La Bitch (Sarah Palin) may be running for President

“I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here.” Palin went on to say that there weren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of G.O.P. hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” and that her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/magazine/21palin-t.html

You didn't get mad when . . .

After The 8 Years Of The Bush/Cheney Disaster, Now You Get Mad?

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq.

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.

You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick along with many other things... Oh, Hell No!!

Boehner the Douchebag

With Many mea culpas and apologies to the Beatles:

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for the TEA Party loo loos

Thinks he has a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
He's a bit like the TEA party poo ooo

Nowhere Man please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere Man,the world will never be at your command!

ETC.

Dems lose big, Repubs gain and President Obama can start all over

Fuck the Tea Party they suck. Sarah Palin lost more than gained too. The Republicans captured the house and now has almost evened the Senate.  But this could turn out to be a good thing for the Prez. He'll have to rise above, become a statesman instead of a cheerleader and campaigner. He still has the press coverage, the bully pulpit and there are many things he can do by executive power. Sometimes getting flattened is good for the soul. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. . .

Jean Luc Godard's purported anti-semitism

Brody’s most incriminating charge is that of anti-Semitism, not only in connection with Godard’s longtime support of the Palestinian cause but as a matter of generalized prejudice rooted in everything from his childhood absorption of ambient French bigotry to his feud with Claude Lanzmann over the latter’s refusal to use archival footage in the Holocaust documentary Shoah. Brody musters a fair amount of evidence, such as a 1985 remark that invokes the stereotyped slur of Jewish usury: in the history of cinema, Godard said, the ”real producer” is “the image of the Central European Jew” because “[m]aking a film [involves] visibly producing debts.” Brody locates the heart of Godard’s anti-Jewish bias in his conviction—aired most expansively in Histoire(s) du cinéma, his 1998 video series—that true cinema died in the middle Forties as a result of its failure to document the Holocaust, a failure that Godard attributes to money-minded Jewish studio heads. More broadly, Brody paints Godard as an obsessive artist who regards “all of human history as a precursor to or tributary of the history of cinema,” and who blames the Jewish people—starting with Moses, who returned from the Burning Bush with tablets of law rather than icons of revelation—for “the fundamental cultural flaw of society, its preference for text over images, its anti-cinematic prejudice.” Brody finds the apex of Godard’s bigotry in the 2004 collage-drama Notre Musique, which Brody calls “a film of prewar prejudices adorned with postwar resentments—and, like much else in the history of anti-Semitism, with personal frustrations.” As powerful as much of Brody’s argument is, he weakens it by overinterpreting the evidence and (as with the women-and-films motif) pushing it too far—writing about Notre Musique, for example, as if anti-Semitism overwhelmed every other element in its intricate network of images and ideas. But dubious devices mar only a few portions of Everything Is Cinema, and my other complaints are relatively minor, relating to interpretations more than methodologies.

http://www.cineaste.com/articles/everything-is-cinema-the-working-life-of-jeanluc-godard

This election is pretty much the same as all the others

"Midterms Don't Matter"

Do the midterm elections actually matter? The Economist's Will Wilkinson doesn't think so. In spite of all the hysteria and "hyperventilating" commercials, Wilkinson argues that policy tends to stay the same regardless of who's in power. While the ruling party will naturally favor their supporters—that's public-employees unions for Democrats and "rich people and Raytheon" for Republicans—Wilkinson maintains that it's unreasonable to expect any big changes from Congress, or even that special interest groups will give up much power. "Military suppliers, big Wall Street interests, and the economic middle-class may do better or worse, but they always do pretty well," Wilkinson writes. In fact, he says, "this is the great unspeakable fact of American politics: it doesn't matter all that much who wins." At the New York Times, Ross Douthat refuses to say that November won't make a difference at all, but he does concede that Wilkinson offers a "useful corrective to the vast effort currently underway to persuade you that this election … is a world-historical hinge moment."

Read original story in The Economist | Monday, Nov. 1, 2010

What raised suspicions?

What raised the suspicion of the two packages sent from Yemen to Chicago area synagogues? The fact that they were "packages" being sent from an Arab country with known terrorists to an American Jewish house of worship? Or did anyone know what was in each package? Why would such a thing be sent from there to there? It might raise less suspicions if it were the other way the other way around. No?  Unless we had inside information there's no way of knowing or finding out. All I have is logic, my logic, western logic.


It seems like an enormous effort to do what the bomb planners proposed to do even if it meant the target was air cargo shipping. Not a lot of bang for the buck if one or two planes explode. Still the possibility that it would expose known holes in security of cargo transport is an area to be investigated. Shipping would have been disrupted but not entirely damaged. Intelligence services since 9/11/2001 have been focused on passenger planes since that time and the cargo shipments have largely been ignored. So it would mean doubling up now on air cargo. What about ships? Trains? Was it only because air shipments are more convenient for this kind of plan? 

There is much that doesn't seem to add up. None of us should be satisfied that the reasoning behind this hasn't been fully understood. The front pages of newspapers should be demanding answers.  Or maybe we shouldn't and intelligence forces are figuring it out now. My initital thoughts were that this was an operation designed to examine how the machinery of response operated once the packages were discovered and if a bomb went off in the process so much the better. I have yet to be disabused of that.