The Most Pretentious Thing I Have Seen This Week.   ¶ 6:12 PM 0 comments

  GOP Senator Kit Bond Won't Run For Re-election
The GOP's skeletons are falling out of the closet. Bond's skeleton was actually in a bottle, Blunt's was in the closet. These guys demons are not being held as an open secret anymore, the Show Me state is actually starting to look at the deep flaws of these pols. If either of these clowns had run again they would have to answer for things that in the past would have been held closer to the vest.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost  ¶ 10:47 AM 0 comments

  Exchange with Clint Eastwood Fan Regarding The Spike Lee Feud   ¶ 10:06 AM 0 comments

  Phil Singer: If Chris Matthews Is Running For Senate, He Shouldn't Be On Air
I think we all need to buck up and realize that there is no such thing as objectivity. News is commentary and it always has been. People like O'Reilly, Matthews, Olberman et. al. are the honest ones. So called hard news is the biggest con ever to be perpetrated on the American People. There is nothing objective about presenting both sides as equal when all evidence runs to the contrary.



CNN is the standard bearer of this whole objective news charade these days. You think that CNN doesn't have a dog in this fight? Even if their motive is simply profit then they have a point of view that is in no way objective. In fact the lie of unbiased reporting makes it the most subversive element in our society. Every word choice, every story that is chosen over another communicates a perspective. When you turn on the news and they cover a murder in the wealthy neighborhood over those that happen in poorer places. When they cover a pit bull attack but not a German Shepard. When the news calls dirty political tricks simply "hard ball politics" they are showing you that they are not objective.



Just because the bias does not follow a stereotypical ideological line should not lull you into the false sense that "News" is not ideological and bent on selling a certain perspective. Commentary though shows its hand and as such can be better trusted in terms of its own perspective.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost  ¶ 1:29 PM 0 comments

  Why Obama Needs A Tina Fey
My coworkers and I were talking about the poor work SNL has done satirizing Obama. I think the problem is the dearth of talent, especially African American, on the show. Obama would be easy to satirize as most people who have such effortless charisma are easy to satirize. Fred Arnisen is really playing one note role, hitting on the professorial without approaching the charm.



Hell if you had a talented black actor play a square jawed all American figure, say the way they lampooned Don Draper in last nights episode, and alternate that with wonky policy positions that people pay little attention to while they swoon, you would have a pretty good skit. Who knows though why they don't do it? Maybe it's just that they haven't been doing the hard work building a talent pool of young comics, especially African-American, that could easily step into the role.



They are in trouble though. When the guests leave the show just falls on its ass. I think it is as much the writing as anything though because their are moments that the current cast has show brilliance. The inabililty to sustain that is usually do to leadership, sound familiar.
About Tina Fey
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost  ¶ 7:03 PM 0 comments

  PG Porn Says "No" to Nudity and "Yes" to Violence Against Women I believe you have clearly missed the point of PGPorn.tv because it is convenient for you to do so. Other than genitalia closeups and cum shots porn really has little to offer in the way of quality. The ridiculous dialog, plot lines, fake looking women with plastic breasts are grating and unfathomably insulting to the intelligence of men and women.



I think the Gunns' short film points out something about the quality of acting, creativity and hard work that go into porn. Many of the situations, much as the one in PG Porn, would lead to some kind of horrible Darwinian conclusion if it was stupidity that was the reason that porn had such a dearth of quality. Since porn can also make a very good deal of money, lack of resources is not the problem so we must conclude that porn producers are phoning it in.



Some will argue that porn is difficult to do well, having seen Short Bus I would agree, but it is still no excuse for some of the more prolific porn producers not to make an effort to include something of challenging artistic value. What I believe most of your ilk are angry about is that clearly the Gunn's can portray a "sexy" porn type situation but when the shoe is on the other foot you would have a problem delivering a laugh. This PG Porn is to skin flick mediocrity what Paul Mooney is to white racism, a threat.
About China
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost  ¶ 8:26 PM 0 comments

  Ideological Blindness   ¶ 3:37 PM 0 comments

  Recent Listserv Comment on the Economy and Government
I think the biggest mistake that liberals like myself have made though is looking at companies that are intensely focused on profit as evil. Corporations are constructed to be profit focused to the exclusion of all else and that is a problem, but assigning to what is amoral some deeper motivation limits our thinking don't you think? The government is meant to regulate and give guidance to what is essentially a conscience lacking money making machine. With Oil, Mortgages, Enron and the Internet bubble the government failed in each instance to be that guide. These are all results of a post-Reagan view of how the economy should work. No one is enforcing the bulk of securities and business regulation. All of this a reaction to a time when stagflation was upon us and even Nixon excepted that price controls should be implemented. Since the eighties we have swung to the other extreme where even Bill Clinton thought that we should allow a more laissez faire attitude toward government controls.

Essentially, what I am saying is that the GOP has had a self fulfilling prophecy, another instance of them building a government that doesn't work and then complaining about it. We need to as Democrats make this point.

As for Picken's Plan, he is doing what a Corporate type does best and that is acting on current market sentiment to make money. Its a good plan though because it addresses the problem. Since Pickens holds a large position in both wind and nat gas it behooves him to drive demand. He took the position though because he was shrewd, and greedy*, enough to look for an angle in the market and develop a strategy. This strategy was to sell the country something that would be good for both it and Pickens, doesn't make him a villain for trying to make money nor a hero for trying to save the country. It does make him smart and when that works to all of our advantage we can appreciate it. I would say though that it would be better to have all of our cars able to operate on both fuels nat gas and oil, which is not all that difficult. This would give us a tool to manage demand and a response to cuts in the production of either fuels as well as price spikes driven by speculation.

We can see how profound a tool a cut in demand is and how it can kill a price rally in the oil markets, oil is at just above a hundred bucks right now. Oil had been at $147 a barrel just a month and a half ago, dropping around 30% in a dramatically short time. This has been a result of speculators, but speculators were not evil for driving price. The value of the dollar dropping and the lack of other investment opportunities just created fertile soil for a bubble to occur.

I think you make a good point about nuclear power and the need to provide dramatism for the media. Your point about being bold is important to winning elections. In pointing out that being bold depends on transcending limits and rejecting the limitations driven by party dogma you speak to how we must be better than our competition. By stepping outside of our comfort zone to find solutions that fit with what we want for our world, and not simply with how we have fantasized the journey to be, we have a much better chance at realizing our environmental goals.

*Our feelings on Greed on both the the liberal and conservative side is muddied by a Christian perspective that the pursuit of money for monies sake is also evil. Conservatives need to redefine greed as an objectivist virtue and couch it in Christian terms. Liberals just get lazy accepting a traditional view by pointing at greed and holding there nose. Greed exists and it is neither good or evil but it is a powerful force that should be harnessed for the benefit of society.  ¶ 9:58 AM 0 comments

  My Take On John Edwards You know Edwards was a horrible candidate and the interview on Nightline just made it more apparent. The second thing out of the guys mouth was that Elizabeth knew about his affair in '06? I don't buy it. Keep your eye on the ball, this guy is spinning all of this hard. How old is that baby, because you know it's his. That'll trickle out right around the time we are all sick of talking about it and it will be less of a big deal, or so the Breck Boy thinks.

Edwards slight of hand has misdirected us to think, "hey Elizabeth knew about it for a couple of years and she was alright about it, so now we should feel that way too." I do not buy that she knew about this in the timeline that he is suggesting at all. It is way too convenient for him for it to be as he suggests. Nah, this is the most clever political bus throwing I have seen since Scooter Libby took one for the team. Hell if the guy showed as much talent for getting in the White House as he does for complete and utter shamelessness we may have seen him replaced by Barack Obama as VP, ala Agnew, in a John Kerry administration.

I for one am glad this guy is going down in flames. Narcissist is right. Everything from his endorsement of Obama to his announcing of the affair has been about putting himself at the center. Sometimes when I hear him talk about poverty its as if it were invented for him to talk about.

The best part is that his girlfriend is Allison Poole in American Psycho.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/08/allow_bret_easton_ellis_to_int.html  ¶ 10:10 PM 0 comments

  Advocacy In Journalism I like Fox, they have been very successful and passionate in their advocacy. I find advocacy much more transparent than the insidious veil of neutrality as is the pose of cnn or the networks. I should say though that I like what Keith Olberman and MSNBC advocate a lot better.

Other than the rare talented individuals like the late Tim Russert, most journos are pushing in one direction or another whether they are conscious of it or not. This has lead to various perversions such as what happened to Dan Rather, where the substance of a story is true but a supporting doc is forged...then the man is unceremoniously let go after decades of exemplary reporting.

The myth of neutrality suppresses our inclinations to point out wrongs done by those in power. The irony of course is that the notion of objectivity is a remnant of the corporatization of newspapers in the late 1800s. When newspapers began buying stories from from the different independent news bureaus like AP. They did this to cut costs and eliminate foreign and out of town reporters. Prior to this all papers advocated positions, then became "objective" to cut costs.  ¶ 2:10 PM 0 comments