As you doubtless have heard, Columbia University has invited Iranian "President" Mahmoud Aymamzer to speak at the University. Many have speculated whether Columbia would have been so gracious to even Hitler. Well speculate no longer, according to this clip, the Columbia dude says '(Zeig) Heil Yes!'
The Times, top newspaper in human history, has this headline: "Bush Assails Democrats Over Child Health Bill." “Democratic leaders in Congress want to put more power in the hands of government by expanding federal health care programs. Their S-Chip plan is an incremental step toward the goal of government-run health care for every American.”Somehow, Bush thinks that this is an attack; that people within the sound of his weenie voice will be outraged that Congress wants to make health care more available. To people. And chlidren! How disgusting!
“I have a different view,” Mr. Bush went on. “I believe the best approach is to put more power in the hands of individuals by empowering people and their doctors to make health care decisions that are right for them. Instead of expanding S-Chip beyond its original purpose, we should return it to its original focus, and that is helping poor children, those who are most in need.”Aside from the outright lies - which a newspaper is supposed to highlight and expose - Bush's squeaky plea is supposed to resonate with the 29% of the population who hate children. And why is he not yet impeached?
[Backpost addendum: I've made a few posts that talk about gun control, but this is to show how I do like guns]
Anyway, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the amazing internet has saved wee lads like myself from needing ink and pulp encyclopedias to get our recondite info and fulfill masculine fantasies. So in my online searches, I came across a fun gun info place: MadOgre. Note, like many of the pro-gun camp, he feels the need to craze out with anti-Democratic-Party screeds. Ah well. Ignore that part and his gun knowledge and attitude is worth the read.
The online world is free and evolving (for now) and in the two years since NYT locked themselves behind a Dickensian wall of greed, Wikipedia and Youtube exploded and took control of news and information. Now, two years later, the Times needed to drop their scrooging because they were being left way behind.
Backpost from June
From the front page of tonight's NYTimes: Isolation of Gaza Chokes Off TradeAw. I am all, as they say, choked up. I wonder why Gaza is so isolated? Could it be that it's a terrorist state that has been given many gifts from Israel only to use those gifts to slaughter anybody with whom they disagree? Hamas is a criminal, bloodthirsty organization of killers and thieves. I'm surprised the Times doesn't have a story about those poor mobsters who can't feed their families with all that pesky FBI crack-downing.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
With Gaza almost entirely shut off from normal trade, Palestinian businesses are enduring a deep depression.
September 11, 2007This is a travesty! They should be considered kosher just by the name alone.
Lady Liberty Cheez Balls
Company: M-C McLane International- The Woodlands, TX
Issue: This product, reportedly sold in Hong Kong, bears an unauthorized OU symbol and is being withdrawn from the marketplace. Consumers spotting this product are requested to contact the Orthodox Union at 212-613-8241 or via email at kashalerts@ou.org.
There's this concept that Hillary Clinton has 'experience' (and Obama does not). A number of people have wondered what exactly this means since she has only been in the senate for ONE TERM. And, sure, she was first lady of Arkansas, and then the U.S. But, to put it bluntly, is sleeping with an important person considered leadership experience?
Are we as a country mature enough in our collective ego and our adherence to justice to admit that our government has perpetrated crimes against humanity, and to bring the criminals to justice?
I had heard that the Simpsons - the best show ever produced for TV - has 'jumped the shark.' I admit that I'm guilty of the urge to declare the show jumpsharky, but mainly because I was unable to keep watching it regularly. As such, schadenfreude forced me to desire that the show upsuck, to validate my inability to keep watching. 
A friend had asked if there was any good essays from a Torah perspective about Harry Potter. I responded with these links:
Here Carter is Blue, Reagan in Red. Awww, Jimmy, you got smooshed!
During the Bush Honeymoon Period (from 9/11 until Katrina), when he seemed unstoppable, triumphalist Christers would state proudly that they love the fact that a devout Christian was in the White House. Even back then, I was advising them to not adopt him as their own as he appeared to be a mean and stupid person. We can't always choose who will be successful from our ethnic/cultural subgroup, but we can choose to adopt the person as a hero. As a Jewish-American, I want to adopt Albert Einstein (even though he wasn't very religious) and not Jonathan Pollard (who has found Jehovah in prison, I've been told). So it is with religious Christians and Bush... don't adopt him! - he's a cruel moron! - but I'm not sure they've gotten the message yet.
Because the Bush Administration seems on a mission to ignore and/or destroy the Constitution, I just wanted to make a quick point: 
In addition to being a 'tearoom cruiser' (I now know more about this stuff than I ever thought it healthy t do), Senator Craig is/was a member of The Singing Senators - a quartet of Republican crooners: (1) John Ashcroft (R-MO) Baritone, (2) Larry Craig (R-ID) - Lead, (3) James Jeffords (R-VT) - Tenor, (4) Trent Lott (R-MS) - Bass.
"In 1995, at New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith's birthday party, Ashcroft, Jeffords, Lott, and Connie Mack of Florida sang 'Happy Birthday.' Later, when Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon was having a birthday party, Jeffords called Lott and suggested that the four of them sing at the party. Mack declined, but Larry Craig joined. "How nice of Larry to join! And all for Bob "Mr. Morals" Packwood. If anything, this explains that Larry has some important friends (e.g. Lott has so far been holding off from calling for his resignation).
OK, I realize this is meaningless, but recently I performed a taste test of three of the new, kosher, 'reduced fat' pringle flavors: (1) Sweet Mesquite Barbecue, (2) Tomato Mozzarella, (3) Savory Cheddar (the last two are OU-D).
(3) Savory Cheddar - another marketing title. The first few chips didn't taste any different from a regular pringle but I realize now that was because of 'package settling' or somesuch. This is the best of the new flavors because each chip is (or should be) sprinkled with the orange "cheeze" substance they put on The Doodles. It's still not as good as eating an actual doodle, but ya take what you can get in my snacking world.
TPM's Paul Kiel gives a rundown of who has resigned at the Dept. of Justice recently. The following is my editing of his data:
The AG, his chief of staff, his 2 senior deputies, and other heads of offices. Resigned. Their families must have been lonely, eh?
I hate to admit it, but they wrote a durn fine editorial. The choice quotes:Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has finally done something important to advance the cause of justice. He has resigned. But his departure alone cannot remove the dark cloud that hangs over the Justice Department. President Bush needs to choose a new attorney general of unquestioned integrity who would work to make the department worthy of its name again — and provide the mandate to do it. Congress needs to continue to investigate the many scandals Mr. Gonzales leaves behind.
When Mr. Gonzales was appointed, it seemed doubtful that he would be able to put aside his years as Mr. Bush’s personal lawyer, which stretched back to the Texas governor’s office, and represent the interests of the American people. He never did.
In many ways, Mr. Gonzales turned out to be the ultimate “loyal Bushie,” a term his Justice Department chief-of-staff used so incredibly inappropriately to describe what his department was looking for in its top prosecutors.
It was just that kind of craven politics — the desire to co-opt the power of the government to win elections — that was the driving force in Mr. Gonzales’s Justice Department. Dedicated and capable United States attorneys were fired for insisting on doing their jobs with integrity — for refusing to put people in jail, or shield them from prosecution, simply to help Republicans win elections. Lawyers were hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party enrollment and campaign contributions, and top members of Mr. Gonzales’s staff attended pre-election political briefings at the White House led by Karl Rove and his aides.
[snip]
There was a more basic problem with Mr. Gonzales’ tenure: he did not stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, as an attorney general must. This administration has illegally spied on Americans, detained suspects indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” run roughshod over the Geneva Conventions, violated the Hatch Act prohibitions on injecting politics into government and defied Congressional subpoenas. In each case, Mr. Gonzales gave every indication of being on the side of the lawbreakers, not the law.
Mr. Gonzales signed off on the administration’s repugnant, and disastrous, torture policy when he was the White House counsel. He later helped stampede Congress into passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which endorsed illegal C.I.A. prisons where detainees may be tortured and established kangaroo courts in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to keep detained foreigners in custody essentially for life. He helped cover up and perpetuate Mr. Bush’s illegal wiretapping programs, both in the counsel’s job and as attorney general. The F.B.I. under his stewardship abused powers it was given after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the name of enhanced national security.
Mr. Gonzales will hardly be a tough act to follow, but the standard for the next attorney general should not be set that low.
[snip]
The next attorney general will have two critical tasks. First, he or she must get to the bottom of the scandals hovering over the department. Mr. Gonzales played defense, as if it were Congress’s job to discover what laws his department may have broken, and his job to thwart it. The next attorney general should appoint a credible, independent investigator to look into the prosecutors’ firings and likely Hatch Act violations and make clear that the investigation will be permitted to follow the facts where they lead — including, as appears likely, to the White House.
[snip]
Mr. Gonzales, for all of his undeniable deficiencies, merely reflected the principles of this administration. His resignation is a necessary but hardly sufficient step in restoring the nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
So Gonzales has tendered his resignation. It's a surprise. But it shouldn't be. It's a surprise because - like with Rove's resignation - it's both the smart and moral thing to do. And Bush doesn't do smart and moral. It's that simple.
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
"The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families."Aug 21 Update
Like any good cheapskate, I enjoy off-beat mail order catalogues. The big mama of the recent catalog craze is Harriet Carter. My wife will, until my dying day tell the story of how I purchased the toilet-paper tube tower from HC. Ya see, it looked pretty good in the catalog, and one of the worst human fears (as categorized by Carl Jung in 1912) is the Fear of Running Out of Toilet Paper. The tower, as I figured it, would provide a stopgap of toilet paper in the event of a sudden empty roll. I'd link to the item in question, but thankfully they no longer make it. When it arrived in the mail, we saw that it was a cheap piece of wobbily plastic that was actually too small in diameter to fit an ordinary roll of toilet paper. Hence why I will never live that item down.
Two other websites that deal with bad movies from a smart perspective:Both are good reads but not as astute, or redemptive, as Rabin's stuff.
Seriously, Nathan Rabin's blog "My Year in Flops" is one of the best things on the internet. It's so good that even the comments section is readable. Anyway, his review of Exorcist II by my man John 'Zardoz' Boorman has this awesome paragraph: Perhaps the film’s central miscalculation, beyond not making much sense and being crazier than 2Pac in that flick called Juice, is expecting audiences to fear a villain named 'Pazuzu'. Now Pazuzu is an actual figure from Assyrian and Babylonian mythology and figures prominently in Blatty’s novel, but that doesn’t make his name any less ridiculous. No matter how scary the film makes him out to be, 'Pazuzu' still sounds like a zany sound effect a slide whistle might make or a baggy-pants vaudevillian’s catchphrase. How frightening would Silence of the Lambs be if Hannibal Lector’s name was changed to Schnitzie Pretzelpants? "And then there's this from his review of Harvard Man:
28-year-old philosophy professor Joey Lauren Adams, who lectures hilariously about Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard in a bored, flat, disconnected baby-doll high-pitched monotone that suggests she learned the script phonetically.Wa-hoo. Its especially funny when you know who she is.
Fellini's Satyricon is like a bad acid trip. You go from, "this is kinda cool" to "is this ever gonna stop?" to "My God, this IS never going to stop, and I'm going to die like this."
Andew Sullivan recommended Songs to Wear Pans To - a guy who pledges to make any song, in any form with any lyrics as a way of drumming up his business as a songwriter. There are some great novelties here. 
Barry Bonds beats Hank Aaron's record. Like I care that much. 
As I wrote below about being on vacation, I'm currently at my parents' home in Maryland. We come here for vacation so my mom can take care of our kids while my wife and I try to relax. My mom is the only one who has the same energy level as my eldest, so it's a good match. 
Israel - because it's constantly hanging on the lip of doom - is supposed to take leadership quality much more seriously than we do here. Possibly that holds only for their military and not politicians (and that's possibly the opposite structure in America). The US military could be staffed by high level morons and we regular citizens wouldn't even know until the Russkis/Red Chinese/Cubans have conquered the Midwest. The military just has very little to do with everyday life and the protective redundancy built into our 'Homeland Security' means that we just don't pay attention. But our politicians are constantly in our eyesight - probably because we have so many of them and because we insist on constant elections.
Cases in point: (1) Olmert botched a war and is still in power, (2) Chaim Ramon sexually assaulted a soldier and is now deputy prime minister, (3) Peres, second in command during the War is now president. 
This is a more mundane story. Joe started to go wacky before Lamont threatened him. I believe the loss of his mother – who I’ve been told acted as his moral and political gyroscope – made Lieberman do all these politically stupid things. I also think that had the Democrats not tried to throw Joe under a bus last August, he’d be less likely now to betray his party principals. It is said that people suffer a loss of loyalty when their employer unsuccessfully tries to fire them. So too with Joe.
I'm on vacation and I've decided to spend a few in between moments trying to clean out the 'drafts' section on the blog. That said, the computer I'm using for this housecleaning is a seized-up laptop. I hate laptops, and while I appreciate the mobility, the lack of a mouse is driving me buggy. Even an external mouse doesn't eliminate the stiff 'mousepad' that is directly in path of my typin' hands - making for unintended button clicking (e.g. like the one that sent this post to be published long before I had intended it to.)
In the past three or four years the number of must read websites has exploded (at least for me). Sometimes I'll stumble upon a series that eerily meets my interests with such focus that I need to absorb the whole corpus. The latest in that string of 'must reads' is Nathan Rabin's Onion AV Club column: "My Year of Flops"
