he was once sheriff of a mining settlement.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Forget the Palin Choice. I want to know who made the decision to make Laura Bush the de facto MC at Day 2 of the RNC? *That* is a guy whose decision-making abilities I'd like to question. I imagine the next four to eight years will brings all sorts of this delightful non-logic. It's true that Obama's biggest accomplishment is his success (thus far) in running a Presidential campaign. But isn't this a bit absurd? One qualifies to run for President by the very activity of running for President? I'm glad to hear that he smiled when he said that, because I don't think it's an argument you can make with a straight face.The act of reading a novel makes me qualified to write a novel! Hitchens points out that both parties love to engage in "pseudosocialist" propaganda come election years. Every four years, we suddenly discover that the only people worth noticing or mentioning in the United States are those who are ill, or unemployed, or uninsured, or underpaid, or homeless, or some combination of the above. Bill and Hillary Clinton went on about these unprotected and wretched millions on two successive nights last week, apparently never reflecting that some of them at least must have been alive and suffering under the two Clinton administrations. How can a thinking person sit still and listen to such piffle, let alone get up and wave their arms about when they hear it again and again?
Monday, September 01, 2008
Whatever happened to a women's body being her own business? Whatever happened to privacy being a constitutional right? Hahaha. And the grand hypocrisy merry-go-round continues. The fact is, the left is all about privacy in the matters of the womb. Were they to stay true to their colors, this mantra of theirs would seem to preclude them from judging Bristol’s pregnancy and her choice to keep her child, right? It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The Kos kids and their blog followers have already made one attempt to ruin this girl’s life. Now that they have a story with actual truth behind it, we’ll have to sit back and see how far they run with a teenager’s identity.Relatedly, and even more pissed off, is VDH. It did not take a vicious Andrew Sullivan and the Daily Kos long, in despicable fashion, to start directing our attention to pictures of the Palins’ sixteen-year-old daughter, with the unhinged suggestion that she was really the mother of Sarah Palin’s recent child—all this from liberal humanists who lecture the nation hourly about Rovian politics. In their world of the self-anointed, the filthy ends of smearing a teen-ager always justify the noble ends: who cares about destroying the reputation of the Palin family if it brings us the Messiah? (Watch the retreat to victimhood when the untruths from these purveyors of slander are exposed as absolutely false; it will be something like: if you allege I’m a smear artist, then you are thereby a smear artist.).... We praise the distant middle class, but don’t want a rural beauty queen and happy governor of Alaska in Washington. We want to agonize about women’s dramas and abortion, but not someone to deliver a child known in advance to have Down syndrome. We want a superwoman, but that means going to Harvard or Yale, not standing in waders on a boat or carving up a bloody moose.This last part I really agree with, and I think it's the main reason why modern Democrats will always have trouble shaking the elitist label. They may claim to be of the people, but their national leadership is so not of that ilk, and so often condescending toward it in a way that's even more nefarious and hypocritical than McCain's seven McMansions. As VDH writes: Bottom line: we are supposed to turn our lives over to a particular sort of lawyer, Ivy-League deity, who knows far better than we how we are supposed to live. If one understands that condescension, then all the talk about race, class, and gender is about as serious as communitarianism was to those bloated figures who used to stand on the podium at the Moscow May Parade. Cindy Mac does not look happy to be sitting right next to the First Family of Weird in American Politics (goodbye, Clinton-Bush Axis!)
Sunday, August 31, 2008
You're doing a heckuva job, Karma So, McCain steal's Obama's spotlight with the Palin pick and now Hurricane Gustav looks to steal McCain's spotlight by reminding everyone of Katrina and how horrible W is. Fascinating. It's going to be interesting if the hurricane hits -- and devestates -- the more GOP areas (that is to say, most areas) of the Gulf Coast. What's it gonna be like if Obama and Biden get a cold welcome down there (is Obama going to just visit New Orleans and call it a trip?)? Hell, that area doesn't even really like McCain. He better put Palin out front at all times while touring tipped over mobile homes and Trent Lott's water-logged plantation. And won't somebody please think of all those people in St. Paul tasked with putting out folding chairs this week?
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Slate's XX Files is a nice area for female opinions on Palin and politics. It's left-of-center, but the analysis reads very fair and logical to me. Dahlia Lithwick (whose SCOTUS reporting I've always enjoyed) doesn't doubt Palin's tokenism (nor do I), but wonders if Palin will prove to be more Sandra Day O'Connor, or Harriet Miers. Not voting Obama-Biden means you are racist, so does not voting McCain-Palin mean that you are sexist and ageist ? For the sake of internal consistency, it'd be fun if both campaigns made a grand compromise and said yes on both these counts.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Overall, I'm the only person I know who likes both Obama and Mac's veep picks. I am, however, more divided on Palin than Biden. Mac had pulled very, very close to Obama largely on the "can you trust Obama" line of attack. And now's he removed that tactic entirely by picking someone even more inexperienced than Obama. On the other hand, part of my gut thinks Palin is really going to unite the 20% of the country that's hardcore conservative and get them out to vote, plus a very small, but (in this sure-to-be-close election) significant fraction of Hillary Dems. I guess it boils down to McCain not really having much of a choice. He pulled even with Obama, but lost the initiative by way of a well-done Democratic convention and the simple ebb and flow of the campaign. I think his summer attacks on Obama would have run out of steam far ahead of election day. And with Obama needing to only pick up a few purple states (or even just one) to get in the White House, McCain really did need a decisive gamble or else the natural course of this political cycle (GOP out, Dems in) would slowly, relentlessly reassert itself. Hot Air on Palin. That’s pure garbage — the near-hysterical enthusiasm on the right today proves her appeal goes deeper than her sex — but I’m positively aching at the thought of our nuanced left affecting high dudgeon for the next two months over, of all things, identity politics. You turds invented this game. Don’t cry because you’re suddenly getting beat at it. ...The problem with this last part is that the Internet progressives were the ones flinging the most crap at Hillary and saying the most sexist things. I mean, these are people who routinely call Republican women "cunts" (maybe *they* have more in common with Mac than they care to admit?). When Hillary deigned to track Center on some issues and refused to Hope (TM), they turned her into the second coming of Ann Coulter. Basically, it seems like it boiled down to Obama picked a Dad, and McCain picked a girl he'd like to bang when Cindy's not around. |
