Sarah Palin managed to avoid speaking in tongues and calling for witch trials in tonight’s debate, and yet I was still wrong in my post from two days previous: I thought she would win the debate, spew rehearsed lines, look good doing it, and Biden would proffer a gaffe or two to make it a “new race.” The press was dying for a Palin victory to turn the tide.
Didn’t happen. Not even close.
The transparency of Palin’s phoniness was too obvious to ignore in last night’s debate. She was one canned, fake-folksy, BS line after another, and as the debate wore in, it became more and more obvious. [Read more →]
I watch a lot of TV because I’m intellectually lazy and I drink a lot. Those two things put together equal an intense fascination with television. I’m even thinking of buying a new one, so if you have any advice on a good 42 inch LCD TV for around $1000 or less, let me know. I’m rather cheap also.
Since I swore up and down I’d start blogging more, I’m going to let you in on what I’m enjoying right now, with a tidbit about why I enjoy it.
1. Mad Men
Roger Sterling has to be my favorite character. He may have just made a pretty dubious move (don’t make relationship decisions while you’re on a bender), but he’s been a part of some of my favorite moments of the show. Especially enjoyable is his visit back to Sterling/Cooper after his coronary when he’s alone with Joan, and we all think he’s going to say something nice, and he says, “You are the finest piece of ass I ever had, and I don’t care who knows it.” What an asshole, but I love it.
The goal right now is to start putting up some actual content on this blog, on a daily basis.
Right now, my main concerns are around Sarah Palin. I know she is a complete train wreck, but I know that the expectations are so low that even if she gives a few choice lines, she will be seen as somehow eligible for the presidency of the United States.
This is what will happen: the VP debate is so sanitized, and all of the conservatives are so up in arms by Gwen Ifill moderating it, that anything resembling aptitude will result in a Sarah Palin victory.
Biden is also a train wreck, and if it wasn’t for Palin, all eyes would be on his blunders. But since nobody is paying attention to him, any error he makes will be amplified.
Sarah Palin’s greatest gift in regard to this debate was low expectations. Thursday, we will see the forces come out claiming Palin won the debate because she had enough canned lines to bring it home.
But the mark is McCain. I hope Biden keeps his eye on the ball.
Anybody who has been watching cable news over the last several weeks will notice new ads being put out by the American Petroleum Institute (API), talking about “securing America’s energy future” and inviting us to go to their website, Energytomorrow.org.
With their upbeat tones and attractive blonde spokeswoman, the ads hint at the true nature of their mission: they want to drill for oil offshore of states like Florida and California, and they want to drill in protected wildlife refuges like ANWR.
With McCain flip-flopping and adopting the oil company platform, the two become blood brothers: McCain will push an extensively polled plan to liberalize offshore drilling while the oil companies launch a campaign to promote “domestic exploration.” Both campaigns help the other: the money and resources from Big Oil augment the McCain argument, helping him politically. The more McCain pushes for offshore drilling, the more possible it becomes for Big Oil to win their prize: unencumbered American drilling. [Read more →]
Okay, I don’t “love” Kobe Bryant, but I love his game.
There’s a good article in Sports Illustrated this week that a friend of mine pointed out as evidence that Kobe Bryant is America’s number one douchebag. But I took it a different way. In one instance, he challenged a player on his high school team to one-on-one hoops, first to 100 wins, except Kobe always beat the guy by a score of around 100-10. I look at this as a guy with a pure killer instinct, looking to improve his game, never wanting to back down. Kobe practices and works out more than any player in the league. While he takes a lot of heat for being a dick, he gets little credit for the fact that the guy outworks his teammates. When you’re the hardest working guy out there, don’t you deserve to be somewhat of a knob-gobbler? [Read more →]
Besides the Reverend Wright firestorm that currently bores me to tears, Barack Obama has taken a lot of heat from the likes of Sean Hannity and Paul Krugman about his remarks that working class white people are “bitter” and “cling to guns and religion” due to a deep stagnation of economic progress in the working class over the last few decades. This reflects the thesis of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas, which Krugman seems to think is incorrect.
Krugman is correct in saying that people from poor states don’t cling to 2nd Amendment and religious issues because of economic hardship, but he is not correct in his assertion that they don’t vote against their own economic interests in favor of guns and moral values.
This all started with the backlash against the sixties and seventies that made everybody love Reagan.
Conservative voices like Newt Gingrich and Robert Bork have railed on sixties culture, blaming a collusion of the counterculture and the Great society for attempting to bring down western civilization as we know it.
However, the counterculture of the sixties has been co-opted by the power elite and the evangelical right. The religious right has become the new counterculture, and the tenets of old counterculture are now tools of the power elite. The methods and language of the “old” counterculture have turned into a vehicle for trendsetting on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood as well as a vehicle for social change in a right-wing religious revolution. [Read more →]
Okay, I have to blame my friends Greg and Scott Thorson, as well as Greg’s girlfriend Jessica Bowser (check out her blog, Cocktail Moms), for turning me on to the obsession that is Battlestar Galactica. They also got me addicted to Lost, and that comprises the two major dramas I’m hopelessly addicted to.
I’ll admit first off that their knowledge of the series is far superior to mine since I’ve just basically watched most of the series in the last month or so. It was sort of like cramming for a test.
Battlestar just came back for its final season after a shocking end to the third season, where we found out that Tory, Chief Tyrol, Sam Anders, and Col. Saul Tigh were all Cylons. It’s especially intriguing that Tigh is a Cylon considering his extreme humanness. He’s a drunk, he’s surly, and prone to emotional outbursts–not what one expects from a supposedly superior robot race. As Captain Lee Adama espouses lofty rhetoric about how the flaws of humanity are precisely what makes it worth saving, we come to realize that a Cylon can be a roaring booze fiend as well. Hell, Tigh showed up to the Baltar trial half-lit, and admitted to killing his own wife because she was giving information to the Cylons to save Tigh’s bacon. Heavy stuff.
But that only makes four of the final five Cylons. Who is the fifth? [Read more →]
Sean Hannity is a white cultural supremacist. This is the only conclusion one can legitimately reach after watching the vitriol spew forth from him and his Fox News colleagues.
Nearly every time I turn it to Fox News in the evening, either Hannity or Bill O’Reilly are finding some way of turning Barack Obama into a black nationalist.
Day and night, they are linking him with black intellectuals and clerics while claiming that the loose affiliation he has with them proves that he hates his country. Essentially, Fox is suggesting that the only way for Obama to prove his patriotism is to renounce African-American culture.
It is true that a lot of the civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King himself, often spoke harshly about America’s history. But why shouldn’t he, and what is so inherently wrong with Barack Obama having a familiarity and bond with the black community? According to Fox News, Hannity, and O’Reilly, the only way a black person can be patriotic is by distancing him or herself from the mainstream of black culture and thought over the last century. In light of O’Reilly’s comments about his trip to Sylvia’s and Hannity’s relationship with known neo-Nazi Hal Turner, it’s no surprise that their litmus test for an African American president is basically a complete repudiation of black culture and intellectual history.
What is that but a veiled call for white supremacy? Admittedly, it’s likely not the color of the skin that Hannity and O’Reilly are worried about, it’s the color of the culture. I promise you that if any other black Democrat was in the running for the presidency, Fox and company would hit him with the same patriotism argument that is only remedied in their eyes by a rejection of black culture, history, and thought. [Read more →]
Well, I made the decision to hook up my own domain and get this blog up and running last night, and really didn’t have much of an idea what I was getting into. My blog is going to look like hell for awhile due to my idiocy about Wordpress and building actual websites. You see, I’m pretty good at viewing websites. I can type the name of them into the browser and look at them as they magically appear from the tubes that comprise the Internet. It’s all of this “code” and “stuff” that I’m not too familiar with. So I don’t even know what the hell to do next.
One thing is for sure: this blog is going to be mediocre. And I can promise this to you with 200% assurance. Would I lie to you? Not exactly.
I could go into all of the crap that has me concerned right now (whether it be installing Wordpress 2.5 without the help of Fantastico or figuring out how to personalize my theme with my own pics, fonts, and colors), but instead I will go and take a shower and wash away the memories for my intense frustration I endured last night merely to get to this point.
Sarah Palin managed to avoid speaking in tongues and calling for witch trials in tonight’s debate, and yet I was still wrong in my post from two days previous: I thought she would win the debate, spew rehearsed lines, look good doing it, and Biden would proffer a gaffe or two to make it a “new race.” The press was dying for a Palin victory to turn the tide.
