We just watched Once Upon A Time In Mexico. It rocked. I was on Sandy's blog earlier today and she had a thread about her picks for sexiest dudes in show biz. Of course, we agreed that Johnny Depp is really one of the hottest men alive. Not that this is news.
Watching him in this movie...well...I seriously don't think that Johnny Depp has made a movie where he wasn't profoundly, irrisistably sexy. Except, perhaps, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because I wasn't digging that bald thing with the long socks and that weird fishing hat. Not to mention the cigarette tightly clenched between his teeth which only further conveyed the severity of his insanity throughout that film.
But moving on. Cry Baby was my all-time favorite Johnny Depp movie. I lusted after him like only a prepubescent girl could. But even still I think that, for me personally, he wins hands down for most fuckable man ever to walk the surface of god's green earth. Let's not forget that it's not just his rugged good looks, but also his winning personality that makes us all melt.
He was really damn funny in Pirates of the Carribbean and equally hysterical, if not more, in Once Upon A Time In Mexico. I laughed everytime he opened his mouth in that movie. And no, not just because I am charmed or perhaps even irie, but because the dialogue in that movie is absolutely fucking superb and his especially. Lines like "you're a good rat....I like you" and "Chiclets? Why would I want to buy fucking chiclets? Here take this money and I never want to see you again okay. Now fuck off." were classics that I'll treasure always. I can't wait to watch the movie again. It was definitely one for the collection.
This story once again reinforces my seemingly lifelong animosity towards school administrators.
School administrator, Patrick Conroy, at a South Haven, Michigan high school plants drugs in kid's locker (a kid who he believes IS selling drugs, but can just never seem to catch him with any) in order to frame him and expel him from school permanently. The plot to frame the student goes awry when the dumbass Conroy calls the police to come and sniff the halls for drugs and the narcotics canine does not detect the drugs in the several times passing the rigged locker. So Conroy contacts the police to find out why they did not detect the drugs that he planted in the kid's locker. Of course, at that point, not only was his plan foiled, but he also gave himself up as a Class A Shitbag.
This is an email my dad sent to me on this subject of Nader running and I had to share it because it is SO my dad. Poetic and yet so realistic:
HELLO!!!!
Nader's followers suffer from the delusion that ideals must always trump action. Their unpragmatic approach simply means that they do not realize that we are very close to species annihilation and planetary doom.
The Nader people need to be dragged out of their Volvos and Saabs and beaten vigorously with the club of reality. We do not have the luxury of intellectual purity, or adhering to the side of the angels in all things, if as a result, we are relegated to angel status, pirouetting on a pinhead with all the other irrelevant angels.
-Charles (a/k/a Maria's dad)
My boyfriend sent this to me and I had to post it because it is too true.
Things you have to believe to be a Republican today:
1. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.
2. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.
3. Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.
4. "Standing Tall" for America means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.
5. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
6. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
7. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.
8. Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.
9. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.
10. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
11. HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.
12. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound foreign policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.
13. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
14. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
15. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
16. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
17. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George W. Bush's driving record is none of our business.
18. You support states' rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.
19. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the 1980s is irrelevant.
20. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
Just a reminder:
"When the government fears the people, that is LIBERTY. When people
fear the government, that is TYRANNY."
-Thomas Jefferson
This is an excellent article. Click on "More" below to read it.
Kerry vs. the chicken hawks
John Kerry's band of Vietnam War brothers has the Bush army running for their lives.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Robert Poe
Feb. 19, 2004 | It was an unscripted scene, nothing like the polished photo ops the Bush team, plundering the resources of the government, liked to put together. Near the end of the Iowa caucus campaign, former Green Beret Jim Rassmann stood on a Des Moines stage and quietly described how John Kerry had saved his life in Vietnam. By the time he was finished, something remarkable had happened: a presidential challenger had, as the world watched, grown larger than the incumbent president.
But something even more important happened as well: In that moment, Vietnam veterans, with characteristic modesty, claimed their long-overdue seat at the head table of American politics. And that brought an unexpected threat to the Bush team's reelection plans, which relied on beating up liberals who didn't know how to fight back. Standing beside Kerry at campaign stops, working the phones, or simply filling the front rows, the veterans, powerless but for the witness they bore, took aim to blow those plans away.
Their presence made the election itself larger. The contest became more than a choice between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. It became a referendum on whether Vietnam still matters to us, and perhaps on whether it ever did. And thus it became our best, and perhaps last, chance to use the Vietnam War to make ourselves a better nation, rather than allow it to make us a worse one.
Like Dylan's thin man, the Bush team knew something was happening, but they didn't know what it was. Almost without thinking, they reached for the weapon they'd used to eviscerate Clinton and everyone in his vicinity: character. Though it has multiple uses, in the context of war "character" is a code word for courage and patriotism, just as "states' rights," "soft on crime" and "quotas" are for race. It lets a skilled attacker pretend to be above the fray by refraining from directly calling others unpatriotic, while making clear that they are.
The character weapon has been particularly useful to neoconservatives, the right-wing hawks who form the heart of the Bush administration -- and who avoided military service in Vietnam. Having declined the opportunity to prove themselves the traditional way, they desperately needed to establish that they alone have the character -- that is, the honesty, integrity, courage and especially patriotism -- to guide the nation morally and lead it militarily. Lacking proof of their own character, their only option was to attack their rivals'.
So Team Bush could hardly do less when the veterans' threat dawned. Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie was soon intoning that "John Kerry’s record of service in our military is honorable. But his long record in the Senate is one of advocating policies that would weaken our national security." Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said virtually the same thing the next day. When Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe slugged back, claiming that Bush had been AWOL from his National Guard duty, a fierce three-part counter-counter-attack from Gillespie, White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot let the world know that Republicans were shocked and outraged at the accusations.
Perhaps only the Bush team was surprised when the attack went wrong. The weapon that had won them the White House, and was supposed to help them keep it, blew up in their faces, like a claymore mine a sapper on the perimeter had aimed back at the defenders. Talk of Kerry's voting record failed to catch fire, while interest in the president's National Guard record, which the rapid-fire response was supposed to suppress, exploded. Bush himself was soon promising on "Meet the Press" to release records to prove he'd never been AWOL. And the incoming only intensified after that, to the point that the White House, in a rare cave-in to the press, actually did release some 400 pages of Bush's military records less than a week later. What new information they contained proved little and did nothing to shelter Bush from the questions that were increasingly finding their mark.
The skirmish conjured the ghost of Tet, of doing all the right things to win according to the rules of the game, only to realize with a sinking heart that you were losing a bigger game you'd never suspected you were playing. Only this time it was American soldiers who were playing the bigger game.
The vets supporting Kerry aren't the only ones with a stake in his campaign. Some 30 years after the war ended, Vietnam veterans as a group were the only members of their generation still missing from the political mainstream. The Des Moines moment dropped them into the center of the action. It fused their strengths and needs with those of the candidacy and provided a glimpse into the energy source at the core of democracy. If the campaign fulfills its potential, it will so enlarge the political presence of Vietnam vets that even those who don't agree with Kerry on issues will become more than they otherwise could be.
But veterans didn't flock to the Kerry campaign aiming to create the stuff of civics textbooks. According to John Hurley, national director of Veterans for Kerry, they began volunteering in significant numbers last summer in response to growing concerns that the Bush administration, while boasting of its support for America's fighting forces, was stiffing veterans in areas like pensions, disability compensation and medical care. And they didn't show up just to stand onstage. They also worked phone banks, or simply phoned from their homes, reaching out to veterans of all wars to bring them on board.
The gathering of veterans in his camp made Kerry the Bush team's nightmare opponent. They turned its greatest advantage, its flag-bedecked character costume, into its greatest weakness. They didn't go out of their way to attack neocons for having avoided combat service -- Vietnam vets have always been the most nonjudgmental members of their generation. Rather, simply by showing their faces in politics, as veterans supporting a veteran, they invited comparisons unflattering to Bush and his friends.
When Jim Rassmann talks about Kerry in public, even a skeptical viewer finds it hard to avoid the thought: The candidate is a better man than the president he seeks to replace. The more veterans appear in political settings, the more neocons will find themselves facing the kinds of questions they've managed to dodge for most of their adult lives.
The questions take a lot of forms, but stripped to the basics, they add up to what the press apparently considers an outrageously in-your-face, emperor-has-no-clothes verbal assault: If you believe that patriotism should be wholehearted, and should transcend politics and selfish concerns, what does it say about your patriotism that you didn't volunteer for Vietnam? (That wasn't so hard, was it?) Or, as a vet might be tempted to put it: If you're such a great patriot, why didn't you go fight like we did?
Bush and Co. have been enormously successful in avoiding such questions. We know that Dick Cheney famously "had other priorities," but that's no answer. What does the public know about John Ashcroft's reasons for not serving in Vietnam? Richard Perle's? Paul Wolfowitz's? Not to mention all their comrades in Congress and the right-wing media. Were they all believers in the patriotism of dissent, as draft resisters were? Or did they have some other rationale for their actions? The central question is not whether they did anything illegal to avoid military service. It is how they justified their avoidance in the first place. That so many leaders have given so few answers to such important questions must set some sort of record for a democracy. If so, it's one we shouldn't be proud of.
The rare, reluctant answers that have dribbled out from various neocon stars, in books and interviews and on talk shows, are far from reassuring. Collectively, they sound like this: Vietnam was Johnson's political war, so it was a mess. Besides, I knew the weak-kneed liberals and peaceniks would never let us win it. And as an anti-big-government conservative, I believe the government has no right to force anyone to perform any service against their will. Not to mention my physical condition that for some reason hasn't slowed me down since. And don't forget, I didn't actually break any laws, or at least none that anyone can prove, to avoid military service. I would have gone if called, but I wasn't called, because I was doing other things that by the way made me exempt from the draft. And, last but not least: I didn't do anything Clinton didn't do.
On close inspection, the answers point to the most unflattering conclusion of all: that, based on their own actions during their generation's greatest test of character, neoconservatives are no more courageous or patriotic than the liberals they so despise.
Bright career-minded lads that they were, they recognized from the start that if this truth got out, it would cripple them politically. That's what kept them in stealth mode for so long, emerging to strut their patriotism only after Clinton had proven that dodging the Vietnam draft was no obstacle to the presidency. And that delay gave them plenty of time to plan their damage-control campaign.
The campaign had two parts. The first was to attack the liberals' character before anyone figured out the embarrassing truth about their own. Thus did they build their careers -- indeed, their very identities -- around preemptive attacks.
The second was to attack the character of any who might ask embarrassing questions that could reveal the truth later. And that meant attacking the mainstream media, both directly and through surrogates. To that end, some of them impersonated objective journalists, just as their political team impersonated war heroes, preemptively attacking everyone to their left (which meant almost everyone) as "biased" -- the media-specific code word for unpatriotic.
An exchange from the now-famous "Meet the Press" encounter between President Bush and Tim Russert this month illustrates how this media intimidation works. After stating that he would release his National Guard records, Bush added: "What I don't like is when people say serving in the Guard ... may not be a true service."
Russert hadn't said that, but he got the skillfully unstated message: If you question my actions, you're insulting the patriotism of the good Americans in the National Guard who are now serving in Iraq, and that calls your own patriotism into question. Russert's failure to register shock as Bush appropriated the heroism of the guardsmen he had sent into harm's way, to mask the opposite of heroism of his own safe-haven Guard service, should earn case-study status in broadcast journalism schools. And subsequent questions by the preemptively slapped Russert could stand as a model for media timidity in questioning neocons:
Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and we provided a service to our country.
A few sentences later, Russert signaled surrender: "Let me turn to the economy."
Intimidating journalists by hinting (or by using surrogates to scream) that they are not patriotic works, of course, only because most of the media themselves avoided military service -- there are almost no Vietnam veterans at the top of the profession.
But Kerry's vets spoiled the party. By confiscating the character weapon from the Bush campaign, they freed liberals and perhaps even the media to more boldly challenge the administration's claims of character. And they themselves raised the most embarrassing questions merely by showing their faces in politics, as veterans supporting a veteran.
That leaves Bush and his supporters with a single, shaky defense: insisting that Vietnam doesn't matter. Not that they often say it out loud. But their belief in the message is as clear as their need for it. And they have different ways to get it across.
The cleverest, and most widely used, is the women-and-cripples argument. It goes like this: If military service were a prerequisite for being a good wartime leader, it would disqualify all women, as well as physically handicapped leaders like Franklin Roosevelt, from ever becoming president. And that would be discrimination. It would also deprive us of some of our greatest leaders.
The argument brings us full circle, from hiding behind Clinton to hiding behind women to hiding behind Roosevelt. It also carefully glosses over the most important fact: There's a big difference between not having the opportunity to serve one's country and actively avoiding doing so. In its own way, it's as large as the gap between courage and cowardice.
The least subtle expression of "Vietnam doesn't matter" sentiment seems a specialty of up-and-comers we might call baby neocons. Represented by conservatives like CNN's Tucker Carlson and Wall Street Journal Web columnist James Taranto, they are too young to have dodged the Vietnam draft, but are such fierce and faithful defenders of neocon positions as to leave little doubt they would have if they could have. Immune (they think) to criticism for never having served their country, they excoriate Kerry for repeatedly mentioning that he did. As far as it's discernible, their main criticism appears to be that they're tired of hearing his macho boasting.
But in their intrepid insistence that, unlike themselves, real soldiers should be seen and not heard, these keyboard soldiers and combat commentators inadvertently reveal something else. The frequency and aggressiveness of their attacks on Kerry make clear how much neocons fear him and his veterans. Yet their potshots miss the target. Simply by standing their ground in public, unashamed of their uniforms, veterans say everything they have to. Their very presence argues that whether one had the courage to face combat defines one's character in such a deep and important way that it should be our most important criterion in selecting our leaders.
More broadly, the attack of the baby neocons illustrates one of the most striking characteristics of neocons in general: the way they virtually advertise their fears and vulnerabilities by the intensity of their assaults and their choice of targets. It's a side effect of having built their identities around preemptive attacks. And it's a superb tool for tracking the progress of Team Bush through the minefield that the character-and-patriotism issue represents.
The detonation of the AWOL issue was only the beginning. More explosions are likely as they intensify their assault. For example, attacks on Kerry's national-security credentials -- ranging from the gutter-variety attempts by surrogates to link him with Jane Fonda to the alarmed "analyses" of his defense voting record -- represent an argument that what one did after the Vietnam War means more than what one did during it: a variation on the "Vietnam doesn't matter" theme.
But if they step over the line and argue that Kerry's antiwar activism overshadows his war service, and proves that, on balance, he's unpatriotic, they may find themselves at odds with some formidable Republican Vietnam vets. For example, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, has said that Kerry's honorable service earned him the right to protest the way he did. And Sen. John McCain of Arizona has come to like and respect Kerry despite their early differences over Kerry's antiwar activities.
As their attacks set off more blasts, the Bush team will begin to sense the bigger game that is closing in around them, transforming them from hunter to hunted. And the rest of the world will begin to wonder whether the neocon patrol is going to make it to the other side in one piece.
If Kerry's war record removes the personal-character attack from the Bush campaign's arsenal, the veterans standing beside him give him the power to take out the institutional version of the same weapon. Republicans have successfully used this weapon of mass denigration for decades. Its technique is simple and familiar: to paint all Democrats as deficient in patriotism and courage, and the Republicans as the only party unafraid of war.
The tactic is a key part of the Bush team's reelection strategy. To make it work, they have to sell the Republican/Democrat contest like a TV script depicting an epic struggle between pro-war and antiwar forces, and thus, through long-practiced implication and innuendo, a battle between heroes and cowards, patriots and traitors. The presidential combatants become mere characters in this larger drama, their personal qualities fading to irrelevance.
The war with Iraq makes it all possible, because it lets the Republicans stake out the most extreme pro-war territory available. If the public buys their script, it means no one with less extreme positions -- that is, no one else -- can match their aura of heroism and patriotism. The Republicans win the character competition by default, and so does the president. No wonder, then, that Bush most seemed to be reciting pre-written lines when, during the "Meet the Press" interview, he told Russert: "I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind."
The administration's success in selling its story is evident. Almost without realizing it, America has obediently hauled its favorite Vietnam-era rhetoric out of the attic and sent it to the Middle East, even though the old terminology doesn't begin to fit the new territory. What does it mean to be pro-war or antiwar with regard to Iraq? Is it about favoring or opposing liberating the Iraqis from oppression? Is it about favoring or opposing working through international organizations? Is it about simply opposing the timing and the manner of the war effort, but not its goals? There is no clear answer -- the mothers of all political buzzwords have become meaningless.
Indeed, almost no Democratic candidate except Rep. Dennis Kucinich has said outright that we should simply bring the troops home -- a staple anti-Vietnam War position. But no matter, everyone from pundits and politicians to ordinary citizens almost instinctively slaps one of the two labels -- pro-war or antiwar -- on everyone they see. And Gov. Howard Dean played right into the administration's hands, by making opposition to the Iraq War the central theme of his candidacy. No wonder they hoped he would be the nominee, and no wonder Democratic voters sensed he might have trouble getting elected.
Kerry is well-positioned to fight the tactic in two ways. First, even the silent presence of veterans beside him shouts that, Democrat or not, he's neither coward nor traitor; should he wish to, he could even question the courage and patriotism of Bush and Co. And he didn't vote against the Iraq war resolution, which means that they can't use their imagined link between Saddam and Osama to attack him for being soft on terrorism. By saying he's not necessarily against the use of force in Iraq or elsewhere but against the way it was used in this case, he prevents Bush from painting him as either pro-dictator or pro-terror.
Second, he and his veterans can launch an assault on the Republican weapon itself. Rather than agreeing to define the election in oversimplified pro-war/antiwar terms, they can insist that we define it, and our role in the world, in terms of America's integrity and credibility, on the grounds that those are the true key to security.
Vietnam veterans have the authority to argue that by trying to sell Americans such a simplified, divisive worldview, the administration is doing the nation a huge disservice. It is not helping us get over the Vietnam era, as it claims to be, but rather dragging us back into the Nixonian heart of it, by reviving the polarized thinking that tore America apart during that war. Back then, one was either pro-war or antiwar, pro-communist or anti-communist, courageous or cowardly, moral or immoral, pro-America or anti-America. It was all black and white, you were either one or the other, and the pairs of opposites were all rigidly connected.
Perhaps only those whose lives floated serenely above the turmoil of Vietnam -- such as the Bush conservatives -- can utterly fail to understand, or care, how damaging and fundamentally incorrect such a simplified, divisive worldview is. That is, perhaps only such people can utterly fail to grasp the lessons of Vietnam.
Vietnam veterans understand those lessons best. They suffered the most damage -- to their bodies in Vietnam, and to their souls after they returned -- without ever painting themselves as victims. And they witnessed, more intimately than any others, the fundamental defects of the politics of oversimplification.
More credibly than anyone else, veterans can testify that fighting in a war doesn't automatically mean supporting it, that supporting it doesn't automatically equal heroism, that opposing it doesn't automatically equal cowardice, and that fighting a global enemy doesn't automatically require taking every global opportunity to go to war.
More authoritatively than anyone else, they can argue that an oversimplified view of war and foreign policy wasn't right during Vietnam, when the global enemy was easy to identify, and had the weapons to annihilate all Americans hundreds of times over, and it's not right now, when the enemy is far harder to pin down, and the mix of political and cultural conflicts is even more complex than during the Cold War.
If Kerry and his vets fully engage in this larger game and begin to make the case against the oversimplification of American policy, they will shake the foundations of the privileged neocon world. Realizing that their political survival is at stake, the Bush team will fight back with every tactic they can dredge up. Their impugning of war hero Max Cleland's patriotism in Georgia's 2002 Senate campaign shows how low they will stoop.
Years ago, the epithets of similar children of privilege, protesting the war from behind college deferments, stunned veterans into decades of silence, driving them out of the national conversation. Today, attacks like those of the baby neocons and the Republican smear machine still try to keep them mute. But this time, nothing can keep them out of the debate, because even in silence, the veterans speak volumes. And they don't plan to be silent.
In the end, the biggest objection to the oversimplified us-or-them mentality isn't just the pain it caused America during the Vietnam era. It's not even that it made America safe for the practitioners of the patriotic smear, who are making such a comeback today. What's worst is the central role such thinking played in getting us into Vietnam in the first place. Blinding us to any possibilities that didn't fit its preconceived patterns, that simplistic mentality sternly assured us that military action was a fail-safe, one-size-fits-all solution, and that there was no other option -- the only choice was between war and global surrender. It serves us no better now than it did then.
If the veterans of Vietnam, as they quietly file into the hall of American politics, help eject the politics of oversimplification from the room once and for all, they won't just be helping us get over Vietnam. They'll be making us better and wiser than we were before Vietnam. And thus, once again, they will be doing their country a greater service than any others of their generation ever have, or ever will.
Dear Ralph Nader,
Why are you doing this? Why are you running for president again? Have you completely lost your mind? Now is not the time for this kind of arrogance. I wrote you an email just the other day making a last ditch effort to beg you not to run. Remember? I'm sure I wasn't the only one. I wrote that I respect you and you're a great guy and everything, but please, just vote with the rest of Americans to get Bush out of the White House. I am so mad at you. Are you nuts? You are not going to win. You are just going to cause trouble. I really understand your statement about principles and your feeling that the democratic candidates are not fit to run this country anymore than George Bush is and they are equally driven by greed and special interests. And honestly, I don't know. Maybe you're right. But I don't think that either of them could possibly do as bad of a job of running this country as Bush has.
I think I'd rather have John Kerry or Edwards or Kucinich or Howard Dean (yes, still) in the White House anyday over Bush. You're betraying your own brand of greed and selfishness in the simple act of choosing to run again and I think you need to curb your ego and forget about it. Seriously man, it is just NOT a good idea for you to run for president right now. I know you're getting really pretty old and you dearly want to be president before it's all over and this is your life dream...and dude, it's a great dream. Seriously, I gotta give it to you: you reach high, but I think you have to accept that you are not the one. You are not the one my man. So step off and allow the removal of George Bush from office to go forward without the hindrance of your candidacy.
p.s. If you don't quit the race and you actually win, I will volunteer to go on Fear Factor and lay in a coffin filled with those crazy hissing cockroaches and maybe even a couple snakes. That is what I think of your chances Ralphie.
_______________________________________________
As a side note here, I am going to post this UK article, also relaying the news of Ralph's candidacy, which mentions something that really caught my attention, that is, that Kerry ended this month with approximately 2 million in campaign funds (wiped out by his snowball victories), Edwards with a mere $120,000 and Bush with nearly 100 million USD in the bank to fuel his candidacy to keep the presidency.
"The Republicans are expected to unleash shortly the most expensive political advertising campaign in history, designed to define Mr Kerry as a shifty, upper-class liberal, who could not be trusted to keep America safe from terrorists." (Emphasis added)
Wow. That's a lot of money to spend to try and shift negative focus. Maybe if Bush was a better president he wouldn't have to spend a hundred million dollars on the task of trying to slam his opponent's character, because perhaps his own would speak for itself. But alas, it does not.
By Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around
Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around
We talk about it all night long
We define our moral ground
But when I crawl into your arms
Everything comes tumbling down
Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around
Your face has fallen sad now
For you know the time is nigh
When I must remove your wings
And you, you must try to fly
Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around
Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around
Isn't it just sick and fucking ironic that this entry is about the invasion of privacy and parasitic nastiness perpetrated by spam sites and pop-ups, and that as I speak, they attack my fucking blog with the same shit? I hate these bastards more than I would hate sleepinig on a pillow soaked in fucking cat piss. Can you feel how angry I am about this? It is a fucking crime. I wish I could send a mail bomb to every piece of crap that spams my blog.
On my hotmail account, I just have a spam filter that works like a dream. I have to get something like that for my blog because this is ridiculous. If anyone has a suggestion - anyone OTHER THAN YOU SPAMMER FUCKS - about how I may block spam-emails from being posted to my blog comments, I would love to hear about it. Online Casions dot com, Prozac, Viagra and any others that have dared to post their bile in my comments can burn in hell.
I found this piece that this guy Bob Avakian wrote back in 1997 that I thought was interesting about the phrase "Justifiable Homicide." I like what he has to say.
Also this bit of "Kopwatch" on Mediafilter.org exposes the watering down of statistics that politicians have done in this city with regard to police violence and brutality, the millions of dollars in tax payer money that it costs to settle lawsuits against the police department, and also mentions many incidents, including the one where police in Washington Heights shot that kid in the back last year. And their GloboCopwatch Directory provides archives of stories and even a place where you can email about your very own police brutality incidents and experiences.
Very interesting reading.
I am so sick about this that I don't even know what to say, except that it is obvious to me that if you are a police officer in NY, you can get away with just about anything.
I cannot deal with the fact that a grand jury declined to indict this police officer for shooting a boy for no reason. They say it was a "tragic accident," that "everbody loses in this case..." NO. The boy loses: his life. The family loses: a loved one. The community loses: a boy who was going to school and working hard to make something of himself, a boy who was not a threat to anyone. The cop loses NOTHING. He was suspended WITH pay for a couple weeks. That's a paid fucking vacation, I really don't care what you call it. Then he gets off scott free. Don't tell me he loses. Don't tell me that he is, in any way, paying for his actions. He says it was an accident. He says that when that door swung open on the rooftop his gun was already drawn and he was startled and he just pulled the trigger and the boy was dead and he didn't mean it and he's sorry. Not fucking good enough. No reason that these officers should be patrolling these neighborhoods with guns drawn. I have been to these neighborhoods. Yes they have problems with drugs and violence. But one of their even bigger problems are the cops always coming around, harrassing and killing them off like it's nothing. I have friends who have been interrogated and dragged down to the precinct simply for being in a project building adjacent to their own. And these cops, with their guns. And their itchy trigger fingers. And their racial prejudice. That is scarier than drugs. It is scarier than a sheisty neighbor.
This officer had no respect for the life of this young black man, Timothy Stansbury Jr. That is all it comes down to. If the door had swung open and a white boy had stood there, I don't believe the officer would have been so startled to instantly fire off a round without a second thought. Police officers know that it is common for kids to traverse these rooftops. Why would they just shoot as if the occurence of a door opening was such an anomily, such a startling incident? It's not that startling. It's common. Another thing that is common in NY is police officers shooting at black men, killing them dead and getting away with it.
It makes me want to just cry that it continues to happen. Nothing changes. The outrage of the public and of the victimized families does nothing to stop this kind of violence. Deeply controversial incidents such as the horrendous murder of Amadou Diallo do nothing to bring these incidents to a halt. These men who perpetrate racism and violence within the police force are protected. It is so hideous that this continues. And that it is dismissed as a "tragic accident." What happened cannot be excused with those two meaningless words. This was not an accident any more than 40 rounds being pumped into Amadou Diallo after he had already fallen to the ground was an accident. It was negligent homicide at best. In Diallo's case it was just murder. Senseless and evil and condoned by our mayor and everyone else who apparently mattered. These incidents have got to stop. But how will we make it stop when a jury refuses to indict a man who should clearly be tried?
I feel for this kid's family. They are suffering a massive injustice at the hands of our society and our legal system.
While we are on the subject of hypersensitivity, as with the reaction to Mel Gibson's new movie, we might as well take a look at this inane accusation. Do you think that this is just a little neurotic? Folks are really losing it. You can not do anything these days without some group or another getting all worked up and offended. When did everyone get so uptight? Do people realize how much credibility they lose when they can't let the smallest things go?
Why does the fact that Andre 3000 and his hoochie mamas getting dressed up in fringe and feathers have to mean that now he's making a racist statement about American Indians. Was he making a racist statement about eskimos when he had everyone dressed in giant fur yeti boots? If the best compliment is to be emulated, then take the freaking compliment and shut up! But now it's being construed as racism? How far off the deep end can we go?
It's a little violent, but it feels soooo good.
A man is like a deck of cards:
You need a Heart to love him
A Diamond to marry him
A Club to smash his fucking head in
And a Spade to bury the bastard.
If the message in the movie is not hateful or aimed to cause anti-simitism, then I think the argument is lost.
To me, this is saying that if we review the history of the way that Christ was killed, and the truth makes people feel angry at Jews, then we should not review the history of the way that Christ was killed, because to feel angry at Jews is to feel anti-simitic. It would logically follow that we should not make movies where we review how the white man victimized the American Indians and how they brutalized the slaves, because that might just make people angry at white people all over again or inflame racism. Well there have been more than a few movies made that did do that. That did cause people to feel very angry or racially charged. But I don't see how it's wrong, if there is a historical basis behind this movie "The Passion of Christ," that it may get people worked up. It should get people worked up because that's the point. Otherwise, it's not very interesting, now is it? But you have to trust people to recognize that things have changed in 2000 years.
We know that the Jews of today did not kill Christ. We also know that white people in America no longer own slaves, (though they still have that which they stole from the Indians and the advantages that they gained from past barbarism). The fact that those events have long passed should not barr us from memorializing them in books and film, regardless of whether it might inflame or provoke indignance from some.
Who knew that in France you can marry a dead man?
I can't figure out whether it's touching or just deeply disturbing that this woman has gone ahead and wedded her true love, who has now been dead for a year and a half from a car accident. Sounds like a lonely wedding.
That is the strangest irony. You think you've heard everything...
I have thus far refrained from commenting on Janet and Justin's superbowl antics, as I think far too big of a deal is being made about it and I would just prefer to move on, but when I saw this in the Smoking Gun today, I knew I could no longer stay silent.
"Terri Carlin, a 47-year-old Knoxville bank employee, contends that Jackson's exposure and other 'sexually explicit conduct' during halftime festivities caused viewers to 'suffer outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury.'" and "Carlin's complaint seeks compensatory and punitive damages, though an exact dollar figure is not specified."
First of all, with all the crap that people are exposed to everyday, if it were meritorious to file lawsuits against every person that offends you, the courts would be inundated (more than they already are) with complaints about every last curse word and sex scene shown on tv. Give me a break lady. You could also sue if you happen to flip past Howard Stern on the radio in the morning to hear him say the word "breasts" or any other thing that's likely to offend.
Second of all, a breast is not the worst thing this world has ever seen and I am far more shocked at the response to the bared breast than I was by the actual sight of it. And I will even dare to say that I think the fact that it was a black woman's breast really sent people over the edge. People need to learn to get some fucking perspective and a much tighter grip on reality.
I understand that it was a shock to those who had children watching and were not expecting to have to explain what they'd just seen, but then again, I don't think there's that much to explain. "Honey, that's some people's idea of entertainment. But modesty is also a virtue..."
Yes, the breast is a part of the human female body. It's not a crime and it's not disgusting. The breast does not need to be condemned. The sight of one does not cause normal, healthy people to experience profound "outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury" and in my humble opinion, it does not constitute grounds to procure punitive and compensatory damages.
To think that this woman probably watches tv every single day and THIS is the thing that really, seriously damaged her psyche... I do not buy it for a moment.
Finally, I think that by behaving as if this was the most offensive theatrical move of the century, we put an even more dangerous notion into the minds of children: that women's natural bodies are dirty, disgusting and offensive and that to witness a thing like that could potentially cause a person real damage. Which is absolutely ludicrous, not to mention sad.
Meanwhile, god forbid any of these people who are so offended and outraged, ever step foot into a museum, gallery, theatre production, foreign country, or any other location or venue where they might be exposed to the sight of a naked boob, lest they should just drop dead from the shock of it.
Please Note: This entry makes me sound like a terrible person.
Do you ever have one of those days where everyone seems to get on your nerves, from the oblivious idiot on the train to your very own co-workers to whoever else might have the nerve to be in the same building with you? I guess most people would call it PMS, but today it's just grumpiness. But it's that same feeling (maybe it IS PMS). Extreme irritation. There's nothing worse than some asshole who's trying to be funny or some other asshole who doesn't realize when they are just doing something unbelievably annoying. Nothing worse than an amateur comedian when you are having one of those days or having someone tell you what to do. Or someone asking if you're okay, when you're FINE. Absolutely FINE. Now FUCK OFF!
I don't mean that though. Have to bottle up those thoughts and feelings because they are just a product of anxiety. They have nothing to do with actual individuals. I will not take out my aggression and anxiety on anyone today. I will take a very deep breath and recognize that they are just trying to be nice, go about their business, get through their day, overcome their own challenges and that it's not necessary for me to be a cold, rotten bitch or to feel overcome by the desire to throttle the living daylights out of the next human being who comes near me.
It's such a comfort to see that while Bush claims to be pledging all this new money to education reform, he is cutting spending on educational programs, along with a host of other valuable programs such as an alcohol abuse reduction program (you'd think Bush would support that), recreation programs for the disabled, aid for migrant farm workers, an initiative to promote "educational equity" for girls and women, Olympic scholarships and arts in education (yeah, really. Who needs art anyway?) It's obvious to me that this president likes spending money on tax breaks for the wealthy, weapons and waging unjustified wars far more than he likes spending money on things which benefit society and America as a whole.