"George McGovern admitted to hospice."
Even though I was six weeks short of 18 when the McGovern/Nixon vote was held, and politics were far from the most important topic on my mind, 40 years later I still remember the venom directed at McGovern in the media, and on the streets where I lived in SW Virginia. The ignorant and uninformed voted en masse, and the corrupt won the election, but after Watergate I naively thought that would never happen again in my lifetime. Unfortunately, the ignorant, uninformed, and corrupt have carried most elections since, and I don't understand how that happens today any better than I did then. [personal communication, which brings back our own memory of spotting Senator McGovern across 42nd Street in Manhattan the summer of 1976 and realizing that he was eyeing the same shapely girl we'd been eyeing, which he sheepishly acknowledged when we met in the middle of the street to shake hands and chat briefly]
You may have noticed that the Green Party presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, was absent from the "town hall" presidential debate at Hofstra University the other night. That's because she was shackled to a chair in a nearby New York police facility, along with her running mate, Green Party vice president nominee Cheri Honkala. Their crime: attempting to get to the debate so Stein could participate in it. While Mitt Romney uttered the now-famous line that he was given "whole binders full of women" while seeking staff as newly elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, the real binders were handcuffs used to shackle these two women, who are mothers, activists and the Green Party's presidential ticket for 2012.Just finished watching The Secret World of Arrietty (2012: Hiromasa Yonebayashi), which I found very enjoyable, as I almost always find Studio Ghibli films. Check it out.
If you like it there are others—Spirited Away and Porco Rosso, for two—that I enjoyed for their graphic style and imagination, from the same group of creators.[personal communication; the link to Amazon.com includes a 39-second preview; my county library system has it, and I've put in an online request for the DVD]
Sarcasm done right : "The Vampire Squid Morphs into Jilted Valley Girl," by Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives. [personal communication; excerpt:]
...by reading a WSJ article entitled “Goldman Turns Tables on Obama Campaign”:Walter Mosley on Obama: "Obama has shown unflagging will and leadership, the novelist says in his verdict on the presidency."(The Observer, October, 14 2012) [personal communication; excerpt:]
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to finance his campaign than Goldman Sachs. This election, none has done more to help defeat him.
In the four decades since Congress created the campaign-finance system, no company’s employees have switched sides so abruptly, moving from top supporters of one camp to the top of its rival, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of campaign-finance data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Employees at Goldman donated more than $1 million to Mr. Obama when he first ran for president. This election, they have given the president’s campaign $136,000—less than Mr. Obama has collected from employees of the State Department. The employees have contributed nothing to the leading Democratic super PAC supporting his re-election.
By contrast, Goldman employees have given Mr. Romney’s campaign $900,000, plus another $900,000 to the super PAC founded to help him.
Obama was a surgeon in a crowded operating theatre who asked for a bone saw and was given a rusty scalpel. To his credit he applied himself to the impossible job with unflagging energy and inexplicable poise. His wife, her sleeves always rolled up, stood at his side, trying with him to resuscitate the patient that is our nation.One more ignorant idea that religion has given us. First heard this one from Rush Limbaugh:
Our wounds are critical but the real problem is that there are extenuating complications in our immune systems. The economic, environmental, ecclesiastical, and educational systems are all failing...The only thing that we have going for us is will and leadership. For four years, President Obama has represented both.
My politics are not on the same page as the official stance of the White House but that hardly matters. The conflicts that riddle our world seem to have called this extraordinary American president into existence; and for that I am grateful.
But having said that, I'm afraid I believe that the only way a black man could have made it into office was when the problems facing us had already transcended the conflict between races and arrived at the place where the only question was the survival of the species.
God did not give man dominion over the earth only to arrive at the wretchedness of overpopulation, starvation, pandemics, and worldwide pollution. God would never bestow a gift only to see it ruined.Isn't that a beauty! [personal communication]
Limerick of the Week:
A gullible fellow was Claude,
And all too easily awed;
Just to get one vote more,
A man at the door,
Told him that Romney was God.
Even thought I'll vote for Obama, I can't agree with Walter Mosley's worshipful assessment of him. He has done quite the opposite of applying "unflagging energy" to the job he was given. He handed over the drafting of the stimulus bill to Nancy Pelosi and Company. He let a shameless menagerie of senators write the "Obamacare" bill, a label that isn't remotely accurate. He let Tim Geithner and Larry Summers hang millions of defaulting homeowners out to dry. He gets credit for near-perfect foreign policy when Hilary Clinton has run the show. As a public educator and salesman for his policies, he gets a fat F. He's frequently asleep at the switch, as the nation saw in the first presidential debate. The assessment of him as "extraordinary" is ludicrous.
ReplyDeleteAmy Goodman has done her reputation as a reliable broadcast journalist no good in the above snippet. Jill Stein was absent from the Hofstra debate because she wasn't invited. She wasn't invited because, as a presidential candidate, she didn't meet the qualification criteria set up by the Commission on Presidential Debates. She didn't like those criteria, and their fairness is debatable. What isn't debatable is that she and her Veep sidekick entered an area that was designated as part of the debate venue, sat down, and refused to move when a policeman told them they were blocking traffic. Both were then arrested. They were treated as unresponsive protesters, not as VIPs.
ReplyDelete