How Iran's Hackers Killed Big Brother by Douglas Rushkoff

How Iran's Hackers Killed Big Brother

by Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project, is the author of numerous books, including Cyberia, ScreenAgers, Media Virus, and, most recently, Life Inc., released this month by Random House.

Douglas Rushkoff
BS Top - Rushkoff Iran Twitter Burhan Ozbilici / AP Photo Tehran's streets may be bloody, says Douglas Rushkoff, but the opposition has won the digital war. The battleground: Facebook and Twitter. The weapons: bandwidth and hacking. The prize: the end of totalitarianism.

Perhaps the best indication for Americans that something important is going on in Iran right now is the fact that Twitter has delayed a scheduled downtime for maintenance in order for Iranians and others involved in the post-election digital melee to keep at it. For anyone lacking a Twitter feed and thus missing the intense virtual crossfire, what's happening is nothing short of a test of Internet users' ability to challenge not only a regime's power over an election, but over the network itself. The effort alone constitutes a victory.

Unlike the United States, where Facebook friends, Meetup groups, and other online innovation successfully elected a candidate who (at least initially) lacked top-down support, the Iranian power structure has less compunction about snuffing digital democracy. Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is widely believed to have shut down Iranian access to Facebook as soon as it was clear his opponent's supporters were using the social network to organize rallies and motivate voters. Not that Mousavi's 36,000 Facebook friends at that point would have led to the undeniable landslide the opposition leader would have needed to actually win—but the heavy-handed gesture hinted at what was to come. It was the opening salvo in a digital war with global implications, and a blueprint for the democratizing influence of the Internet.

Iran's government counter-attacked with a blockade, closing off the four Internet access routes it controlled, leaving just one pipe through Turkey for messages to breach it.

FINISH THIS ARTICLE HERE

Change_for_Iran Resurfaces! NEW REPORTS

# state TV is now requesting people (armed forces) to go to valiasr st and protest against the outlaws & criminals! (people) #iranelection21 minutes ago from web

# thanks to someone (probably gov) we're are now also spies of israel! and to be shoot on sight30 minutes ago from web

# Kasra is dead & I don't know where is masood, lost him in the crowd yesterday31 minutes ago from web

# 5 killed in the girl's dorm. we saw karoubi in person yesteday and told him about what happened. I guess we made a big mistake #IranElection37 minutes ago from web

# 3:30pm basij is after us. slept in the streets last night. internet is down in most of the city #iranelection43 minutes ago from web

The meaning of the Tehran spring By Pepe Escobar

June 16

Page 1 of 2
THE ROVING EYE
The meaning of the Tehran spring
By Pepe Escobar

It is 1979 in Tehran all over again. From Saturday to Sunday, the deafening sound deep in the night across Tehran's rooftops was a roaring, ubiquitous "Allah-u Akbar" (God is great). Then, in 1979, to hail the Islamic revolution; now, in 2009, to signify what appears to be the hijacking of the Islamic revolution. Then, the revolution was not televised; it was via (Ruhollah Khomeini) radio. Now, it is being broadcast all across the world.

Let's cut to the chase: what Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi qualified as "this dangerous charade" and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "the sweetness of the election", or better yet, a "divine assessment", has all the non-divine markings of intervention by the Iranian Republican Guards Corps (IRGC). This follows President Mahmud Ahmadinejad officially gaining 64% of the vote in defeating Mousavi in what inthe days before Friday's vote had widely been called as a very close race.

Scores of protesters equating Ahmadinejad with Augusto Pinochet in 1973's Chile might not be that far off the mark. Call it the ultra-right wing, military dictatorship of the mullahtariat.

This is emerging as a no-holds-barred civil war at the very top of the Islamic Republic. The undisputed elite is now supposed to be embodied by the Ahmadinejad faction, the IRGC, the intelligence apparatus, the Ministry of the Interior, the Basij volunteer militias, and most of all the Supreme Leader himself.

The elite wants subdued, muzzled, if not destroyed, reformists of all strands: any relatively moderate cleric; the late 1970s clerical/technocratic Revolution Old Guard (which includes Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and Mousavi); "globalized" students; urban, educated women; and the urban intelligentsia.

Even fighting a cascade of political and economic setbacks, for the past three decades the regime has always been proud of the Islamic Republic's brand of popular democracy, and its alleged legitimacy. Now the revolution enters completely uncharted territory as thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest against the result.

What will be the distinguishing features of the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat? How does the revolution recoup from a coup? A 29-year-old female journalist working in a moderately conservative Tehran newspaper spelled it out for Radio Free Europe: "Coup means that right now they're beating people in the streets. A coup means they didn't even count people's votes. They announced the results without opening the ballot boxes. It was sent as a circular to the state television, which announced it. Is it so difficult for the world to understand this?"

The trillion-dollar-question regarding this new "revolutionary" situation is that as things stand, no pacifying solution can be found within the institutional framework of the Islamic Republic. In a nutshell, Ahmadinejad has made his power play against Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The Supreme Leader fully supported him. Mousavi and Rafsanjani, plus Khatami, need an urgent counterpunch. And their only possible play is to go after Khamenei.

As Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, among others, has noted, Rafsanjani is now counting his votes at the Council of Experts (86 clerics, no women) - of which he is the chairman - to see if they are able to depose Khamenei. He is in the holy city of Qom for this explicit purpose. To pull it off, the council would imperatively have to be supported by at least some factions within the IRGC. The Ahmadinejad faction will go ballistic. A Supreme Leader implosion is bound to imply the implosion of the whole Khomeini-built edifice.

Null and void
As a prelude, Mousavi has already bypassed the Supreme Leader, sending an open letter to the powerful mullahcracy in Qom asking them to invalidate the election. Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, head of the election vote-monitoring committee, has officially requested that the Council of Guardians void the election and schedule a new, fully monitored one.

One of the stalwarts of Qom power, the moderate Grand Ayatollah Sanei, who had issued a fatwa against vote rigging, calling it a "mortal sin", has already declared the Ahmadinejad presidency "illegitimate". His house and office are now under police siege. Iranians eagerly expect a public pronouncement from Grand Ayatollah Muntazeri, the country's true top religious figure (not Khamenei) and a certified anti-ultra-right wing.

Even more strikingly, a group of Ministry of Interior employees sent an open letter to the chairman of the Council of Experts (Rafsanjani), the president of the parliament (Majlis), former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, the heads of the legislative and the judiciary, and many other government agencies. The crucial paragraph reads: "As dedicated employees of the Ministry of Interior, with experience in management and supervision of several elections such as the elections of Khamenei, Rafsanjani and Khatami, we announce that we fear the 10th presidential elections were not healthy."

The Islamic Combatant Clergy Association (ICCA), close to Khatami and supportive of Mousavi, said on its website that the counting process was "widely engineered [manipulated]", and there was enough evidence to prove it. So for the ICCA, the election should be nullified.

Mohsen Rezai, who ran as a conservative and who is nothing less than a former head of the IRGC, also sent a letter to the Council of Guardians saying the election was illegitimate. This is crucial; it means a serious crack inside the IRGC - because Rezai's former subordinates are still active and will inevitably support him (he remains very influential). "Officially", Rezai had less than 1 million votes. He maintains that according to his own polls, "in a worst-case scenario I should have had between 3.5 and 7 million votes."
Even a former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Ayatollah Mohajerani, went on the BBC Persian service to say the Supreme Leader was not infallible, and should be replaced in case of "dishonesty".

How it all evolved
The ultra-right wing maybe has not seen it coming this way - the urban youth of Tehran behaving like it's May 1968 in Paris. But they seem to have prepared themselves accordingly. The only question is when. Was it long-term pre-planning? Did it emerge after the televised presidential debates propelled the "green revolution"? Or was it a last-minute, cooked up in minutes, gambit?

As the election approached, an impartial observation of the Iranian presidential TV debates would signal that Ahmadinejad was virtually freaking out. The public debate in Iran made clear that what mattered most for voters was Ahmadinejad's record of economic incompetence, much more than his foreign policy tirades.

In the debates, Ahmadinejad managed to get away with fanciful figures regarding inflation and unemployment. He went into overdrive on the eve of the election, virtually accusing his three opponents of being Zionist agents. He may have calculated that a second round with Mousavi would be too risky. Ahmadinejad knew Khamenei was on his side. But it's fair to argue neither Ahmadinejad nor the ultra-right wing spectrum may have evaluated the full implication of a dubious electoral victory possibly imploding the whole system as they know it.

By the end of May, Mousavi was ahead of Ahmadinejad in Iran's 10 biggest cities by at least 4%.

Fast forward to this past Friday, when Khamenei met with Rafsanjani, the powerful, actual number two in the regime, who had warned the Supreme Leader three days earlier about the serious possibility of election fraud. Khamenei dismissed it.

Mousavi had also warned of fraud after Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic, Mahdist spiritual mentor, appeared to endorse vote rigging.

Ominous signs were piling up fast. Before the election, the IRGC officially warned it would not tolerate a "velvet revolution" orchestrated by Mousavi's urban sea of green. On election day, ballot papers "disappeared" from thousands of polling places. SMS messages were blocked.

The polls closed at 10pm on Friday, Tehran time. Most main streets then were fully decked out in green. In an absolutely crucial development, the great Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf told Radio Farda how Mousavi's main campaign office in Tehran received a phone call on Saturday at 1am; the Interior Ministry was saying "Don't announce Mr Mousavi's victory yet ... We will gradually prepare the public and then you can proceed." Iranian bloggers broke down the vote at the time as 19.7 million for Mousavi, between 7 and 8 million for Ahmadinejad, 7 million for Karroubi, and 3 million for Rezai.

Then all hell seemed to break loose. Phones, SMS, text messaging, YouTube, political blogs, opposition websites, foreign media websites, all communication networks, in a cascade, were shutting down fast. Military and police forces started to take over Tehran's streets. The Ahmadinejad-controlled Ministry of Interior - doubling as election headquarters - was isolated by concrete barriers. Iranian TV switched to old Iron Curtain-style "messages of national unity". And the mind-boggling semi-final numbers of Ahmadinejad's landslide were announced (Ahmadinejad 64%, Mousavi 32%, Rezai 2% and Karroubi less than 1%).

The fact that the electoral commission had less than three hours to hand-count 81% of 39 million votes is positively a "divine assessment".

Continued 1 2

Page 2 of 2
THE ROVING EYE
The meaning of the Tehran spring
By Pepe Escobar

Masked mobs encircled and attacked the headquarters of both Mousavi and Karroubi. By 3am on Saturday, long military convoys escorted by Basij militias on motorbikes took over the streets of Tehran, crying "Mousavi bye-bye" - the countercoup to the green revolution's chant of "Ahmadi bye-bye". The whole thing started to feel like Tiananmen in Beijing in 1989. Or a plain and simple coup.
On Saturday, Khamenei had to go on the record to stress there was no fraud. And on Sunday, he felt he needed to re-certify the whole thing, describing the election as "an epic and ominous event".

The official breakdown of the vote had Ahmadinejad taking Tehran by over 50%. He may be popular in the rural provinces and in
Page 2 of 2
THE ROVING EYE
The meaning of the Tehran spring
By Pepe Escobar

Masked mobs encircled and attacked the headquarters of both Mousavi and Karroubi. By 3am on Saturday, long military convoys escorted by Basij militias on motorbikes took over the streets of Tehran, crying "Mousavi bye-bye" - the countercoup to the green revolution's chant of "Ahmadi bye-bye". The whole thing started to feel like Tiananmen in Beijing in 1989. Or a plain and simple coup.
On Saturday, Khamenei had to go on the record to stress there was no fraud. And on Sunday, he felt he needed to re-certify the whole thing, describing the election as "an epic and ominous event".

The official breakdown of the vote had Ahmadinejad taking Tehran by over 50%. He may be popular in the rural provinces and in



parts of working-class south Tehran, but not even "divine assessment" could be expected to give him more than 30% in the capital.

Ahmadinejad won in the big city of Tabriz. Tabriz is in Azerbaijan. Mousavi is Azeri. Azeris are an ultra-tight ethnic group, they vote for one of their own. The notion that Mousavi was beaten, four to one, in his home ground borders on fiction.

Karroubi had less than half of Ahmadinejad's vote and came in a distant second in his own hometown of Oligudarz. Karroubi not only didn't win in his home province of Lorestan, he had less votes than volunteers helping in his campaign. The first numbers on election night came from rural villages and small towns
voting Ahmadinejad. Something immediately seemed to be way off when less than 1% of voters in western Iran went for Karroubi, very popular not only in his native Lorestan but also in Kurdistan.

As for Rezai, from Khuzestan, where most of Iran's oilfields are, he expected 2 million votes in his province alone. He polled less than a million nationwide. Everywhere, all over the country, Ahmadinejad got between a steady 66% and 69%, no matter the region, no matter the predominant ethnic group, no matter the demographics.

By law, the Electoral Commission must wait three days before certifying the results. Then they inform Khamenei and he gives his seal of approval. This is to prevent any "irregularities". This time, Khamenei approved the official results in less than four hours.

But could he actually win?
"Landslide" apart, a true Ahmadinejad victory would not be implausible. He could have reasonably scored something like 48%, for instance, ahead of Mousavi, and both would square off in a second round of voting. Ahmadinejad visited every Iranian province at least twice in these past four years. Deep, rural Iran has nothing to do with upscale north Tehran.

He plundered the reserve fund, full of oil money, set up by Khatami, to shower more money to pensioners and distribute more pork. Inflation skyrocketed. The working classes suffered with inflation and unemployment as much as north Tehran. But the average Iranian still seemed to be satisfied that his standard of living under Ahmadinejad was slightly higher.

Ahmadinejad turned the election into a referendum on the whole idea of the Islamic revolution. He literally enveloped himself in the flag - a crowd pleaser in a very religious and nationalistic country.

Mousavi had the urban youth vote, the urban, educated female vote, the intelligentsia vote, the upper middle class, globalized vote, and even the bazaar vote. But that was not enough. In the showdown between SMS and Facebook and the poor, rural and working-class masses - many of whom have a lot of empathy with the pious son of a blacksmith - it's fair to assume he could be the winner. But not in a landslide. Khatami had a real landslide in 2001, when he got no less than 78% of the vote (after 70% in 1997). The notion that an over 70% reformist impulse has been transformed over these past few years into a 62% ultra-right wing fervor is questionable.

See you in the barricades
The biggest winner in all this seems to be the Supreme Leader - who else? This is how it all played out. When Mousavi said in the TV presidential debates that Ahmadinejad was a disgrace to Iran's global image, he did not get away with it. The slap came via the very influential Kayhan newspaper, very close to the Supreme Leader.

Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, went after billionaire Rafsanjani with all guns blazing, accusing him of corruption and nepotism. This still strikes a chord at the popular level, and especially strikes a chord with the IRGC.

Rafsanjani is the de facto number two most powerful player in the Iranian system, and has been so for more than 20 years now. He controls the Expediency Council and the Council of Experts (which has the power to depose the Supreme Leader). The IRGC fear him and are against him. It's no secret that those that really matter in the Iranian system are the top mullahcracy and the IRGC. (The name says it all; they are the guardians of the whole idea of the revolution. And they only respond to the Supreme Leader.)

With the Basij militia working as a kind of military cell in every one of the 90,000 mosques all over the country, and multiplying rapidly (they may number close to 13 million by now), these forces can do no wrong.

Ahmadinejad was very clever in the TV debates to equate Rafsanjani with Khatami and Mousavi. He painted them to his key constituency as a shock to the system. The system had to strike back. Game, set, match. For the Supreme Leader - the constituency that matters the most - Ahmadinejad even served the divine satisfaction of crushing Mousavi, who as prime minister in the 1980s (during the terrible years of the Iran-Iraq war) was played by Khomeini to control the power of then-president Khamenei.

Will Rafsanjani go for broke? As he prepares a Council of Experts counterpunch against the Supreme Leader and Mousavi plots the next resistance steps, the ball is now in the Iranian street's court. Much will depend on this Monday's peaceful march along Vali Asr street in Tehran and in 19 other cities, and a national strike on Tuesday, both called by Mousavi. Everyone remembers how a week ago the green revolution formed a chain down the entire 18 kilometer length of Vali Asr.

Ahmadinejad's show of force was his victory rally this Sunday - attended by a huge mass of true supporters in south Tehran, Basij in civilian dress and rent-a-mobs from all over the place. In a press conference earlier, Ahmadinejad hinted that in his second term he will be "more and more solid".

Ahmadinejad blamed the whole Iranian turmoil on foreign media - which not by accident are now being virtually persecuted by the security apparatus. The crackdown is assuming ultra-hardcore proportions. Yet the revolution continues to be broadcast to the whole world in English and Farsi, although the indispensable Tehran Bureau website was been taken down by the thought police. Riot police have fought students inside the dorms of the University of Tehran.

The Ministry of Interior is now protected by tanks. Many in Tehran believe that a lot of the motorbiked Basij are in fact Arabs doing the "dirty work" true nationalist Persians would refuse. Basij have been fighting hard for hours to subdue throngs of protesters. There are widespread reports of a "staggering" number of injured in Tehran hospitals. A Basiji center in north Tehran seems to have been captured by protesters on Sunday night. This means the green revolution having access to weapons.

This has nothing to do with the US-supported color-coded revolutions in Eurasia. This is about Iran. An election was stolen in the United States in 2000 and Americans didn't do a thing about it. Iranians are willing to die to have their votes counted. There is now an opening for a true Iranian people-power movement not specifically to the benefit of Mousavi, but with Mousavi as the catalyst in a wider struggle for real democratic legitimacy. The die is cast; now it's people power against "divine assessment".

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

VIGIL FOR IRAN TWEEPS @Change_for_Iran -- NO WORD for 24 hours!

Many of us trying to use Twitter to support the #Green Revolution in Iran right now were following the courageous updates of a student (?) or group of students in Tehran. The last news was before they set out for the big protest yesterday, were at least 8 are confirmed killed by Basij and many accounts of innumerable wounded spreading across the Twitterverse and Blogosphere.

I am reposting Change_for_Iran's TWITTER posts in hopes that more people will mobilize to keep the flow of information coming out and going into Iran.

Got to TWITTER, you don't even need an account to see posts. But ideally sign up and help RETWEET (RT) important news about the escalating crisis and burgeoning civil war there. People's lives are on the line and I have been moved and humbled by the courage and integrity of the Iranian people, who have stood up in the face of death threats on national television to dispute a baldly fraudulent election, while we in a America did nothing when Dubya and his cronies stole the 2000 and 2004 elections. Shame on us. We obviously have a few things to learn about participatory democracy from our friends who have taken to the streets across Iran.

Please support them in any way you can. This is not about whether you like Mousavi or think his policies are in the US or whatever nation's "interests," this is about the people reclaiming their rights to be heard and counted, and to determine their leaders for themselves. We must stand by them!

SOLIDARITY with the Green Revolution!

TWITTER:
Change_for_Iran

You follow Change_for_Iran
Change_for_Iran's updates appear in your timeline.

1. it's worth taking the risk, we're going. I won't be able to update until I'm back. again thanks for your kind support and wish us luckabout 24 hours ago from web

2. government is now playing a masterpiece mind game, all people here are so confused about what is real and who to trustabout 24 hours ago from web

3. there are now rumors of mousavi's site being hacked and the whole rally is IRG's trap. gun placements at azadi square confirmed2:37 PM Jun 15th from web

4. State TV right now: rally is illegal and Police will use iron fist against law breakers2:32 PM Jun 15th from web

5. whatever it's a trap or not we're agreed to go trying to speak with mousavi & karoubi in person.2:18 PM Jun 15th from web

6. @danrlewis it is complicated, mousavi's official site said it is cancelled but he will be there with karoubi!2:06 PM Jun 15th from web in reply to danrlewis

7. I'm not sure about going to mousavi's rally anymore, we're talking about possibilities.2:00 PM Jun 15th from web

8. IRG threaten to open fire at people if they try to participate in Mousavi's rally1:51 PM Jun 15th from web

9. http://25khordad.wordpress.... more pictures, we will upload more if internet speed gets better #Iranelection12:29 PM Jun 15th from web

10. I will update from over there, we really need to see other students & think of something. #iranelection12:01 PM Jun 15th from web

11. Masood came to say Police forces are moving outside of complex! we're going to take the chance & run to other buildings #iranelection11:57 AM Jun 15th from web

12. http://bit.ly/Aw5zA (in farsi) the news is spreading!11:53 AM Jun 15th from web

13. @VoiceofIran 23 was captured by ansar around 3am, we're in 22 right now11:47 AM Jun 15th from web in reply to VoiceofIran

14. very calm outside people just passing by looking at the police & remnants of doors & windows. #iranelection11:36 AM Jun 15th from web

15. accourding to BBC persian the weapon Ansar used was winchester hunting rifles, looks like the same at Esfahan #iranelection11:31 AM Jun 15th from web

16. @Kellye9 please RT it to me if possible.11:26 AM Jun 15th from web in reply to Kellye9

17. police still prevent us from going to other dorm buildings or attempting to exit the complex. #iranelection11:23 AM Jun 15th from web

18. Ansar troops left about an hour ago & we managed to give Reza some first aid, I guess he is OK for now. #iranelection11:19 AM Jun 15th from web

19. NOT SUITABLE FOR PEOPLE UNDER 18 ---> university of Esfahan http://bit.ly/3whaZV #iranelection11:16 AM Jun 15th from web

20. I'm not sure it's wise to share them here or not, they are absolutely +1811:09 AM Jun 15th from web

21. University of Esfahan was also under attack last night, I got some pictures from students over there but they are terrifying #iranelection11:06 AM Jun 15th from web

22. http://bit.ly/nCF2j #iranelection11:00 AM Jun 15th from web

23. I'm really out of energy & don't know when I will able to twit again. sorry I didn't answer to all of your questions & please wish us luck6:32 AM Jun 15th from web

24. sorry I can't answer to all twits. my head is spinning and Masood is killing me with the importance of his thesis files #iranelection6:28 AM Jun 15th from web

25. @RandyInman Mr.Potato lover is a lunatic selfish man think of himself as a God. so yes it does!6:26 AM Jun 15th from web in reply to RandyInman

26. it's calm now outside. no more sound of sirens or chants guess people are going to work & have no more time for revolting #iranelection6:21 AM Jun 15th from web

27. I really want to sleep right now, it's more than 48hours of rapid incidents. I wonder what mousavi is doing does he know? #iranelection6:12 AM Jun 15th from web

28. unlike Masood and others I really don't think capturing them can help us in any way. #iranelection6:10 AM Jun 15th from web

29. just received news about forging department students captured 2 Ansar troopers and moving them to another building! #iranelection6:04 AM Jun 15th from web

30. Masood says at least we can call it 25khordad and be more famous than 18tir students. I'm too much sleepy for laughing #iranelection5:54 AM Jun 15th from web

31. it's near 6am! come on amirabad people! wake up #iranelection5:47 AM Jun 15th from web

32. Reza is looking very bad & they will shoot at us again if we try to leave here. #iranelection5:44 AM Jun 15th from web

33. if what gooyanews reported is true, the situation in other buildings are far worst than us #iranelection5:40 AM Jun 15th from web

34. according to gooyanews : in whole complex: 15 badly wounded, more than 100 arrested or missing. #iranelection5:38 AM Jun 15th from web

35. 5:26AM I'm praying to GOD they leave us be! we should get Reza to a hospital Asap, he has some bad wounds. #iranelections5:28 AM Jun 15th from web

36. http://news.gooya.com/polit... (in farsi) Finally we are being seen! #iranelection5:23 AM Jun 15th from web

37. 5:17am people outside are burning Saderat bank building or as it seems from this far #iranelection5:20 AM Jun 15th from web

38. Masood is going outside & I'm shaking & feeling useless #iranelection5:11 AM Jun 15th from web

39. The KingKong (Masood named him & well deserved) is now speaking with his radio outside. probably giving or getting some orders #iranelection5:03 AM Jun 15th from web

40. the other buildings are now chanting "Ey Iran" song. #iranelection5:00 AM Jun 15th from web

41. We're trying to stop Masood from going outside! there is no way they will listen to us right now. #iranelection4:56 AM Jun 15th from web

42. Stop burning tires & trash cans! come to our aid it's getting worse than 18tir already! #iranelection4:55 AM Jun 15th from web

43. For some unknown reason there is still power in here and DSL line is working. but there is no dial tone. #iranelection4:53 AM Jun 15th from web

44. typing as fastest as I can in both English & Farsi, Still we need outside help, I really don't want to be captured by Ansar #iranelection4:49 AM Jun 15th from web

45. unfortunately the entrance door is completely destroyed and there is no way of barricading it. #iranelection4:47 AM Jun 15th from web

46. to other sources: this isn't the police! police is still outside! we're under attack by Ansar-Hezbolah. #iranelection4:42 AM Jun 15th from web

47. they used some kind of riot control gun in their last attack, never seen it before #iranelection4:41 AM Jun 15th from web

48. my friend saying more than 100 students arrested, I can't confirm this but the numbers are high #iranelection4:38 AM Jun 15th from web

49. bastards just attacked us for no reason, I lost count of how much tear gas they launched at us! #iranelection4:35 AM Jun 15th from web

50. all university's own security and personnel already evacuated by police, there are only us students in here right now. #iranelection4:30 AM Jun 15th from web

51. we have now some students with urgent need of medical attention I'm calling out to all ppl who can come here don't leave us #iranelection4:26 AM Jun 15th from web

52. trying hard to sleep, there are rumors about karoubi's march toward here! if it is true there is still hope for us! #iranelection4:18 AM Jun 15th from web

53. 4:09am from dormitory building of university of Tehran, we will wait for day light and hoping people of amirabad help us out #iranelection4:12 AM Jun 15th from web

54. there is nothing we can't do right now, police & basij forces are waiting outside blocking anyone from getting in or out #iranelection4:07 AM Jun 15th from web

55. using freegate now, nothing else working. no power in most of the buildings & cellphones & land lines are out again. #iranelection4:00 AM Jun 15th from web

56. http://bit.ly/vnz0l police will break in if you give shelter to people! #iranelection1:57 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox

57. @monshi thanks for confirming it! I don't believe they have the courage to arrest khatami1:19 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox in reply to monshi

58. http://bit.ly/ZV2As #iranelection12:55 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox

59. @Robot117 IRG is not shah! it's a complete lunatic military organization! let's pray that will never happen.12:54 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox

60. http://bit.ly/4AZ7zw Tehran Valiasr st 5:30pm after President Potato's speech #iranelection12:37 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox

61. http://www.iranuon.net23.ne... in this photo: our beloved ex president Khatam arrested; I really hope this is fake12:04 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox

62. @joergheber we're backed by other universities and local people of Koy district and yes we want to try again12:00 AM Jun 15th from TwitterFox in reply to joergheber

63. sorry for the name change, Guess I'm being overprotective11:39 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

64. Basij bastards waving Iron chains at us, my back hurts but I'm OK, we will try again around 2~3AM #iranelection11:34 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

65. I'm sorry people of koy for not being able to do anything, never saw so many basij forces in my life! #iranelection10:58 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

66. tired & beaten. we couldn't break through their wall, they were too many & we were no match for an entire army of special forces10:51 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

67. Students & people fighting back a large group of police & Basij right now at university of physics! I'm going to join them. #iranelection9:04 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

68. is there any end to police's motorcycles?! how much more we should burn?! #iranelection8:38 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

69. Karoubi speaking right now with people in front of his office. I hope nothing bad happens #iranelection8:36 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

70. http://bit.ly/2temyZ God! I really hate him! #iranelection8:32 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

71. @jeff_w44 we called the "lebas shakhsi" (wearing no uniforms) ,you could say they are regime's undercover agents.8:24 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox in reply to jeff_w44

72. From Enghelab square my friend just called me, Police & unknown forces beating everybody for no apparent reason! #iranelection8:16 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

73. Gordanhaye Ashora (IRG's Elite infantry division) seen at Narmak in standby & fully armed with military equipment. #iranelection8:12 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox

74. @Olive648 it was impossible to reach there! it is near ministry of national security & they have a small army protecting it!8:08 PM Jun 14th from TwitterFox in reply to Olive648

75. Security forces are now gathering a large force near university of physics #iranelection7:54 PM Jun 14th from web

76. I'm feeling angry & also depressed seeing him lying so easlly & wearing OUR COLOR on TV #iranelection6:52 PM Jun 14th from web

77. Ahmadynezad now calls himself "seyed" (bloodline of prophet mohammad) & wearing a green shawl on state TV! unbelievable! #IranElection6:43 PM Jun 14th from web

78. http://i40.tinypic.com/oiha... Vali-Asr street #IranElection6:33 PM Jun 14th from web

79. From Qom: Reformist grand ayatolah Saneyi is in house arrest and his office phones lines answered by ministry of Intel #iranelection6:29 PM Jun 14th from web

80. Karoubi does NOT recognize Ahmadinejad as President, and declares the election VOID & urges people to stand #iranelection6:27 PM Jun 14th from web

81. President Potato showing his evil powers on national TV right now! speaking of peace & justice! #iranelection6:24 PM Jun 14th from web

82. IRG's helicopter flying low on yousefabadad Amirabad Gisha right now creating a devastating sound and making windows shake #IranElection6:12 PM Jun 14th from web

83. http://gharinaz.persianblog... #Iranelection6:08 PM Jun 14th from web

84. We can't just risk loosing mousavi because it could be a trap! his core support was always us students! #IranElection11:05 AM Jun 14th from web

85. I'm going inside the building to inform the others, I hope we can get out peacefully with university's bus, we must be there at 12:3010:42 AM Jun 14th from web

86. I guess we should all go, after all he is the real president #iranelection10:26 AM Jun 14th from web

87. according to rumor mousavi requested all people to gather near his office at 12:30 pm today.10:25 AM Jun 14th from web

88. there is a rumor now in Farsi twitting community about mousavi being seen after 12h of no known location #iranelection10:20 AM Jun 14th from web

89. still no working cellphones here and wireless speed is awful #iranelection10:17 AM Jun 14th from web

90. it's 9:54 AM -Amirabad street near Pasargad bank and to be honest I don't have the courage to leave the roof right now #iranelection9:57 AM Jun 14th from web

91. @ahmadinejad no wonder you are OK Mr president 24.5M9:43 AM Jun 14th from TwitterFox in reply to ahmadinejad

92. I'm dizzy but ok. some people are getting shelter in the nearby unfinished bank building. police arresting a middle aged man9:41 AM Jun 14th from web

93. my eyes are burning hard to keep them open #iranelection9:16 AM Jun 14th from web

94. tear gas #iranelection9:01 AM Jun 14th from web

95. Down with the dictator! Mousavi, Karoubi; support us! #iranelection9:00 AM Jun 14th from web

96. police demanding people to move their cars and start crashing car windows. more people are coming. I will try to get a better view8:48 AM Jun 14th from web

97. some people are now parking their cars in middle of the street trying to block the vans. #iranelection8:46 AM Jun 14th from web

98. from the looks of it they are waiting to arrest all the students! it's also explains the vans8:44 AM Jun 14th from web

99. Police is trying to stop people from gathering around while Intel guys still holding a line in front of the gates #iranelection8:35 AM Jun 14th from web

100. http://twitpic.com/7c85l #iranelection8:32 AM Jun 14th from web

101. just receive http://bit.ly/17SDk4 from a friend. can't check it out myself. hope it's not fake. #Iranelection8:20 AM Jun 14th from web

102. they are starting their motorbikes now. I can't see where they are going. #iranelection8:14 AM Jun 14th from web

103. my brother thinks they are after a student council activist. the council known as Tahkime Vahdat and belongs to president era. #iranelection8:05 AM Jun 14th from web

104. I guess the Intel ministry guy is trying to convince university's security to open the gates #iranelection7:56 AM Jun 14th from web

105. I'm currently on rooftop with my laptop, most of the city is now looking calm except university of Economy building. #IranElection7:53 AM Jun 14th from web

106. there were more troops inside the vans and now starting to create a line in front of the only entrance of the building #iranelection7:48 AM Jun 14th from web

107. no reports from any other part of Tehran, we're all waiting for a move from mousavi or karoubi. #iranelection7:42 AM Jun 14th from web

108. Internet barely works, Speed is near 2kbps #iranelection7:34 AM Jun 14th from web

109. they are joining with police motorcycles in front of student's dormitory buildings firefighters are leaving the area right now #iranelection7:33 AM Jun 14th from web

110. black riot guards with black vans, it's my first time seeing this people, no badges! probably Intel ministry #iranelection7:25 AM Jun 14th from web

111. 7am news, still nothing about protests & clashes on TV. #iranelection7:09 AM Jun 14th from web

112. all cellphones now read: Emergency only - No Service! #iranelection6:57 AM Jun 14th from web

113. 6:47 am, police is speaking with students inside dormitory buildings of university of Tehran with speaker. #iranelection6:49 AM Jun 14th from web

114. @matthew951 we're using twitterfox! thanks for the note!6:40 AM Jun 14th from web in reply to matthew951

115. Ahmadinejad & his supporters will celebrate their victory today at 5pm local time in Valiasr square & we will try to ruin his party!6:37 AM Jun 14th from web

116. Major General Jafari, commander of IRG said he will not let mousavi's green movement to harm Islamic revolution's ethics #iranelection6:27 AM Jun 14th from web

117. @LovLesmile Internet access in Iran is based on land lines not sat dishes!6:12 AM Jun 14th from web in reply to LovLesmile

Iraq and Dubya's Lies

Dubya's lies. Olbermann says "shut the hell up," apparently only because he wasn't allowed to say "fuck" on tv.

An Oldie but a Goodie--Keith Olbermann calls Bush a Fascist

Keith Olbermann ROCKS

Keith Olbermann often warms the cockles of my heart, but this special commentary on the shameless passage of Prop 8 banning gay marriage in California is especially powerful, impassioned and spot on.

Judith Warner Captures a Transgenerational Momement

November 6, 2008, 9:03 pm
Tears to Remember
By Judith Warner
New York Times

On Wednesday, Nov. 5, 1980, my 10th-grade American history teacher started class by unfurling The New York Times. She pointed to its triple banner headline: “Reagan Easily Beats Carter; Republicans Gain in Congress; D’Amato and Dodd are Victors.”

“Save this paper,” she told us. “This is the start of a whole new era.”

And it was. An era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.

In short, it was the start of our current era. The Reagan Revolution was the formative political experience of my generation’s lifetime, like the Great Depression, the Second World War or Vietnam for those before us. And in its intellectual and moral paucity, in its eventual hegemony, these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way.

I will admit that back in January, when Barack Obama, in his post-Iowa victory speech, spoke about the “cynics,” the “they” who said “this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,” he was talking about me.

I will admit that the call of “change” did not speak to me as an achievable goal.

Until it actually came.

On Wednesday, there was a run on newspapers, as voters rushed to grab a tangible piece of the history they’d made. My husband Max and I, unable to find extra copies, brought our own worn papers home to 8- and 11-year-old Emilie and Julia.

Sept. 11, the seismic event that we’d feared would forever form their political consciousness, shaping their world and constricting the boundaries of the possible, had actually been eclipsed, light blotting out darkness, the best of America at long last driving away the demons of fear. We wanted them to see that it was the end of an era.

“Look,” we said, pointing to the headline “Racial Barrier Falls.” “This is huge.”

We labored to make them understand that their world — art that day, and orchestra, and Baked Potato Bar at lunch — had irrevocably changed.

But how can you understand change when you’ve only known one way of being?

They were happy because we were happy. They rose to the occasion in that bemused way children do when adults tell them what they should feel. They were glad to be rid of George W. Bush and to be saved – for now – from the specter of Sarah Palin. (“It is not O.K. to say she’s an ‘idiot,’” I had snapped when they came home from school stoked by the mob. “Prove your case. Show, don’t tell.”)

They’d had, like many D.C. children, more than their share of politics. After first following the country into battle against the all-purpose boogeyman Saddam Hussein, they’d become antiwar. They had opinions on tax policy and spoke angrily about the “wealth gap.” In the past election year, they’d been fired up about the woman thing, in all its pretty girl versus smart girl iterations; in fact, they and their friends had remained hard-core Hillaryites long after their moms had moved on.

But the race thing? The groundbreaking immensity of the election of our country’s first African-American president?

“You’re being racist,” Emilie had said when I made a comment about how particularly earth-moving this election was for black voters. “Why should it matter if people are black or white?”

Theirs has often looked to me like a world drained of meaning. Girl power put to the service of selling Hannah Montana. Feel-good inclusiveness that occulted the very real conflicts, crimes and hatreds of history.

It isn’t easy to let go of the past to embrace something new, to risk heartbreak on the chance of the world’s actually having changed.

Or at least, it hasn’t been easy for me. But it comes naturally to some. Like the hundreds of George Washington University students who gathered in front of the White House on Tuesday night, cheering and screaming and shouting their goodbyes to the political era of their youth.

“Bliss it was to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” Max emailed me, paraphrasing William Wordsworth on the French Revolution, at 11:30 p.m. on election night, after leaving his desk to walk among the revelers downtown. I, home with the kids, was in bed, sleeping the drugged sleep of an alcohol-abstaining migraineuse after drinking half a glass of celebratory champagne.

Colin Powell did not dance for joy over Obama’s victory; he wept.

“Look what we did. Look what we did,” he said, puffy-faced, red-eyed, fighting back more tears on CNN. “He’s won. It’s over.”

David Dinkins was similarly solemn. “Things do change. There is a God. They do get better,” said the mayor who presided over New York City at a time of toxic racial tensions.

Obama, too, resisted giddy gladness on Tuesday night. But he did proclaim an end to the world as we’ve known it for far too long.

“To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you,” he promised. “This is our moment. This is our time.”

The glory of Barack Obama is that there are so many different kinds of us who can claim a piece of that “our.” African-Americans, Democrats, post-boomers, progressives, people who rose from essentially nowhere and through hard work and determination succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams are the most obvious.

But there are also people who respect intelligence and good grammar. People who see their spouse as their “best friend,” as Barack called Michelle on Tuesday night. People whose children have the same knowing look as Sasha and Malia, who are probably more excited about their puppy than about their father’s presidency.

Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.

And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.
Obama's victoryAt the First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, Latrice Barnes, right, is comforted by her daughter Jasmine Redd, 5. (David Goldman for The New York Times)

It is, I suppose, in part a matter of temperament, whether one shouts or weeps at happy transformative moments. But I also think it’s a matter of what has come before. The young people joyfully frolicking in front of the Bush White House never knew the universe whose passing was marked by Obama’s victory and Jackson’s tears.

This moment of triumph marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the “values voters” around whose sensibilities we’ve had to tiptoe for the past 28 years.

The election brought the return of a country we’d lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief. The next looked up confusedly, eager to please and yet unable to comprehend just what the tears were about.

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Why the White House Needs a Greyhound

Why The White House Needs A Greyhound

11:50 AM on Sat Nov 8 2008
By hortense
Posted on Jezebel.com

Though President-Elect Obama's first press conference yesterday was meant to showcase his plans on how to ease the economy out of its current crisis, the question that garnered the most attention, and the question that has been flying all over the press in every country in the world, is this: What kind of dog are the Obamas going to get? We had some suggestions last week, with Goldendoodles, Bichon Frises and Poodles leading the hypoallergenic way, and though it seems likely that the girls will choose one of these adorable breeds, I'd like to make the case for another hypoallergenic, quiet, loyal, loving breed: the greyhound.

Greyhounds have a long and noble history; before greyhound racing became what they were best known for, greyhounds were actually protected by law during the Middle Ages, were the only dogs mentioned in the Bible, and were mentioned by Chaucer and Shakespeare, among others. America's favorite animated family, The Simpsons, adopted their greyhound, Santa's Little Helper, at the very start of the beloved series, and J.K. Rowling adopted a grey last year, which means, of course, that greyhounds are Gryffindor approved.

The Obamas are looking for two things: a rescue dog and a hypoallergenic dog. A greyhound fits both of these criteria. Greyhounds are also notoriously lazy, preferring to spend their days curled up in a ball, fast asleep. They're incredibly gentle, they don't shed, they very rarely bark, and they don't secrete the same oil as other dogs, which means they don't give off that "doggy smell" that other breeds seem to.

Even if the Obamas decide to go with a poodle or a doodle (which they will, most likely), greyhounds have already won one victory this week: voters in the State of Massachusetts voted to ban greyhound racing, a move that will close down the tracks that my retired racer used to run on. Thousands of dogs will now be placed in rescue shelters to await real homes. With 5,000-8,500 greyhounds being killed each year simply because they can't race anymore, the need for good homes and greyhound rescue awareness is higher than ever, and a Presidential adoption would do wonders for greyhound rescue efforts across the country.

When we first got Liffey, he was three years old and had never set foot in a home before. He didn't know how to climb stairs. He didn't understand that the face looking back at him in the mirror was his own, and not another dog's. He walked into the plate glass door twice, not knowing what windows were. He had spent his entire life in a crate, leaving only to pee, eat, or run.

A year and a half later, he's a bit of a rock star in our very small town. Kids will stop us every three feet when we go for walks, and he stands patiently as they pet him and tell him how neat they think he is. Sometimes when I watch him curled up in a ball on the couch, I think about the first three years of his life, when he was just a number on a track, locked in a cage at night, and I can't help but worry about the other greys out there who are still in need. A greyhound in the White House would be the best thing that ever happened to the Greyhound Rescue movement; but even if that doesn't happen, the steps being made in states like Massachusetts are definite signs that the country is beginning to realize that these animals deserve loving families, good homes, and a chance to live a cage-free life.

[Grey2kUsa]
Mass. Voters Approve Dog Racing Ban [Boston Globe]
J.K. Rowling Adopts An Abandoned Greyhound [Daily Record]
Who Should Be The First Dog? Here Are The Candidates [AP]

Gail Collins' Thinking of Good Vibrations

Thinking of Good Vibrations

By GAIL COLLINS
Op-Ed Columnist
Published: November 5, 2008
The New York Times


Tralalalalala.

We are only thinking cheerful thoughts today, people. America did good. Enjoy.

Even if you voted for John McCain, be happy. You’ve got the best of all worlds. Today, you can bask in the realization that there are billions of people around the planet who loathed our country last week but are now in awe of its capacity to rise above historic fears and prejudices, that once again, the United States will have a president the world wants to follow.

Then later, when things get screwed up, you can point out that it’s not your fault.

About the inevitable disasters: I am sorry to tell you, excited youth of America, that Barack Obama is going to make mistakes. And the country’s broke. Perhaps we should have mentioned this before. But let’s leave all that to 2009. When somebody runs one of the best presidential campaigns ever, he deserves a little time to enjoy the sweet spot between achievement of a goal and the arrival of the consequences.

Let’s hear it for the voters. Good turnout, guys — especially you Virginians who stood in line for seven hours. A professor at George Mason University who studies this sort of thing claims that there hasn’t been such a high participation level since 1908. You could turn out to be the ever-elusive answer to the question: “Name one thing that Barack Obama has in common with William Howard Taft?”

Let’s hear it for Hillary Clinton, who lost but made the country comfortable with the idea of a woman as chief executive. And Joe Biden, who actually ran a disciplined campaign, given his truly exceptional capacity to say weird things.

And let’s give a shout-out to John McCain. As desperate as he was, he still passed up opportunities to poke hard at the nation’s fault lines of race, religion and region — although he has probably created a permanent gap between the rest of us and segments of the country who feel under imminent threat from Bill Ayers.

McCain ran a dreadful campaign, but it’s over. Give the guy a break. He was stuck with George Bush. And the Republican Party. And the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of giving a decent speech. The road was hard, but he soldiered on and did a lovely concession Tuesday night. Kudos.

Sarah Palin did go over the top with her small towns vs. the world mantra. However, she does get credit for giving us a real understanding of the difference between a moose and a caribou.

O.K., there is nothing positive to say about Sarah Palin. And Alaska, are you re-electing Ted Stevens? What’s going on there? Did you actually believe him when he said that the court verdict was still up in the air? On the day after he was found guilty? By the way, if Stevens does win, it will be with about 106,000 votes. In total. There are more people than that in my immediate neighborhood! What kind of state is this, anyway?

But we’re in a good mood, so let’s forget Alaska. Instead, we’ll contemplate the fact that North Carolina tossed Elizabeth Dole out of office despite her ad campaign aimed at convincing the state that her opponent, Kay Hagan, was an atheist. This was accomplished, you may remember, through the creative strategy of showing Hagan’s picture along with another woman’s voice saying: “There is no God!” If Dole had won, by the next election we would have been bombarded with ads that appeared to show candidates saying “I support adultery!” or “Let’s kill the puppies!” Now that won’t happen. Thank you, North Carolina.

By the way, I believe that during the campaign McCain’s great friend Senator Lindsey Graham said something along the line of promising to drown himself if North Carolina went for Obama. I believe I speak for us all, Senator Graham, when I say that we are feeling extremely mellow today and you do not have to follow through.

Congratulations to Senator Susan Collins on her re-election. The entire moderate Republican caucus in the Senate may now wind up consisting of women from Maine. As Maine goes, so go the Supreme Court nominations.

Finally, on behalf of the baby-boom generation, I would like to hear a little round of applause before we cede the stage to the people who were too young to go to Woodstock and would appreciate not having to listen to the stories about it anymore. It looks as though we will be represented in history by only two presidents, one of whom is George W. Bush. Bummer.

The boomers didn’t win any wars and that business about being self-involved was not entirely unfounded. On the other hand, they made the nation get serious about the idea of everybody being created equal. And now American children are going to grow up unaware that there’s anything novel in an African-American president or a woman running for the White House.

We’ll settle for that.

Anna Quindlen on What Obama Means for Us: Living History

Living History

Occasionally America turns out to be every bit as good as its hype. It's thrilling to be around to witness one of those moments.
Anna Quindlen
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Nov 17, 2008

The American Museum of Natural History threw a spectacular party on New Year's Eve 1999, but perhaps the millennium really arrived there just a few weeks ago. A group of New York City schoolchildren were at an event marking the 150th birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist and president, and at the end of the visit one of the kids raised his hand. "I have a question," he said. "Was he black?"

History will record that on Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the first black president of the United States. It is impossible to overstate what that means to this nation.

America is as much a concept as it is a country, but it is a concept too often honored in the breach. The Statue of Liberty welcomes with the words "Give me your tired, your poor." Yet generation after generation of immigrants arrived here to face contempt and hatred until the passage of time, the flattening of accents, turned them into tolerated natives. The Declaration of Independence states unequivocally that all men are created equal. Yet for years the politicians and the powerful seemed to take the gender of that noun literally and denied all manner of rights to women.

But no injustice or prejudice brought to bear by this country against its own people can compare with how it has treated black men and women. Humiliation, degradation, lynchings, beatings, murders. The rights the United States pretended to confer upon all were unthinkingly and consistently denied them: the right to the franchise, to representation, to protection by the justice system.

Literal ownership gave way to something not so different: "When we are moved to better our lot," Richard Wright wrote in 1941, "we do not ask ourselves 'can we do it?' but 'will they let us do it?' " Henry Louis Gates Jr., in the memoir "Colored People," says simply, "For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores." Alice Walker left home for college on a bus and was ordered to move after a white woman complained that she was too near the front.

None of this was so very long ago.

Time passed. Things changed. John Lewis, a boy who loved books but was not permitted to enter the public library, a man whose skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers when he led a peaceful march across a bridge, now sits in Congress. Gates is a professor at Harvard, Walker a revered writer. Segregation as a matter of law has given way to segregation as a matter of class and custom. As President-elect Obama said when he gave a speech about race earlier this year, speaking of systemic poverty, bad schools and broken families, "Many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow."

But Obama said something else in that speech, something both simpler and more profound that has special resonance now that his improbable candidacy has prevailed. He made the political spiritual. "In the end, then," he said, "what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us." He asked the American people to be fair and just, to be kind and generous, to put prejudice behind them and be one people because that is, not a legal or social imperative, but a moral one.

There will be learned discussion in the years to come about the specific meaning of this moment, about whether it will be more symbolic than substantive, about whether having a black president will lull Americans into believing that racism is a thing of the past. But for just a moment consider this small fact: for a long time a black man in many parts of the United States was denied even the honorific "Mister" by the white community, and was instead called by his first name, like a child, no matter how elderly and esteemed he might be.

Now a black man will be called Mr. President.

They never thought they would see the day, people said, especially the older ones, who could remember the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. They wept, some of them, and so did I. Perhaps it was because this man seems so young and vigorous in a nation that seems old and tired. Perhaps it is because he promises change and hope, and both are so badly needed. He is the president for our children's generation, a more tolerant and diverse society, so insensible of bright dividing lines that one of them would idly wonder whether Theodore Roosevelt was a black man. They belie a time when there was a crayon labeled "flesh" in my Crayola box, a crayon that was a pale pink.

But I suspect that, like many others, I wept for myself, too, because I felt I was part of a country that was living its principles. Despite all our prejudices, seen and hidden, millions of citizens managed, in the words of Dr. King, to judge Barack Obama by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. There were many reasons to elect him president, but this was one collateral gift: to be able to watch America look an old evil in the eye and to say, no more. We must be better than that. We can be better than that. We are better than that.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/167571
© 2008

Barack Obama's election victory brings a new dawn of leadership

Barack Obama's election victory brings a new dawn of leadership

* Jonathan Freedland in Chicago
* guardian.co.uk
* Wednesday November 05 2008 06.57 GMT


The man who once described himself as a "skinny kid with a funny name" stood before a vast, euphoric crowd — and a watching world — and in a speech that was by turns sombre and inspirational, took upon his shoulders the great weight of leadership of the United States of America.

Barack Obama emerged onto the stage at Chicago's Grant Park as President-Elect to greet a crowd that had waited for several hours to see him — and for decades to witness such a moment. There had been tears all evening, as one key state after another fell — first Pennsylvania, then Ohio — turning the hope of victory into a certainty. But for many it was the sight of the man himself that finally made reality sink in. There he was: an African-American man who from today will be addressed as Mr President.

Obama himself seemed to understand the gravity of the moment. Save for a few thank-yous to his campaign team — and a message to his daughters that they had earned the new puppy that the Obamas will take with them to the White House — he did not deliver a cheery victory speech celebrating an electoral triumph. Instead he used the occasion to give the first address of his presidency.

He declared that "Change has come to America," but left no doubt that his election marked only the first step along a road that will prove long and hard. "We may not get there in one year or in one term," he cautioned. "But we will get there."

Reprising a line he had used in the stump speech that launched his "improbable journey" in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire a year ago, he reminded his audience that they were a nation at war, with an economy in trouble, living on a planet in peril. He called on all Americans — including those who had not voted for him — to join him in the tough work ahead: "I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too."

It was one of several calls for unity from the man who made his name with a 2004 plea for America to remember that it is not made up of blue states or red states, but must always be the United States. He seemed to be attempting to assemble a new coalition, even a government of national unity, to tackle the great challenges of the age. In a flourish that echoed John F Kennedy, he declared: "Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other."

The crowd in Grant Park — scene of one of the most bruising chapters in recent US political history, the Chicago riots of 1968 — stood rapt. They listened as Obama seemed to steel them for a collective effort unseen since the days of FDR.

That crystallised a sense that had been building about Obama in the final weeks of his campaign: that he aspires to be not just a successful politician who wins elections, but a genuine leader — ready to steer his people through an onslaught of troubles. "America, we have come so far," he said, as if the entire nation were gathered before him. "We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do."

He also had a message to the rest of the world, one that will be welcomed almost everywhere. "To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand."

In this speech, and with his victory, Barack Obama has drawn a line under the last eight years, ending an American era that few will mourn. For today marked nothing less than the first day of the Obama presidency.

We Did It! Welcome President Elect Barack Obama

Watch Obama's Victory Speech
Obama Victory Speech Transcript

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

Its the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

Its the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

Its the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

Its been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and hes fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nations promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nations next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy thats coming with us to the White House. And while shes no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what youve sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didnt start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generations apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.

I know you didnt do this just to win an election and I know you didnt do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how theyll make the mortgage, or pay their doctors bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who wont agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government cant solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way its been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, its that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one thats on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. Shes a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldnt vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that shes seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we cant, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when womens voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that We Shall Overcome. Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

We are the Ones We've been Waiting for!

John McCain: No You Can't

From Election08 On Youtube
Presented by: The Public Service Administratioin
Andy Cobb
Josh Funk
Nyima Funk
Marc Evan Jackson
Mark Kienlen
David Pompeii
Marc Warzecha

Special guests:
Beth Farmer
Matt Craig
Rebecca Allen
Kai Pompeii
Kevin Douglas
Victor Lopez

The work that we face in our time is great
in a time of war
and the terrible sacrifices it entails
the promise of a better future is not always clear
there's gonna be other wars
I'm sorry to tell you there's gonna be other wars
there's gonna be a lot of combat wounds
and my friends it's gonna be tough
and we're gonna have a lot to do
That old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?
Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb...
I'm still convinced that withdrawal means chaos
and if you think that things are bad now
if we withdraw--you ain't seen nothing yet
was the war a good idea, worth the price in blood and treasure?
It was a good idea
President Bush talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years
Maybe a hundred, that's fine with me
I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for a hundred years, or a thousand years, or ten thousand years.



From: lessjobsmorewars
Added: February 13, 2008
NO, YOU CAN'T -- NO SE PUEDE. Status quo is Latin f...
NO, YOU CAN'T -- NO SE PUEDE.

Status quo is Latin for scandal, recession, Bush, McCain, global warming, children without healthcare, young men and women dying in Iraq for 100 years, and tax cuts for the super-rich while we rack up trillion dollar deficits. If you prefer more of the same, please stick with the Grand Ol' Party. If you want hope and change, there's that other guy running for president...

We made "No, You Can't" as a part parody/part homage (or "parage," if you will :-) ), to the original piece by will.i.am. We're inspired by the movement that Obama has set in motion, and wanted to poke fun at the entrenched interests and cynics who'll be pushing back harder and harder against us as our movement grows stronger.

Members of the power elite featured in this video include: Dick Cheney, Filmore Barrols, Ivy League-Legacy, Jen Trification, D. Forrest Callee, Monet Oliver de Place, Winsome Mandate, and Lily the Dog.

Brought to you by the same spoiled brats who brought you Billionaires for Bush http://billionairesforbush.com

Creative Team: Melody Bates (producer), Elissa Jiji (producer), Marco Ceglie (writer/post-production genius), Andrew Boyd (other writer/post-production sub-genius), Tom Blake (camera), Diana Solomon (hair and makeup), Eddie Martinez (editor), Ken Rosser (guitar), Ron Kidd (Dick Cheney), Brian Fairbanks & Justin Krebs & Cliff Tasner (co-conspirators), Kim & Philippo (dog wrangling).

+++
Lyrics

NO YOU CAN'T—NO SE PUEDE

...It was a creed, snuck into the founding documents that denied the destiny of a nation.

No, you can't.

It was decreed by bankers and landowners as they marched our monopolies westward.

No, you can't.

No you can't stop our power and privilege.

No you can't repeal our tax cuts for the wealthy few.

No you can't heal this nation.

No you can't end the war.

No you can't.

No matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of our power keeping us in power.

Status quo.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a private school in Newport are the same as the dreams of the boy who parties in the clubs of LA.

We are not as divided as our portfolios suggest. We run this nation, and together we will stop this nonsense about writing the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --

No. You. Can't.

VOTE GOP?

YES! WE! CAN!

I am waiting for the new day to break. I am proud that the best we have in us has been called forth by the prospect of hope. Thank you, Barack Obama. We shall overcome.



Official song site:
http://www.yeswecansong.com

Obama Campaign Site:
http://www.barackobama.com/

Yes we can what?:
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/

Is it true that he....?:
http://factcheck.barackobama.com/

Be a part of the video at:
http://www.hopeactchange.com

-Lyrics-

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant ........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --

Yes. We. Can.



Celebrities featured include: Jesse Dylan, Will.i.am, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon

Also check out this other great song and video inspired by Barack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyJ72i...

Vote Yes on PROP 2 in California--Prevent Gratuitous Suffering

Dear Californians, please vote yes on Prop 2 today to fight back against the grotesque cruelty of factory farms. Give animals raised for food a little decency--the right to stand up, turn around, lie down and stretch their limbs. Is that really too much to ask? And if the wellbeing of the animals does not move you, consider the filthy and unsanitary conditions in which your food is being raised. Do the right thing and vote Yes on Prop 2.


























Long Version

Vote NO on California's Discriminatory Prop 8

Here are but a few perspectives on why it is essential that we California's fight for what's right and vote down the despicable Proposition 8 with a landslide. The idea that we should write discriminatory, religion-driven intolerance and inequality into law is revolting. Anti-gay marriage legislation is the incestuous cousin of the anti-miscegenation Laws prohibition interracial marriage that were constitutional until 1967! Stamp out this kind of disgusting bigotry and descrimination. SAY NO TO PROP 8 in California, and any similar legislation like it across the country (and the world). The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness surely includes everyone regardless of whom they love. These are the real traditional American values to stand by and protect.













For a glimpse at the twisted logic behind the divisive Yes on Prop 8 people, take a look at this ridiculous mess of lies and scare tactics. It's like white racists in Little Rock fighting for their so-called "right" to not have their children schooled alongside African American kids, or white male clubs defending their "right" not admit people of color or women. This kind of blind, stupid hatred has no place in America, or anywhere for that matter. So fucking what if your kids learn that people who love each other can get married regardless of gender? I think the idea of raising a new generation of kids who are open-minded and tolerant is a beautiful fabulous idea.

Yes. We. Can: Intelligent, Conscientious People Across the Spectrum Come Together for Obama

03 Nov 2008 12:30 pm
Barack Obama For President

By Andrew Sullivan

On a spectacular September morning more than seven years ago, our world changed. I remain one of those who believe that that day remains indelible, and its lesson unforgettable. The civilized democratic world came under attack from a small but lethal band of religious fanatics bent on destroying free societies, and, more terrifyingly, eager to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction that could make 9/11 look like a dry run.

We are still under attack.

This confluence of fundamentalism and lethal technology is the greatest danger of our time. And in the last seven years, the threat has not abated. Al Qaeda remains at large, and the very top leadership that planned and executed 9/11 is alive. They have reconstituted a base of sorts in Pakistan. They have scored several major propaganda victories - from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay to trapping most of the US military in an unending counter-insurgency in one country where al Qaeda was weak before 2002, Iraq. Islamist factions in Pakistan's government are horrifyingly close to nuclear technology. Iran has gained in power and influence in the Middle East and its ability to launch and use nuclear weapons is much greater than it was on 9/11. At its best, the Iraq war will lead to a fractured petro-state, closely allied with Iran, beset by constant infighting and terrorism. At its worst, Iraq will keep over 100,000 young Americans trapped there for the rest of our lives. The war in Afghanistan against the Taliban is at a seven year nadir.

Now the really bad news: the view of co-presidents Bush and Cheney is that this is a war that can and should be controlled by only one branch of government and a war in which the job of the citizenry is to shop. It is a global war where force of arms remains too often a first resort and in which talking to our enemies is regarded as "the white flag of surrender," instead of another tool at our disposal. It is a war where the American government has alienated - in some cases deeply - democratic allies whose police work and intelligence we desperately need. I do not doubt that military force is part of the mix to defeat this threat. (Like everyone else, I'm heartened that general Petraeus has introduced some minimal intelligence into the occupation of Iraq, although I fear it has merely made our presence more protracted and our withdrawal more difficult.) But the crudeness with which military force has been deployed, the absence of strategy or even due diligence in the execution of the long war, and the massive public relations blunders which have led the United States to lose a propaganda war against a bunch of murderous, medieval loons are unforgivable.

These mistakes were compounded - and in large part created - by what I believe will one day be seen as the core event of the last eight years: the collapse of constitutional order and the rule of law fomented in a mixture of hubris and laziness by the president himself. It is now indisputable that the president and vice-president of the United States engineered a de facto coup against the constitution after 9/11, declaring themselves above any law, any treaty, and any basic moral norm in their misguided mission to rid the world of evil. This blog has watched this process with increasing dismay - and watched several attempts to bring the US back to sanity foiled by a relentless and unhinged vice-president's office.

Cheney and Bush, unlike any presidency in American history, have dangerously pushed constitutional government to the brink of collapse. They did not merely assert a unified executive in which actions and regulations reserved to the executive branch were kept free from Congressional and judicial tampering. That is a perfectly defensible position, especially in wartime. They did not merely act in the immediate Agabuse wake of an emergency to protect American citizens swiftly - again a perfectly legitimate use of executive power, unhampered by Congress or courts. They declared such power to be unlimited; they asserted also that it was as permanent as the emergency they declared; they claimed their dictatorial powers were inherent in the presidency itself, and above any legal constraints; they ordered their own lawyers to provide retroactive and laughable legal immunity for their crimes; they by-passed all the usual and necessary checks within the executive branch to ensure prudence and legality and self-doubt in the conduct of a war; they asserted that emergency war powers applied to the territory of the United States itself; they claimed the right to seize anyone - anyone, citizen or not - they deemed an "enemy combatant," to hold them indefinitely with no due process and to torture them until they became incoherent, broken, brutalized shells of human beings, if they survived at all. They did this to the guilty and they did this to the innocent. But they also had no way of reliably knowing which was which and who was who. Never before in wartime has the precious, sacred inheritance of free people been treated with such contempt by the leaders of the democratic West.

They seized countless individuals with no trials and no hearings. They tortured dozens to death. They subjected many more to some of the worst psychological torture techniques devised by Communist totalitarians and the worst physical suffering devised by the Gestapo. They crossed lines no American president had ever crossed before. They withdrew the US from the Geneva Conventions - and did so secretly. They tapped American's phones without warrants, and forced many of their randomly grabbed prisoners into the black hole of insanity. They set up secret sites in former Soviet gulags to torture their victims. They single-handedly devastated America's reputation for human rights and the rule of law in the minds of the vast majority of people in other Western democracies, let alone the developing world, let alone the millions of Muslims across the Middle East who now suspect that America is not really better than their own thugocracies, that America also tortures when it wants to, that the shining city on a hill is actually a place where men above the law can do anything they want to other human beings in their custody.

No economic mismanagement can compare with this attack on the basic institutions of our democracy and the constitution. No incompetence in conducting an occupation can be deemed comparable with this level of criminality and indecency. No reaction to a natural disaster, however hapless and negligent, is as grave as this crime. No financial crisis eclipses it in gravity. The president's oath is to protect the constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. Instead, the president himself became an enemy to the constitution he swore to uphold.

This is the depth of the predicament the United States is in. The Islamist threat remains; but the Constitution is in deep disrepair, the military stretched to breaking point, the national debt doubled, and America's reputation in terrible shape. More important, the president and vice-president deeply damaged the reliability and integrity of America's intelligence services, creating a self-perpetuating loop of phony intelligence procured by torture which then justified more torture which led to worse intelligence. It will be decades before we learn the full extent of the damage Bush and Cheney have done to the country's ability to find out what the enemy is really up to, how much risk these sadists and goons have subjected us to, how much damage to this country they may have facilitated by filling intelligence with the garbage always created by torture. We do know that their policy has led to just one successful prosecution - and that many guilty figures will escape justice because torture has tainted the legal process beyond repair.

My great fear since 2004 is that this could have gotten even worse. Another attack and the abuse of power could have become much worse. A Romney or a Giuliani, empowered by religious fanaticism and a worship of state power, could have taken us down a path much darker than even the Cheney-Addington-Yoo cul-de-sac. Ron Paul emerged as the one Republican prepared to defend the rule of law, the Constitution and habeas corpus in the primaries. But, in the end, McCain emerged by default, a torture victim himself, and a critic of some aspects of the conduct of the war. But we saw in 2006 that, when push came to shove, even McCain acquiesced to the legalization of America's use of the very same torture techniques once used against him. And in this campaign, we have seen how no Republican candidate can escape the logic of bigotry, fanaticism and xenophobia that now grips and motivates the Republican party base. We have also learned, much more importantly, that McCain would appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who would acquiesce to and constitutionally entrench the dictatorial presidency that Bush-Cheney believe in as loyally as Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia. That means we are one vote away from the court ever restraining this unchecked executive. It doesn't matter who that executive is and what party he or she belongs to. What matters is that the controls upon it - controls critical to the endurance of constitutional balance and individual freedom in America - have been frayed to the breaking point. There is no greater cause right now than repairing that.

If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government. The domestic cultural and political reasons for an Obama presidency remain as strong as they were when I wrote "Goodbye To All That" over a year ago. His ability to get us past the culture war has been proven in this campaign, in the generation now coming of age that will elect him if they turn out, in Obama's staggering ability not to take the bait. His fiscal policies are too liberal for me - I don't believe in raising taxes, I believe in cutting entitlements for the middle classes as the way to fiscal balance. I don't believe in "progressive taxation", I support a flat tax. I don't want to give unions any more power. I'm sure there will be moments when a Democratic Congress will make me wince. But I also understand that money has to come from somewhere, and it will not come in any meaningful measure from freezing pork or the other transparent gimmicks advertized in advance by McCain. McCain is not serious on spending. But he is deadly serious in not touching taxes. So, on the core question of debt, on bringing America back to fiscal reason, Obama is still better than McCain. If I have to take an ideological hit to head toward fiscal solvency, I'll put country before ideology.

But none of this compares to the task of restoring the rule of law and Constitutional balance. Unlike McCain, Obama has never wavered on torture or habeas corpus or on keeping the executive branch under the law. His deep understanding and awareness of the Constitution eclipses McCain's. Coming from the opposing party, he will also be able to restore confidence that what lies within America's secret government - the one constructed by Bush and Cheney beyond any accountability, law or morality - will be ended or cleaned up. He can restore critically needed trust again - and force the Democratic party to take responsibility for a war which we all need to own, and take responsibility for, again.

We cannot win this war without regaining our democratic soul, ending torture, and returning to lawful governance. But these things won't win the war either. On that, we have a perilous task ahead. I don't know how Obama will be able to get out of Iraq in his first term. I fear that Bush and Cheney have made withdrawal deliberately difficult if not impossible. I fear the same in Afghanistan. I don't know how Obama will handle Iran, given the power that Bush and Cheney have ceded to the Islamist regime there, and the danger of a pre-emptive strike before Obama even gets inaugurated. But I do know that he will handle these wars with reason, with prudence and with care. Those are three qualities absent from the White House for eight years. And I do know that Obama's very person, and what he symbolizes, will do more to restore America's image and repair our global public relations than any single measure any new administration will be able to accomplish.

The truth is: we are in a war for the future of human civilization. We are fighting for a world in which destructive technology need not collide with fierce religious fundamentalism to annihilate us all; for a world in which dialogue across cultures and religions and regions (even within America) is essential if we are to survive. We need to win the argument in the developing world; we need to reach out and persuade the Muslim middle - especially the next generation in Iran and Iraq and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Western Europe - about the virtues of democracy and constitutionalism. We cannot do that if we trash our own values ourselves. It is self-defeating. We cannot be a beacon to the world until we have reformed ourselves. In this war, we are also fighting for an America that does not lose its soul in fighting our enemy. Just because we are fighting evil does not mean we cannot ourselves succumb to it. That is what my Christian faith teaches me - that no nation has a monopoly on virtue, and that every generation has to earn its own integrity. I fear and believe we have given away far too much - and that, while this loss is permanent, it can nonetheless be mitigated by a new start, a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.

It will not be easy. The world will soon remember why it resents America as well as loves it. But until this unlikely fellow with the funny ears and strange name and exotic biography emerged on the scene, I had begun to wonder if it was possible at all. I had almost given up hope, and he helped restore it. That is what is stirring out there; and although you are welcome to mock me for it, I remain unashamed. As someone once said, in the unlikely story of America, there is never anything false about hope. Obama, moreover, seems to bring out the best in people, and the calmest, and the sanest. He seems to me to have a blend of Midwestern good sense, an intuitive understanding of the developing world that is as much our future now as theirs', an analyst's mind and a poet's tongue. He is human. He is flawed. He will make mistakes. His passivity and ambiguity are sometimes weaknesses as well as strengths.

But there is something about his rise that is also supremely American, a reminder of why so many of us love this country so passionately and are filled with such grief at what has been done to it and in its name. I endorse Barack Obama because I will not give up on America, because I believe in America, and in her constitution and decency and character and strength.

And the world needs that America now as much as it ever has. Can we start that healing, that rebirth, tomorrow?

Yes. We. Can.

Thank You Andrew Sullivan for a Powerful Endorsement

Hopes and Fears

22 Things About the Election that I am both Excited and Scared About
4 Nov 2008 Author: rikyrah

From We Are Respectable Negroes

22 Things About the Election that I am both Excited and Scared About

1. I am excited that the American people may be more mature, wise, and reflective than I would have guessed them ever capable of being. I am scared that they may not be.

2. I am excited that Obama’s victory could be a cathartic moment for our country as America moves one step closer to confronting, and maybe if we are really lucky, of conquering the demons that plague its racial subconscious. I am afraid those demons may be semi-permanent fixtures in our politics and culture.

3. I am excited about Obama winning. I am scared that if he loses, what that defeat says about America, our future, and the prospects for a truly shared and democratic political culture.

4. I am excited that Barack could be what America hopes and dreams him to be. I am scared that if Obama is just a man, if he is not superhuman, if he is merely just a good president, that this won’t be good enough.

5. I am excited that these last few months have been witness to conversations about race, class, and gender (even if they were often “coded”) that hint at a need and want for a real conversation about this country’s future and what is/was an often ugly and shared history. I am scared that these first steps will be final steps and that our much needed national conversation won’t continue.

6. I am excited that White Americans are displaying a bit more responsibility, courage, and wisdom as citizens than I would have ever thought them capable. I am scared that I am about to be disappointed.

7. I am excited that we are at the cusp of a great moment in our history. I am scared that we are investing too much in that one moment.

8. I am excited that the house that race built may be teetering just a wee bit more than it did a year, a decade, or certainly a century ago. I am scared that it will never fall down.

9. I am excited that a Black person will be president. I am scared that he won’t be free to simply be mediocre.

10. I am excited that the president of the United States may happen to be a Black man. I am scared that many will view Obama as a Black man who is president.

11. I am excited that a centrist may occupy the White House. I am scared that the wolves are already waiting at the door to attack him for not being “radical” enough.

12. I am excited that the Right-wing in this country has been dealt a devastating blow. I am scared that the Right will somehow find a way to profit from this moment.

13. I am excited that we may see history happen tomorrow. I am scared that we may instead witness history tomorrow.

14. I am excited about the future, our undiscovered country. I am scared that the force of history, of inertia, and of bad habits–a moribund nostalgia–will keep America from stepping into the future.

15. I am excited about being blown forward by the winds of change tomorrow. I am scared that there are too many whom will instead decide to stand against the winds of change tomorrow.

16. I am excited that an unapologetically Black man may be president. I am scared that Obama, as “white” as he is, may still be too “Black” to be president.

17. I am excited that many of us seem ready to move forward as a society, as a country, and as a community in order to salvage and resuscitate America’s influence and image in the world. I am scared that so many are going to have to be dragged into the future.

18. I am excited that we may be able to scratch one more item off of our list of “Black Firsts.” I am scared that list of Black Firsts is still too long.

19. I am excited that America will make the correct choice tomorrow. I am scared that America will make the wrong choice tomorrow.

20. I am excited about a Post-Racial future. I am scared about what a Post-Racial future may hold.

21. I am excited about what an Obama victory means for the Black Freedom Struggle. I am a scared about what an Obama victory may mean for Black politics.

22. I am excited about what it means to be an American tomorrow. I am scared about what it means to be an American tomorrow…and for every day thereafter if America stands against history and decides to not move forward with it.

@@@@

What are your thoughts? What are you excited about? What are you scared about? How will you spend tomorrow?

www.jackandjillpolitics.com

Learning about Hope

My wife made me canvas for Obama; here's what I learned
This election is not about major policies. It's about hope.
By Jonathan Curley

from the November 3, 2008 edition
The Christian Science Monitor

Charlotte, N.C. - There has been a lot of speculation that Barack Obama might win the election due to his better "ground game" and superior campaign organization.

I had the chance to view that organization up close this month when I canvassed for him. I'm not sure I learned much about his chances, but I learned a lot about myself and about this election.

Let me make it clear: I'm pretty conservative. I grew up in the suburbs. I voted for George H.W. Bush twice, and his son once. I was disappointed when Bill Clinton won, and disappointed he couldn't run again.

I encouraged my son to join the military. I was proud of him in Afghanistan, and happy when he came home, and angry when he was recalled because of the invasion of Iraq. I'm white, 55, I live in the South and I'm definitely going to get a bigger tax bill if Obama wins.

I am the dreaded swing voter.

So you can imagine my surprise when my wife suggested we spend a Saturday morning canvassing for Obama. I have never canvassed for any candidate. But I did, of course, what most middle-aged married men do: what I was told.

At the Obama headquarters, we stood in a group to receive our instructions. I wasn't the oldest, but close, and the youngest was maybe in high school. I watched a campaign organizer match up a young black man who looked to be college age with a white guy about my age to canvas together. It should not have been a big thing, but the beauty of the image did not escape me.

Instead of walking the tree-lined streets near our home, my wife and I were instructed to canvass a housing project. A middle-aged white couple with clipboards could not look more out of place in this predominantly black neighborhood.

We knocked on doors and voices from behind carefully locked doors shouted, "Who is it?"

"We're from the Obama campaign," we'd answer. And just like that doors opened and folks with wide smiles came out on the porch to talk.

Grandmothers kept one hand on their grandchildren and made sure they had all the information they needed for their son or daughter to vote for the first time.

Young people came to the door rubbing sleep from their eyes to find out where they could vote early, to make sure their vote got counted.

We knocked on every door we could find and checked off every name on our list. We did our job, but Obama may not have been the one who got the most out of the day's work.

I learned in just those three hours that this election is not about what we think of as the "big things."

It's not about taxes. I'm pretty sure mine are going to go up no matter who is elected.

It's not about foreign policy. I think we'll figure out a way to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan no matter which party controls the White House, mostly because the people who live there don't want us there anymore.

I don't see either of the candidates as having all the answers.

I've learned that this election is about the heart of America. It's about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It's about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.

My wife and I went out last weekend to knock on more doors. But this time, not because it was her idea. I don't know what it's going to do for the Obama campaign, but it's doing a lot for me.

Jonathan Curley is a banker. He voted for George H.W. Bush twice and George W. Bush once.

M.C. Howie and Julie K Get Down and Get Out the Vote

Vote Barack!!!

One word: MORON

MONTREAL — A Quebec comedy duo notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state has reached Sarah Palin, convincing the Republican vice-presidential nominee she was speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. This woman is scarily naive and boneheaded.




Transcript from Daily Kos

UPDATED TRANSCRIPT OF ENTIRE INTERVIEW (63+ / 0-)

Recommended by:
moeman, AggieDemocrat, SarahLee, askew, Hudson, ebradlee10, JTML, dkistner, rlamoureux, elfling, Creosote, ksh01, rioduran, webweaver, BarbinMD, snakelass, fritzrth, gmhowell, sawgrass727, beagledad, darcarama, theberle, liveparadox, Caoimhin Laochdha, 5x5, Articulating Arm, eastmt, maxalb, cville townie, VelvetElvis, craigbear, condorcet, RickMassimo, kaolin, dewley notid, statsone, Calouste, Lavocat, velvet blasphemy, geodemographics, DHinIA, Rick in Oz, abraxas, Oregonian Optimist, The Jester, DrFitz, Dr Gonzo, CA Physics Grad, Irony Raygun, Xtatic, Dr Ferg, nampa45, DParker, Ann Hedonia, Mizclark, page394, BellaNJ, kostalNH, crando47, Donna O, angrykeyboarder, Trizza, johnQpub

Working from CatM's great transcript, I changed a few things, added in the French and explained the cultural references.

SP Assist: This is Betsy.
MA: Hello, Betsy. This is Frank l’ouvrier (Frank the worker], I’m with President Sarkozy, on the line for Governor Palin.

SP Assist: One second please, can you hold on one second please?
MA: No problem.

SP Assist: Hi, I’m going to hand the phone over to her.
MA: Okay thank you very much I’m going to put the president on the line.
SP Assist: Ok he’s coming to the line.

SP: This is Sarah.
MA: Okay, Governor Palin?

SP: Hellloooo...(long drawn out, like Well, hellooooo)
MA: Just hold on for President Sarkozy, one moment.
SP [To someone in the room]: Oh, it’s not him yet, I always do that. I’ll just have people hand it to me right when it’s them.

FNS: Yes, hello, Governor Palin? Yes, hello, Mrs. Governor?
SP: Hello this is Sarah., how are you?

FNS: Fine, and you, this is Nicolas Sarkozy speaking, how are you?
SP: Oh...so good, it’s so good to hear you. Thank you for calling us.

FNS: Oh, it’s a pleasure.
SP: Thank you sir, we have such great respect for you, John McCain and I, we love you and thank you for spending a few minutes to talk to me.

FNS: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American Advisor Johnny Hallyday (the most famous French singer, looks like and sings like Elvis), you know?
SP: Yes! Good!

FNS: Excellent! Are you confident?
SP: Very confident and we’re thankful that the polls are showing that the race is tightening and--

FNS: Well I know very well that the campaign can be exhausting. How do you feel right now my dear?
SP: Ah, I feel so good. I feel like we’re in a marathon and at the very end of the marathon, you get your second wind and you plow to the finish—

FNS: You see, I got elected in France because I’m real and you seem to be someone who’s real as well.
SP: Yes, yeah, Nicolas, we so appreciate this opportunity.

FNS: You know, I see you as a president, one day, you too.
SP: [Muahaaa...weird laugh], maybe in 8 years. Haha

FNS: Well, ah, I hope for you. You know we have a lot in common because personally one of my favorite activities is to hunt too.
SP: [Giggle]o h very good, we should go hunting together.

FNS: Exactly! We could go try hunting by helicopter, like you did, I never did that.
SP: [Giggle]

FNS: Like we say in France, "on pourrait tuer des bébés phoques aussi" [Translation: We could also kill some baby seals.]
SP: [Giggle] Well I think we could have a lot of fun together as we’re getting work done, we can kill two birds with one stone that way.

FNS: I just love killing those animals. Mm, mm. Take away a life, that is so fun!
SP: [Hahahaha]

FNS: I’d really love to go as long as we don’t bring your Vice president Cheney, hahaha.
SP: No, I’ll be a careful shot, yes.

FNS: You know we have a lot in common also except that from my ass I can see Belgium. That’s kind of less interesting than you.
SP: Well, see, we’re right next door to other countries that we all need to be working with, yes.

FNS: Some people said in the last days, and I thought that was mean, that you weren’t experienced enough in foreign relations, and you know, that’s completely false, that’s the thing I said to my great friend, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stef Carse [Stephen Harper is the PM and Stef Carse is a Quebecois country singer who covered Billy Ray Cyrus' Achy Breaky Heart in French in the 90s].
SP: Well, he’s doing fine, too, and yeah when you come into a position underestimated, it gives you the opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder-

FNS: I, I was wondering because you are also next to him, one of my good friends, also, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr. Richard Z. Sirois [a famous Quebec radio host], have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?
SP: Uh, haven’t seen him at one of the rallies, but it’s been great working with the Canadian officials in my role as governor; we have a great cooperative effort there as we work on all of our resource development projects. You know I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife, oh my goodness, you’ve added a lot of energy to your country, even, with that beautiful family of yours.

FNS: Thank you very much. You know my wife, Carla, would love to meet you. You know even though she was a bit jealous that I was supposed to speak to you today. [Hahahaha]
SP: [Hahahha] Well give her a big hug from me.

FNS: You know my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she’s so hot in bed. She even wrote a song for you.
SP: Oh my goodness! I didn’t know that.

FNS: Yes, in French, it’s called "Du rouge à lèvres sur une cochonne" [Translate: Lipstick for a sow literally (but not properly) but it actually means an uninhibited girl] or if you prefer in English Joe the Plumber, [sings] It’s his life, Joe the Plumber..."
SP: Maybe she understands some of the unfair criticism but I bet you she is such a hard worker, too, and she realizes you just plow through that criticism like

FNS: I just want to be sure, I don’t’ quite understand the phenomenon "Joe the Plumber," that’s not your husband, right?
SP: Mmhmm, that’s into my husband but he’s a normal American who just works hard and doesn’t want government to take his money.

FNS: Yes, yes, I understand, we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France, it’s called, "Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit, oui."
SP: Right. That’s what it’s all about, is the middle class, and government needing to work for them. You’re a very good example for us here.

FNS: I seen a bit about NBC even Fox News wasn’t an ally, an ally, sorry, about as much as usual.
SP: Yeah that’s what we’re up against.

FNS: I must say, Governor Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life, you know, Hustler’s "Nailin Palin."
SP: Oh, good, thank you. Yes.

FNS: That was really edgy.
SP: [Laughs] Well good.

FNS: I really love you. And I must say something, so, Governor, you’ve been pranked.
By the Master Avengers. We’re two comedians from Montreal
SP: Oohhh have we been pranked? And what radio station is this? [tries to force herself to sound nice but you can tell she’s pissed]

FNS: This is for CKOI in Montreal.
SP: In Montreal? Tell me the radio station call letters
[SP leaves phone, continuous griping in background, sounds like, "For chrissakes...that was ??? Just a radio station prank...chrissakes..."]

MA: Hello? If one voice can change the world for Obama, one Viagra can change the world for McCain.
[Man’s voice in background: hang up, hang up.]
SP Assist: Hi, I’m sorry, I have to let you go. Um, thank you.

by montsegur1234 on Sat Nov 01, 2008 at 03:43:03 PM PDT

How Low Does the Base (do the base?) go?

A man brought a stuffed monkey doll wearing an Obama sticker to a Palin campaign event in Johnstown, Ohio. Realizing he was caught on camera, he passed it off to a child he didn't know.

FOR SHAME.

Morgan sings a song about everyone's favourite Vice Presidential Candidate.

Another Hey Sarah Palin

Another remake of the Venga Productions version of Hey Sarah Palin by TheRealDCarb

A Tuneful and Well Produced Hey Sarah Palin

Matt Geiler sings a parody of The Plain White T's hit "Hey There Delilah." Lyrics by John Cates. Video by Jeff Vanroy.

Great Lyrics and hilarious video.

"Hey Sarah Palin" parodies of Hey Delilah abound!

jessicamoose offers another Hey Sarah Palin song.


Hey Sarah Palin,
Oh, your makeup looks so pretty
Whats it like being the mayor of
A tiny little city?
Governer, too?
Wanna do mascara just like you
I swear its true.

Hey Sarah Palin,
Dont you worry about the distance
You hunt wolves and eat moose burgers
So just aim at the resistance,
Shoot em down
You deserved the Miss Alaska crown
So dont you frown.

Oh, for the presidency
Lets forget old John Mc C
McCain dont mean a thing to me
Its all about my girl SP
For our next VP

Hey Sarah Palin,
You just keep keeping it real
Let the others take their limousines,
You have a snowmobile
So let them hate
Alaska is the biggest state
I think its great.

Hey Sarah Palin,
Cant vote cause Im underage
But I hear that getting pregnant
When youre seventeens the rage
Ill try it out
Thats what abstinence is all about
I have no doubt.

Oh, for the presidency
Shes too good for just VP
She should win because shes a lady
Everyones a sexist SOB

A thousand miles seems pretty far,
But Wasilla, Alaskas where you are,
Even though we havent ever heard of it.
And nine thousand peoples not a lot,
But youll get the vote because youre hot
cause we dont need experience, not a bit.
Sarah Palin, I can say its true:
That if vice president goes to you,
The world will never ever be the same
And youre to blame

Hey Sarah Palin,
Im not being pessimistic
But according to your VP speech,
Youre just a dog with lipstick
By the way,
You look a lot like Tina Fey
And its just like you used to say:
What does VP do anyway?
What can I say?

Oh, for the presidency
You can have my liberty
Oh, no, choice is not for me
Oh, Ill keep my rape baby
Thank you, Sarah, P.


Lyrics by Jessica and Karissa Tom.
Guitar credit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVEPkf...

More From: jessicamoose

McFlipflop on Obama's Tax Policy

One more instance of what a hypocritical motherfucker this guy really is. Okay, maybe it's the onset of dementia and the old coot can't remember that his stance in 2000 was an awful lot like Obama's is now. But never mind the truth. When Sarah the Impaler started spewing her filthy lies in rallies, inspiring white trash boners that McViagra can only fantasize about inspiring with his meandering platitudes and reminders of his maverickiness, I guess ambition overrode the last shred of judgment the geezer had left in him.

Spread the word. We have 6 days to go.

Final Tina Fey Skit as Palin on SNL

The VP Debate moderated by the fabulous Queen Latifah

Maybe Kathleen Parker was right about Why McCain Chose Sarah

Something About Sarah
By Kathleen Parker
Friday, October 24, 2008; Page A19

My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant 75-year-old scholar and raconteur confessed to me over wine: "I'm sexually attracted to her. I don't care that she knows nothing."

Finally, writer Robert Draper closed the file on the Sarah Palin mystery with a devastating article in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain."

McCain didn't know her. He didn't vet her. His campaign team had barely an impression. In a bar one night, Draper asked one of McCain's senior advisers: "Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?"

The adviser thought a moment and replied: "No, I don't know."

Read the whole article on the Washington Post.

Buns of Leadership

Do I seem obsessed? Well, golly gee darnit (wink wink), the fate of the American nation, nay, the fate of the world, hangs on the outcome of this election, and yet the will of the people may well be subverted by the well-oiled machine of disenfranchisement and stolen elections--the Repugnican Party and it's henchmen. But scarier still is what the bizarre popularity of Sarah Palin among certain circles says about us (or those of us, at least, who are so stoked about her). Sometimes we get what we ask for...and there are some among us, who want (bad) those meatloafy Buns o' Leadership!

Greatest Hits of Sarah Palin brought to you by BarelyPolitical.com

The Sarah Palin Rap: Club a Baby Seal ...

More much needed levity as Heather Anne Campbell raps as Governor Sarah Palin about her qualifications for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America

Adorable Anti-Palin Song (with subtitle lyrics)

Check out this goofy song about Sarah Palin's woeful inadequacy to be VP or hold any public office for that matter. Hey Sarah Palin



MC Howie goes political with Julie K in this oh-my-god-how-hilarious song, to the tune of "Hey There Delilah".

Hey Sarah Palin, do you tell them in Wasilla
That 4,000 years ago we roamed the planet with Godzilla
Is it true
I am so fucking scared of you
As number 2

Hey Sarah Palin, I think Alaska's very pretty
But just 100,000 people more than Oklahoma City
Yes it's true
Go look it up, Im telling you
Oh man, were through

Chorus
Oh, if you become VP, oh, its Canada for me (2x)
Its Canada for me

Hey Sarah Palin, did you really once inquire
Whether you could throw library books into a big bonfire
God, my eyes
This really might be our demise
This pack of lies

Hey Sarah Palin, just because you're good at shootin
Doesn't mean you have the ammo to negotiate with Putin
Are you on coke
This fucking countrys up in smoke
Oh what a joke

Chorus
Oh, if you become VP, oh what will it mean for me (2x)

Bridge
Just because I can see the moon
Doesn't make me an astronaut, you loon
Your foreign policy expertise is pooh
Do you really think a woman commits
To a candidate just because she has tits
Please tell me that this ticket is not true
I thought that there could be no worse
Than Cheney, but here you are, I curse
The madman who would cast a vote for you
And McCain too

Hey Sarah Palin, is it media distortion
Or would you tell a girl who's raped that she could not have an abortion
Its a new low
Who knows just how far you would go
Id rather vote for Ross Perot
Hey Sarah Palin I dont know
Where can we go

Chorus
Category: Comedy
Tags:
political parody spoof hey there delilah plain white t's sarah palin john mccain campaign vice president barack obama liberal democrat skit sketch

Joe the Plumber--An Unvetted Example of McFlailin's bad judgment or a Repugnican Plant?

Apparently, average Joe-the-plumber needed to be vetted before being brandished as the Repugnicans' latest icon. Class warefare, indeed! If he had any, it would be a nice start. But the incessant lying and intentional misrepresentations are certainly a genuine affinity with the McDementia and Brownshirt Barbie campaign, even if Joe's inability to grasp that he would actually benefit under Obama's tax plan and NOT under McFlailin's is a class example of the "false consciousness"that's made so many under-educated Americans vote Right when their material interests are so clearly aligned with the platform of the Left.

Stop Ridiculous Smears Against ACORN-- Get the Facts

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is the nation's largest community organization of low and moderate income families working together for social justice and stronger communities. The fact that they self-reported some phony registrations by Mickey Mouse and the Dallas Cowboys et al, is now being absurdly portrayed as an intentional fraud designed to steal the election and undermine the fabric of democracy. No mind that, um, nobody's going to actually LET Mickey Mouse vote, should he so brazenly come to the polls, and that there is a huge distinction between voter REGISTRATION and actually VOTING.

Meanwhile, this bullshit subterfuge is being used to preempt McCain's refusal to accept (Dubya-supreme-court-string-pullin'-style) is impending defeat once it happens, and to divert attention from ACTUAL election fraud being actively and vigorously perpetrated by the Repugnicans, AGAIN, just as they did with great success in 2000 and 2004.

"ACORN recently worked to stop Republican voter suppression tactics in New Mexico and Michigan.

ACORN debunked New Mexico Republican Party claim that fraudulent voters - some of whom registered with ACORN - participated in the June 2008 Democratic primary. ACORN contacted the voters the Republican party mentioned during a press conference and confirmed their legitimacy through the Bernalillo County Clerk. All are first-time voters - three 18 and 19-year-olds and a new citizen. ACORN presented its findings at a press conference Oct. 18 in New Mexico. "This is un-American," said Celestina Balderas, an ACORN leader. READ ON and get the facts about ACORN--and the latest bullshit smear tactic by McPalin and double check that the Repugnicans haven't purged your voter registration based on a technicality...it's happening all over.

Bravo to Chris Buckley

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

by Christopher Buckley

"The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:[THESE ARE GOOD SO PLEASE READ ON....]

Read the whole article here on www.thedailybeast.com

Sarah Palin as Brown-Shirt Betty Boop?

Andrew Sullivan on "Palin vs Feminism"

One day, Camille Paglia will, I think, be embarrassed by this. What I think has happened to some otherwise very brilliant and perceptive people is that they have become so hostile to "liberal pundits" or "Hollywood liberals", that their reactions are really reactions not to Palin herself but to those criticizing her and the selection of her. These people are anti-anti-Palin and if forced to be pro-Palin, they'd have a very hard time explaining it. Actually, Camille is pro-Obama, so she doesn't have to go that far. But just because liberals are annoying and Hollywood liberals make you want to vomit doesn't mean Palin is qualified to be vice-president. Look: Tim Robbins is about the only person who could make me support McCain. But I'm not stupid enough to let my loathing of idiotic Hollywood liberals affect my judgment of this farce of a veep candidate.

I don't think Palin is dumb; she is just proudly ignorant, a cynical opportunist and a pathological liar. "

Read the whole article on The Atlantic

I agree with Andrew. Camille Paglia is not stupid. She is an intelligent, well-read woman with a bizarre set of fetishes and an over valourized sense of herself as this 'kid-gloves off', 'no-holds barred' sort of iconoclastic 'feminist' who can take the 'man's world' by the balls with pride. Unfortunately, her rebellion if often at the expense of ... Read Moreintellectual consistency and the rebel feminist image she tries so desperately to create for herself is almost as full of bullshit as Sarah Palin herself, the only difference is that Ms. Paglia is far more intelligent, even if deeply confused.

How Low Will McFlailin' Stoop

The (So-Called) Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

By FRANK RICH
Published: October 11, 2008
The New York Times

"IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.
Many of us who had looked to John McCain to restore some semblance of sensible conservatism to the Republican Party have been dismayed and disappointed...

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes."

Please read the whole article here www.nytimes.com

Fighting Back Against the "Separate But (not really) Equal" Battle of Our Time: Gay Marriage Rights

Gay Marriage Is Ruled Legal in Connecticut

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: October 10, 2008

"A sharply divided Connecticut Supreme Court struck down the state’s civil union law on Friday and ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Connecticut thus joins Massachusetts and California as the only states to have legalized gay marriages.

The ruling, which cannot be appealed and is to take effect on Oct. 28, held that a state law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, and a civil union law intended to provide all the rights and privileges of marriage to same-sex couples, violated the constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law.

Striking at the heart of discriminatory traditions in America, the court — in language that often rose above the legal landscape into realms of social justice for a new century — recalled that laws in the not-so-distant past barred interracial marriages, excluded women from occupations and official duties, and relegated blacks to separate but supposedly equal public facilities."

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE:New York Times

Meretricious Maverick

Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

By TIM DICKINSON

"At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

McCAIN FIRST

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush bothttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifh represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot."

READ THIS RIVETING ARTICLE IN FULL AT Rolling Stone

The Poetry of Sarah Palin

The Poetry of Sarah Palin

Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 11:35am
The Poetry of Sarah Palin

Recent works by the Republican vice presidential candidate.
By Hart Seely [Slate]
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 1:25 PM ET

It's been barely six weeks since the arctic-fresh voice of Alaskan
poet Sarah Heath Palin burst upon the lower 48. In campaign
interviews, the governor, mother, and maverick GOP vice presidential
candidate has chosen to bypass the media filter and speak directly to
fans through her intensely personal verses, spoken poems that drill
into the vagaries of modern life as if they were oil deposits ben!
eath a government-protected tundra.

Thursday's nationally televised debate with Democrat Joe Biden could
give Palin the chance to cement her reputation as one of the country's
most innovative practitioners of what she calls "verbiage."

The poems collected here were compiled verbatim from only three brief
interviews. So just imagine the work Sarah Palin could produce over
the next four (or eight) years.

"On Good and Evil"

It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.

That's not a good guy.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)



"You Can't Blink"

You can't blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we're on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can't blink.

So I didn't blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)


"Haiku"

These corporations.
Today it was AIG,
Important call, there.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)


"Befoulers of the Verbiage"

It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)


"Secret Conversation"

I asked President Karzai:

"Is that what you are seeking, also?
"That strategy that has worked in Iraq?
"That John McCain had pushed for?
"More troops?
"A counterinsurgency strategy?"

And he said, "Yes."

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)


"Outside"

I am a Washington outsider.
I mean,
Look at where you are.
I'm a Washington outsider.

I do not have those allegiances
To the power brokers,
To the lobbyists.
We need someone like that.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)


"On the Bailout"

Ultimately,
What the bailout does
Is help those who are concerned
About the health care reform
That is needed
To help shore up our economy,
Helping the—
It's got to be all about job creation, too.

Shoring up our economy
And putting it back on the right track.
So health care reform
And reducing taxes
And reining in spending
Has got to accompany tax reductions
And tax relief for Americans.
And trade.

We've got to see trade
As opportunity
Not as a competitive, scary thing.
But one in five jobs
Being created in the trade sector today,
We've got to look at that
As more opportunity.
All those things.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)



"Challenge to a Cynic"

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)



"On Reporters"

It's funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don't know,
You know ...

Reporters.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)



"Small Mayors"

You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns—
Quote, unquote—
They're on the front lines.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 19, 2008)


Hart Seely is the author of Mrs. Goose Goes to Washington: Nursery
Rhymes for the Political Barnyard.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201342/

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Palin Is Ready? Please.

Palin Is Ready? Please.

by Fareed Zakaria

"McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, that is simply not true."
Published Sep 27, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008

Tasty tidbits of damnation from Zakaria:

"Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony? Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that wonderful phrase in American politics, "to spend more time with her family"? Having stayed in purdah for weeks, she finally agreed to a third interview. CBS's Katie Couric questioned her in her trademark sympathetic style. It didn't help. When asked how living in the state closest to Russia gave her foreign-policy experience, Palin responded thus:

"It's very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America. Where—where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to—to our state."

There is, of course, the sheer absurdity of the premise. Two weeks ago I flew to Tokyo, crossing over the North Pole. Does that make me an expert on Santa Claus? (Thanks, Jon Stewart.) But even beyond that, read the rest of her response. "It is from Alaska that we send out those …" What does this mean? This is not an isolated example. Palin has been given a set of talking points by campaign advisers, simple ideological mantras that she repeats and repeats as long as she can. ("We mustn't blink.") But if forced off those rehearsed lines, what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish."

SNIP

He makes short work of calling her incoherent ramblings about the bailout what they were--"nonsense—a vapid emptying out of every catchphrase about economics that came into her head. Some commentators, like CNN's Campbell Brown, have argued that it's sexist to keep Sarah Palin under wraps, as if she were a delicate flower who might wilt under the bright lights of the modern media. But the more Palin talks, the more we see that it may not be sexism but common sense that's causing the McCain campaign to treat her like a time bomb.

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president."

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE at Newsweek

Palin is a Problem: Thinking Conservatives as Conscientious Objectors

When even right wing commentators are begging Sarah Palin to bow out, we must admit the depth of the disaster that her inauguration into national public office would represent. Bravo to thinking people from across the political spectrum. And shame on the kneejerk love-it-or-leave-it reactionaries who have been slamming her for speaking the truth.

Palin Problem
She’s out of her league.

By Kathleen Parker
September 26, 2008 12:00 AM

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin.

To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.

Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)

And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).

Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Read the article in Full in the The National Review

Watch Palin Impale herself in interviews with Katie Couric

Chilling...

Katie Couric Interview with Sarah Palin 1
Katie Couric Interview with Sarah Palin 2

Palin on the Bush Doctrine and other Lacunae

Familiar fodder for fear by now, but for anyone in doubt of Caribou Barbie's ignorance about foreign policy and inability to think on her feet, read or watch Charlie Gibson's interview. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise thinking of her with the "Nuculer" codes. *shiver*


Please read this interview in full or watch it on youtube. It is imperative that this incompetent, meretricious subgamma moron pit bull with lipstick is kept out of national office. The world would be in grave danger should that happen. Now please register to vote if you are an American and have not yet. And don't forget to "blink!


EXCERPTS: Charlie Gibson Interviews Sarah Palin
Republican VP Candidate Speaks with ABC News' Charlie Gibson in Exclusive Interview

Sarah Palin on 'the Bush Doctrine':

GIBSON: We talk on the anniversary of 9/11. Why do you think those hijackers attacked? Why did they want to hurt us?

PALIN: You know, there is a very small percentage of Islamic believers who are extreme and they are violent and they do not believe in American ideals, and they attacked us and now we are at a point here seven years later, on the anniversary, in this post-9/11 world, where we're able to commit to never again. They see that the only option for them is to become a suicide bomber, to get caught up in this evil, in this terror. They need to be provided the hope that all Americans have instilled in us, because we're a democratic, we are a free, and we are a free-thinking society.

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

read the whole interview here

McCain Rape Joke Defended as "Authentic McCain just being himself"

McCain's rape joke,
caught on film, is defended by his campaign as an instance of his "mavericky" personality and him just "being McCain."

Niiiiiiice.

McCain's version of "Lipstick on a Pig" in reference to Hillary (prior to Obama's use of the term)

Better late than never. The beginning of a few telling posts about our current state of disunion and the disastrous McFlailin' campaign.

Take a peek a Hypocrisy Central in action. Or maybe it's just the onset of Dementia Pugilistica and the poor old man doesn't remember what he said just a few months ago.

McCain using the common expression "lipstick on a pig"...long before Obama did.

DFW's Kenyon Commencement Address

So worth reading, I had to copy it in full here.

Transcription of David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (copied from www.marginalia.org)

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Infinite Sadness for DWF

It's taken me this long to collect myself--scratch that, I haven't really been able to collect myself after reading almost a week ago about David Foster Wallace's sudden exit. I've been reading the obits and the articles, most of which seemed so tongue-in-cheek badly written as to further highlight the rarity of the talent that just left us--even DFW's Kenyon's Commencement Speech. This evening, I found Laura Miller's tribute on Salon, (as well as a 1996 interview with the author that is telling in so many ways) and an outpouring of letters and responses to his death by readers, writers, colleagues, students and friends (as well as a disgusting spate of venomous, tasteless trollery by a few pithed vultures here and there). Miller's piece resonated with me on so many levels. She found a way to be eloquent at a moment where I have felt too rattled and grieved to articulate myself. Porochista Khakpour's posting on the Remembering David Foster Wallace column at www.edrants.com also touched the nerve-center of grief that so many of us are feeling right now. Suicide and terminal depression are nothing new, and yet the way in which they claimed DFW, in spite of all his attempts to live in the world and to love it as best he could, still managed to blindside me. I think of Kurt Cobain, of Nietzsche (who might well have taken a similar way out had he not been institutionalized during the final years of his life), and I think, especially of Anne Sexton. Our loss of DFW, although I never knew him (though like many, I feel as if I surely must have known him nevertheless), is beyond words for me tonight. And so instead I leave for him a poem by Anne Sexton, although it comes too late to save him, just as it failed, ultimately, to save her, for even if words cannot save us from ourselves, they are all we have with which to make meaning out of the meaninglessness and to make life/our lives out of mere/sheer existence.


Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!

Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.

Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.

Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.

Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.

O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

Multiple Realities 多重现实

Multiple Realities 多重现实
"Multiple Realities" examines the rhizomatically recursive and polyvalent nature of the world in which we live, through the multidisciplinary art practices of 11 contemporary artists, using oil painting, video, mixed media installation, sculpture, experimental ink wash, and light box photography installation to investigate the multiplicity at the core of the human condition. The concept of "multiple realities" speaks to rhizomatic processes of juxtaposition and paradox, duality and inversion, mimesis and recursion, which animate the artistic languages and conceptual investigations of these artists' works. Works include Xia Jing's caged, decapitated, behemoth Buddha—that icon of transcendence and harmony with nature—cast in compressed coal—the quintessential symbol of humanity's short-sighted, destructive dependence on the ongoing exploitation of nature; Tao Aimin's stunning ink wash installation made from "rubbings" of the labor-worn wooden washboards of rural women, whose ceaseless mundane, manual labor marks the passage of their lives; Michael Zheng's recursive hole in the wall that isn't quite what it seems; Feng Shu's stylized, elegant ceramic and metal insects who may outlast us all; Zheng Lu's bombs made from vermilion "double happiness" characters, typically used to symbolize newlywed bliss; Sun Huiyuan's inverted AK47s that asked the spectator to gaze down the bullet side of the barrel of the gun and confront the violence of the human condition; Zhou Xiaohu's interpenetrating realities in his dual channel video work, "Conspiracy;" Sun Xun's sophisticated animation videos that project apocalyptic take-overs and possible futures for humanity; Weng Yunpeng's conceptual paintings that juxtapose the local and the global; Li Qing's painting and photography mixed media work, "Monument" from his Collision series, in which we consider the shifting meanings of national monuments and the complex histories they symbolize in reference to one another; and Han Bing's ethereal inverted images of glamorous high-rises next to shantytowns and construction sites captured in the reflections of Beijing's ubiquitous, pollution-infested, garbage-clogged "stinky rivers," that capture China's fantasy of modernization—both "the detritus and the dream"—in a single image.

Exhibition: Multiple Realities 多重现实
Opening: August 10th, 2008, from 3-6 pm.
Exhibition Dates: August 10, 2008-Sept 20
Curator: Maya Kóvskaya
Participating Artists: Feng Shu, Han Bing, Li Qing, Sun Huiyuan, Sun Xun, Tao Aimin, Weng Yunpeng, Xia Jing, Michael Zheng, Zheng Lu, Zhou Xiaohu
Host Gallery: F2Gallery

Curator Bio:
Maya Kóvskaya is a Beijing-based writer, art critic and curator with over a decade of experience living in China. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including, most recently, China Under Construction II at the 2008 Fotofest 12th International Photography Biennial (USA, 2008), worked with the Asia Triennial Manchester ATM08 (curatorial coordinator for the project at The International 3, UK, 2008); curated China Under Construction I, at the Deborah Colton Gallery (USA, 2007); Age of Big Construction (PRC, 2007); The Fatalistic Language of Things (USA, 2007); On the Stage of Modernization (USA, 2007); The Fragmented Gaze: Video Art from the People's Republic (USA, 2007); Love in the Age of Big Construction (PRC and USA, 2006); Quotidian Iconic (curatorial coordinator, PRC, 2006); The Other Shore of Desire (USA, 2006) Estrangements and Engagements: Contemporary Chinese Video Art (Canada, 2006), Misalignments: Chinese Performance and Video Art Documenta (USA, 2006), Other Modernities (USA, 2006), and others. Upcoming exhibitions include, China on the Road (Brussels, 02.2009), and Action—Camera! Beijing Performance Photography at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, as curatorial coordinator (Canada, 2009). Her writing has appeared in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Catalan and Spanish in numerous art catalogues, academic volumes, and magazines, such as Flash Art, Contemporary, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art Post, Art iT, Art Map, Art Manager, Eyemazing: International Contemporary Photography Magazine, and positions: east asia cultures critique. Her book on Chinese contemporary art, China Under Construction: Contemporary Art from the People's Republic (2007) is available in bookstores worldwide.

F2 Gallery
Nº 319, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100015, CHINA
Tel.: +86 10 64328831
Fax.: +86 10 6432 8203
Email: art@f2gallery.com
www.f2gallery.com
Open Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm. Monday by appointment only.

Check out the F2 Gallery website for more details F2 Gallery



展览：多重现实 Multiple Realities
开幕时间：2008年8月10日，下午三时至六时
展期：2008年8月10日至9月20日
策展人：迈涯（Maya Kóvskaya）
参展艺术家：冯澍、韩冰、李青、孙慧源、孙逊、陶艾民、翁云鹏、夏静、 `郑济忠、郑路、周啸虎
主办：F2画廊

多重现实
由批评家迈涯（Maya Kóvskaya）策划的“多重现实”展透过十一位当代艺术家的跨界艺术实践，采用录像、混合媒体装置、雕塑 油画、实验水墨画以及灯箱摄影装置等手法，探寻处于人类生存状态核心的多样性，进而审视了我们生活的这个世界多样化的本质。多重现实的概念，表达的是并置和矛盾、二元性和倒置、模拟和递归的过程，生动地反映了这些艺术家作品中的艺术语言和观念上的探索。参展作品从夏静创作的浇筑在紧压的煤炭当中被斩下头颅的巨佛象，到陶艾民令人称奇的农村妇女用旧的木搓板水墨拓片——这些农村妇女的平凡以及双手的劳作代表了他们一生的道路；从郑济忠在墙上开出的并非看上去的孔洞，到冯澍样式统一精致优雅的陶瓷不锈钢昆虫；从郑路利用婚庆场合用来象征对新人的祝福的红色“双喜”字样制成的炸弹，到孙慧源那支颠倒过 的AK47——要求观众凝视枪口里面人类冲突的影像；从周啸虎呈现互相穿插的现实场景的双屏录影装置“同谋”，到孙逊预示人类未来有可能出现的场景和统治者的复杂生动的影像；从翁云鹏将本地场景与全球场景并置的概念性绘画作品，到李青“冲撞”系列作品中的“纪念碑”——这幅作品是由李青的油画及其照片所组成的混合媒介作品，观众从中可以感受到两座纪念碑意义甚至他们各自所象征的历史意义之间的相互转化， 到韩冰拍摄的陋屋和正在建设中的摩天大楼在充满污染和垃圾的“臭水河”里倒转的影像， 借用一次成像来捕捉中国的现代化之路—“沉渣与梦想”交相辉映的多重现实。

F2画廊
北京市朝阳区草场地319号，邮编100015
电话：＋86 10 64328831
传真：＋86 10 64328203
电子邮箱：art@f2gallery.com
www.f2gallery.com
开放时间：周二至周日，早上10点－下午6点，周一需预约。


策展人小传：
迈涯 (Maya Kóvskaya)— 作家、学者、批评家和策展人，生活和工作于北京。曾策划的展览包括2008年第12届休斯顿国际摄影双年展的《正在建设中 2》（2008年，美国）、08曼彻斯特亚洲三年展（协助策划， 2008，英国）、 《 正在建设中 1》休斯顿艺术节（2007年，美国）、《宿命的物语》（2007年，美国）、《在现代化的舞台上》（2007年，美国）、《目光的碎片：来自中国的录像艺术》（2007年，美国）、《爱在大工地时代》（2006年，中国和美国）、《日常圣像》（协助策划，2006年，中国）、《欲望的彼岸》（2006年，美国）、《接触与疏远：中国当代影像》（2006年，加拿大）、《脱轨：中国行为和录像艺术个案展》（2006年，美国）、《另一种现代性》（2006年，美国）以及其它展览。即将举办的展览包括《多重现实》（2008年8月，中国）、 《中国在路上》（2009年2月，布鲁塞尔）、 以及 《行为—摄影！》（协助策划，加拿大，2009 年1月）。她的艺术评论在多种艺术杂志、学术期刊上以英文、中文、日文、法文和西班牙文发表，如《典藏艺术国际版》、《日本艺术Art iT》、《Eyemazing：国际当代摄影杂志》、《Flash Art》、《当代》、《Art Post》、《艺术地图》、《艺术经纪人》、以及《positions：东亚文化评论》等。其专论中国当代艺术的著作《正在建设中：中国的当代艺术》（2007年版）在全球销售。

"Why can’t men write anymore? " Is that right?

"Why can’t men write anymore?" Choire Sicha asks in "Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?"

She goes on to list a few male writers who have recently enjoyed a modicum of literary limelight: "From Dave Eggers to Jonathan Safran Foer to Dana Vachon to Joshua Ferris to Jeff Hobbs to Charles Bock to Mr. Gessen, JT Leroy outdid them all. And he was a lady. And a bona fide nutjob."

SNIP

Okay, well, admittedly, none of these guys are on my "desert island survival book list," however, in all fairness, they're hardly the worst writers around either (and some, such as Jonathan Safran Foer--at least in Everything is Illuminated (I haven't read his new book)--are arguably talented. I have a friend with excellent taste is literature who loved Egger's first book, and another who liked Ferris.

Moreover, given all the floating turds fouling the publishing pool (written by people of all shapes, sizes, colors, genders,literary predilections and political affiliations), it seems odd to single out a couple guys to skewer as bad "male" writers.

Finally, um, excuse me, but Papa Hemingway? Puhleeze. I don't care if he's part of the canon, since when did his particular brand of anorexic prose become THE standard by which the decline of (virile, male) literary civilization should be measured? He sure as hell ain't my papa.

Don't get me wrong--I actually loathe one of the writers on the list above. I find his work shallow, pretentious, and altogether too desperate to appear clever and ironic at all costs (cuz, like, if we like actually acknowledged we gave a shit about anything the world might come to an end, or, our hipsterific, pseudo-jaded, scare-quote-mongering personae might, like, turn out to be ordinary dorks who are just too scared, or lazy, or selfish, or banal and unthinking for such profoundly uncool stances as earnestness, engagement and (gasp!) reverence}.

BUT. I don't really think it's really a gender thing. And he's not even a terrible writer. I just don't like his attitude.

Sure, part of me likes the idea of turning the tables and hyphenating the once hegemonic, hence default, gender. I never liked phrases like "woman writer," and wondered why no one ever says "male writer," but now, reading this, although I wish I could cheer the impetus behind the piece, actually, I just can't. The inversion of the old "standard" just turns the wrong-headed equation on its head, reinscribing it, instead of getting past it.

Sicha's article has its moments, to be sure: "The American desire for fucking has become, locally, the Brooklyn-based or -bound desire for a book deal and a brownstone. Men, finding that they cannot really get status or security from the ownership of women very often, find their very selves disparaged. Like most of us, they get their status first from consumption, and the way out is to become a maker of consumables; a high-class published author. And they are bewildered, I think, because their bewilderment shows in books that try to understand class and economic conditions even as they are being happily further ensnared by them. Their books read as if this were the first time they’d ever thought of all this."

This is funny, with some insight, perhaps, but surely there are better and easier ways into a Brooklyn brownstone than literary fiction? And if it is consumables you're after, opening a hip restaurant or hangout is a better bet at financial security, and if it's trendy enough, a better chance to schmooze the glitterati.

Moreover, I find the empirical rigor of the article wilting at sight of counter-evidence to the claim that men's writing has begun to suck-ofy. Salman Rushdie (even IF his prose is not quite the luxuriant tour de force of days gone by when he really took the time to write his books, as in his brilliant The Moor's Last Sigh, Midnight's Children, and others, but he can still write the pants off most of his peers even on a lazy day)? Check! David Foster Wallace? Check! Jeffrey Eugenides? Check! Norman Rush? Check! Will Self? Check! James Salter? Check! Jonathan Franzen? Check! Aleksander Hemon? Check (and he only recently started writing in English!).

I could keep going on, but really, what's the point? I'm sure you've got a spate of your own examples of excellent (male-written) literary fiction. And of course we could all also make a list of equally powerful women writers, but...like I said. That's not really necessary, is it? There are so many of them out there (Jhumpa Lahiri, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Monica Ali, Doris Lessing, A.L. Kennedy, ZZ Packer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Porochista Khakpour, etcetera--in addition to ones named by Sicha) now that we no longer have to worry about balancing chips on our shoulders (except maybe when good writers are demeaned by silly fixations on their head shots, or treated as if their writing is somehow lesser because they don't look like hags). Yet in spite of the fact that there's good work out there, there's always a lot more that's just awful.

But so what? Mediocrity is the norm; excellence, the exception. Every era has its doomsday sayers, calling out that the apocalypse is nigh (this holds in every artistic medium and milieu) and bemoaning the sucky state of works that have managed to squeak past the Quality Police. Every one of us has moments of frustration reading some poorly concocted cocktail 'o caca that's received unwarranted praise. I've been there. I can relate.

My friend Cindy (an outstanding literary translator, guitar noodler, abandoned cat adopter and wearer of many hats) and I recently indulged ourselves in a (rather uncharitable) frenzy of picking to bits one of the worst (most pretentious, presumptuous, poorly researched) lit fic novels to invoke China in recent years. The flaws, far too many to list, included totally fake, unbelievable dialogue--so culturally off that it seemed ludicrous to see it being attributed to a Chinese artist--and the botched historical and cultural details--right down to an invented description of a piece of performance art that could never in a million years have been executed in Beijing during the period in question, not merely because it was stupid and lame and not the sort of thing those artists were doing, but because the hardware required for the performance (electric heaters) would have blown the fuses on the little ramshackle flats where those artists' lived and made their works.

I know. I lived in one of those places. In fact, I lived in the place the story was supposed to have taken place. Fall and Winter of 1996 through the Summer of 1997 (the story there is set in 1993-94). I know because I almost froze to death because the little electric heater I bought (the lowest wattage, I might add) blew out the power in the entire communal courtyard every time I turned it on. This wasn't just where I lived, but all the pingfang across the city (probably across China). The power grid in such places couldn't handle that sort of thing. But of course, someone who came to China for a couple weeks to research a novel, for which she already had a handsome, possibly unwarranted, advance, wouldn't know something like this. And this is just one of myriad little details that she gets completely wrong.

I'm not saying a novel has to be historically and ethnographically pitch perfect, just like I'm not going to say I hated the movie version of Memoirs of Geisha just because Chinese actresses were used to play Japanese roles--it's not about ethnically privileged access to authenticity--white people can rap, Italians can play Greeks and and Greeks can play Mexicans, and able-bodied people can play disabled people, and gay people can play straight people--and anyone can write about anything.

JUST DO THE HOMEWORK AND GET IT RIGHT. That's all I ask.

Or if you're going to get it wrong, it had better be part of the point of the story. Like my friend Guo Xiaolu's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, where the protagonist gets a lot of things wrong because she's new to the language and the culture...but that's the POINT OF THE STORY.

In this other novel, the one Cindy and I ranted about, flabbergasted by positive reviews, I don't think the author was trying to get the details wrong. She made a research visit or two. She even talked (via a sort of a translator who isn't really fluent but at least lives here) to one of the people involved in the history on which the book is based. And what's more, she even read a couple books about the scene, one of them quite decent. However, trying hard is not enough. I'm not saying only write what you know--but at least have the humility to know what you DON'T know and make the effort to find out, not just a couple facts (which she still got mixed up, or wrong, or took out of context), but the about the context, without which those pathetic few "facts" are discombobulated and bleached of significance.

So, yes, I totally understand the urge to trash that comes to all of us now and then. But notice. I didn't name the author. If you're really in the know about the scene in question AND you've read the book, you MIGHT be able to guess, but I'm not going out of my way to hurt someone who surely tried to do a good job. Moreover, it's hard enough to really accomplish something, let alone do it well. Surely it is more valuable to laud excellence than to eviscerate mediocrity. Give it a strong defense, not an empty panegyric. Take a stand on what's good and right in this world of little, situated truths and applaud those who've managed to do something well.

It's easy to catch a whiff of blood and go into feeding frenzy mode, but really, at the end of the day, that's a useless waste of energy. I've been there, done that, so I'm hardly holier than thou. I went to grad school after all. But after that first year of scornful trouncing and contemptuous tearing down everything in my path, I had to turn to the real work of creating, and discovered that creating something is much harder than destroying. Oh Nietzsche, poor dear Nietzsche (so maligned as the patron saint of the sophomore poseur who misunderstands him and uses her bastardized interpretations as an excuse to shit on people and call it strength!)--Nietzsche knew: first comes the camel, disciplined and loaded down with duty (knowledge, values, etc.)--then comes the lion (the great negator who annihilates those handed-down values and virtues), but it takes a child to create, to become a self-propelling wheel, a new movement, a YES! For the task of creation, only the child has that power. May we all be more like children and focus our energies on the great task of creating rather than the easy blood sport of tearing down.

Jonathan Safran Foer on What's Kosher (or Not) in the Meat Industry

If This is Kosher...video

I have huge respect for Jonathan Safran Foer (aside from enjoying his excellent debut novel, Everything is Illuminated). Please watch the video he put on Youtube documenting the outrageous abuses of animals by the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, Agriprocessors (the same sleazy outfit where hundreds of illegal latino migrants were unscrupulously arrested and summarily tried for possession of fake SS #s when many of them, often illiterate, didn't even know what a SS# was, and only knew that the company had required (very likely helped) them to acquire these documents). Even though there's some kind of annoying syncing glitch in the video, his cogent, impassioned statement on the unethical practices of this industry force us to rethink what it means to eat meat and be complicit in an industry of cruelty and death. What he is talking about is relevant for all people who consume meat--it's not just a question of whether such practices are kosher, because non-kosher meat factories are guilty of many of the same sorts of disgusting, egregious, grotesque and wanton cruelty.

I'm not saying that you can't eat meat. But if you choose to do so, I think the least you can do is be fully aware of the costs of your choices. People's blase attitude toward the unnecessary suffering of living creatures, who endure lives of incredible pain in inhumane conditions, would be harder to maintain if they were forced to face what goes on behind the scenes.

I find it grossly hypocritical that so many foreigners come to China (where animals, admittedly are seen as possessions and instruments, with little regard for their welfare and almost no conception that their lives could have anything resembling dignity) and are put off watching a peasant slaughter a chicken or pig (cows are often too expensive to use as food in rural areas) with their own hands for their own consumption, because it seems so cruel, and yet have no compunction about purchasing plastic sealed, sanitized packages of anonymous flesh from impersonal supermarkets.

If the video's not showing up here, go directly to this link:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YZ74SpTA_-o

Many more reasons to chill out on the meat-eating

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
by the awesome Mark Bittman

EXCERPT... Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

DAI Guangyu's "Interval of Silence" Opens June 7th in BeijiAI

"Interval of Silence," curated by the brilliant artist Dai Guangyu, opens this Saturday in Beijing.

With a lineup of some of China's hottest contemporary artists, including AI Weiwei, CANG Xin, CHEN Lingyang, DAI Guangyu, HAN Bing, HE Chengyao, HE Yunchang, HUANG Rui,JIN Feng, ZHANG Dali and others, and academic host, Wang Lin, the show promises to give pause for reflection, as the curator intends.

I'll post installation shots after the opening.

If you're in Beijing on June 7th, 2008, come to 798 Art Factory, Red Star Gallery, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing, Chaoyang Qu, 100015 for the opening. Starts at 3pm.

Exhibition runs from June 7th-July 20th.

Kitai Vperiod!!! China Forward

Kitai Vperiod!!! China Forward!!! Contemporary art exhibition
curated by powerhouse Pia Copper, organized by Albert Benamou Gallery and located at Tsum in Moscow. Highlights from the show of some of China's hottest artists and rising stars, from Gao Brothers to Chen Wenling, from Zhong Biao to Feng Zhengjie, from Ma Liuming to Han Bing.

VIDEO CLIP of the show at TSUM

Wang Qingsong's work takes a new direction at PKM SOLO SHOW

And Wang Qingsong's trademark hairstyle changes as well to mark the occasion. I'm trying to convince him that a John Waters mustache is the perfect compliment to his new look. Surveillance cameras allow visitors on the second floor to spy on the action below.Some of the work exhibited is self-referential photography of the PKM Gallery before and after his installation.My favorite work in the show was more in line with Wang Qingsong's traditional photography. This triptych shows an empty train, a train full of the possessions of rural migrants, along with the artist (who often appears in his own works in various guises) and the train crammed with those same migrants--a typical scene from everyday life that the artist has restaged, ala Jeff Wall, for this series. Kids LOVED the squishy foam stairs at Wang Qingsong's Solo Show at PKM. They bounced and bounded all the way up, screaming "好舒服” （feels good and comfy) all the way up.

Asia Society Director Melissa Chiu's ‘Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know’

‘Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know’ by Melissa Chiu
May 26th, 2008 ·

Published: 2008
English

‘Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know’ presents a historical overview of the contemporary Chinese art scene. Written by Asia Society director, Melissa Chiu, the book is characterized by succinct text that present concise explanations of the events, exhibitions, market shifts and individual players that together created the backdrop for today’s contemporary art scene in China.

The text is divided into seven chapters, which highlight what Dr. Chiu views as the most important discussion points related to contemporary Chinese art: 1) contemporary art in China began decade ago 2) Chinese contemporary art is more diverse than you might think 3) museums and galleries have promoted Chinese contemporary art since the 1990s 4) government censorship has been an influence on Chinese artists and sometimes still is 5) the Chinese artists’ diaspora is returning to China 6) contemporary art museums in china are on the rise and 7) the world is collecting Chinese contemporary art.

For the rest of the review check out REDBOX STUDIO

Incendiary American BULLSHIT

...the US cancels Palestinian Fulbrights.

"Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

“I stayed to get my scholarship,” she said. “Now I am desperate.”


Read the whole damn scandal.

I want to puke. This is our idea of JUSTICE?

WU Gaozhong's Windshield Wipers

Since I can only view blogspot via a proxy (thanks to the Chinese firewall), I can't tell if the video is loading or not. Here's a direct link to Youtube if you can't see the video.

WU Gaozhong's Spectral Memory Opens Today at Zendai MoMA in Shanghai

Wild and Wooly at Wu Gaozhong's Solo Exhibition at the Zendai MoMA in Shanghai

Today Chinese artist Wu Gaozhong drove a car covered with millions of black boar bristles around Shanghai's Pudong district as part of the Zendai MoMA 366 Intrude exhibition series, and as a precursor to his solo exhibition which opens tomorrow at the same place.

Spectral Memory is the way I decided to render “悚然的回忆”，the title for Wu Gaozhong's show given by the venerable Chinese critic Li Xianting, who has taken an extended hiatus from the world of curating, with the rare case of ongoing support for exceptional artists like Wu Gaozhong. The literal meaning of ”悚然的回忆“ comes from an idiom and could be translated as "hair-raising," but I didn't want to telegraph the artist's visual punch that way, or give away the punchline, if you will, so prematurely, so elected for a more metaphorical rendering, after much consultation with the Lao Li and the artist. Besides, "hair-raising" is too much like the title of a horror movie, whereas Spectral Memory captured the ghostly, haunting feeling that comes with the sorts of remembrance that Wu Gaozhong's work elicits.

Tomorrow, Spectral Memory (reloaded) launches at the Zendai MoMA 证大现代艺术馆, as Wu Gaozhong's first solo exhibition in Shanghai. With a powerful array of all new works, the show promises to offer a madeline cookie dipped in tea (to paraphrase Proust), to take us down our own rembrances of things past. With his carved wooden sculptures of everyday objects from mundane life to pivotal moments, embedded with black boar bristle to give the appearance of sprouting hair, Wu Gaozhong offers sites of intimate remembrance that connect the minutiae with the macro, and the personal with the larger experiences of us all.

Expected Dead Now Numbered at over 70,000

China says over 70,000 dead or missing from quake


By Lucy Hornby

CHENGDU, China (Reuters) - China raised the number of dead or missing from a devastating earthquake to more than 70,000 on Tuesday, as rescuers found another survivor eight days after the huge tremor hit.

A government statement said the number killed had now topped 40,000, and state news agency Xinhua reported that a further 32,000 were missing.

Authorities had previously said they expected the final death toll to exceed 50,000. More than 247,000 were injured.

In Wenchuan county, epicenter of the May 12 quake in mountainous Sichuan province, rescuers found a man alive after 179 hours buried in the rubble, state media said.

Ma Yuanjiang, 31, a power plant executive, spoke after he was rescued, but his body was "as fragile as that of a newborn baby", Chongqing Xinqiao hospital president Wang Weidong said.

"The next 12 hours are crucial for Ma's survival. The patient finished the first half of a life miracle, now we are trying to do the second," Xinhua quoted Wang as saying.

His rescue came as authorities tried to restore calm in the provincial capital, Chengdu, after tens of thousands rushed into the streets overnight alarmed by a television prediction of another powerful earthquake.

But as darkness fell over Chengdu on Tuesday thousands of residents prepared makeshift shelters to sleep outside, too afraid to stay overnight in their homes.

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE:

Lots of info on China Quake Relief here

With links to places for your donations and up to date news links!

Donate Online Now

* AU: Australian Red Cross
* CA: Oxfam
* CA:Canadian Red Cross
* DE: German Red Cross
* HK: Oxfam
* HK: Red Cross
* JP: Japan Red Cross
* NZ: New Zealand Red Cross
* NZ: Oxfam
* UK: British Red Cross
* UK: China Embassy Appeal
* UK: Oxfam
* UK: SaveTheChildren
* UK: UNICEF
* US: American Red Cross
* US: Mercy Corps
* US: World Vision

China Earthquake Benefit at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center

China Earthquake Benefit at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center


On May 12th 2008, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province. With over 30,000 victims, the scope and scale of this tragedy has shocked people all over the world. In response, Three Shadows is bringing together friends and family for a united effort benefiting the earthquake victims. A fundraiser, including charity sale and silent auction, will take place in Three Shadows’ fourth exhibition hall, concluding with a special Sichuan Earthquake Benefit on Sunday, May 25th. In addition to a donation box for collections, Three Shadows has called upon its widespread network of artists and creative individuals for artwork, signed publications, and special classes to donate to the charity sale and silent auction. All profits from the event will be given to the China Red Cross for earthquake disaster relief.

When one person is in trouble, many people can help. Three Shadows hopes you’ll get involved!

The Three Shadows Fundraiser is accepting donations for the charity sale and silent auction immediately. Any items – artworks, books, gift certificates, etc. – are welcome. Beginning on May 21st, Three Shadows will exhibit the donated items in the exhibition hall. Items will be collected through May 25th, the day of the Sichuan Earthquake Benefit. Please contact Three Shadows to coordinate donations.

The following artists have generously donated works:

RongRong & inri
Adou (Sichuan native)
Xiong Wenyun (Sichuan native, donating 1999 photographs from Wenchuan county, the earthquake epicenter)
Zhao Liang
Qiu
Huang Lei
Gao Bo (Sichuan native)
He Yunchang
He An
Mo Yi
Jiang Zhi
Yu Bogong
Han Lei
Wang Huaxiang
Cai Weidong
Lian Dongya
Zhang Baijun
Han Bing
Maya Kovskaya
Chen Qiulin(Sichuan native)
Qiu Zhijie
Lu Yanpeng
Sun Hongbin
Wang Xu
Liu Yuan
Li Tianyuan
Artists from the Pace/MacGill Gallery (USA)
Alberto Garcia-Alix (Spain)
Scott Graham (USA)
Aislinn Legett (Canada)
Oystein Ruud (Norway)
Wang Binglong…

In addition, other items already donated include:

Signed books by writers Hong Ying (Sichuan native) and Adam Williams
Three-day tour of Pingyao by Wild China journeys
A complete set of Immersion Guide books
Portrait Session with artist Claudia Baez (New York)
A One-on-One Darkroom Tutorial with photographers Chip Rountree and Liu Yuan (English or Chinese)
Signed, limited edition books by the Three Shadows Publishing House
Makeover by MeiLi Autumn Style Consulting
Truffles by Isabelle
Dinner for four prepared at your home by Chef Meng
Jewelry by Isabelle
Facial by Catherine de France
Wine by Pauze and Associates
Organic Vegetarian Food by Mrs. Shanen’s …

Special Exhibit: May 21st -25th, 10am-6pm (closed Mondays)

Sichuan Earthquake Benefit: Sunday, May 25th, 3-6pm (Shuttle bus from Lido Starbucks to Three Shadows from 2:30pm to 4:30pm. Please call to reserve.)

Venue: 155A, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing



For more information:

Stephanie Tung (English): 64319063 ext 8004

Yam Chan (Chinese): 64319063 ext 8019

Please check all items at: http://3shadows.blogbus.com/

Please call us or send us an email to participate if you cannot be on site:support@threeshadows.cn

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre

May 18, 2008

Rising to meet the challenge

Today was another day of crushing news about the growing casualty count in the earthquake stricken regions of China's Southwest, but it was also a day of uplifting stories about people who rose to the challenge--a 9 year old boy who carried injured classmates out of his collapsing school on his back; a survivor who was pulled from the wreckage i shock but still alive after an unthinkable 179 hours of being buried alive.

I wept today reading of the 60-something year-old homeless beggar man who felt compelled to do something."Those people have it worse than me, I have to try to help them," he said. The first time he went to the donation center in Nanjing, he was only able to offer about 5 yuan (less than a dollar) in loose change. Spurred on by his desire to somehow help, he began aggressively (but respectfully) panhandling and able to produce almost 100 yuan (about 15 dollars), the third time he went to donate, this raggedy old homeless man in tattered clothing counted out over 300 yuan in small change and small bills, as his respectful contribution.

Every drop counts, people.

These People Need ALL of Our HELP!

PLEASE HELP THE VICTIMS OF THE EARTHQUAKE IN CHINA

Dear Friends,

I am writing to appeal for help of any kind for the victims of the catastrophic earthquake that hit Southwestern China on May 12th. Initially estimated at 7.9, the quake has now been revised to an 8.0 magnitude, but the devastation it has wrought is fundamentally unmeasurable.

While the Western media has covered this event to an extent, information will surely begin to peter off as other "news," like Paris Hilton's latest hairdo seizes the media's fickle attention. Meanwhile, the human suffering caused by this colossal natural disaster is only just unfolding and the need for aid in the form of money, medical supplies, expertise and assistance, clothing, shelter, clean water, food, baby formula, and other basic life necessities will only increase and become more urgent as time goes by.

I hope that each one of you can reach inside your heart and offer whatever kind of support and assistance you can to help ease this devastating calamity.

A few basic up-to-date facts and info about the current situation.

To date, over 32,000 people have been confirmed dead. This number is expected to reach 50,000 as the 7-day mark passes and the chance of surviving in the rubble declines precipitously. At 150 hours, the soldiers and relief workers are are still digging survivors out of the rubble. People are not giving up hope.

One woman, who escaped being crushed because her husband flung himself on top of her at the last minute, managed to stay alive only by drinking her own blood. In order to get out from under the tons of concrete pressing down on her leg, she had to saw off her own leg with a rusty saw and a pair of scissors that the relief workers were able to pass through a hole in the rubble. Of course she had no anaesthesia. She told reporters that the only thing that kept her alive was the thought that she had a responsibility to raise her teenage daughter into a decent, contributing member of society. There are so many others like her.

A primary school teacher refused to run for safety when she saw that her little charges were paralyzed with fear inside the classroom. She made three rescue trips back into the shaking building before it collapsed on her. She was dug out with children under each arm, over her shoulder and one in each hand. Elsewhere, a mother saved her infant by making a bridge over it with her body. She died in that position, and three days later the child was saved.

Another man, in one of the many regions not readily accessible by rescue teams, tells of trying with his bare hands to dig his 16 year old son out of the rubble, hearing his voice become weaker and weaker over the ensuing 4 days before rescuers were able to get through, by hiking on foot over the mountains. His boy called out one last time, "Ba," he said, "I'm sorry, I'm can't hold on any longer," and perished before the rescuers were able to dig him out. The impossibility of transporting cranes and other heavy-lifting machinery into such areas has led to the loss of an enormous number of lives.

Although there has been a laudable and prompt reaction from the Chinese government, markedly unlike the reaction of the US government during Hurricane Katrina (American soldiers are said to have stood by with their guns and refused to help, while the Chinese soldiers came armed with only shovels and tireless determination to save lives), the earthquake has devastated a huge area of mountain towns, villages and cities, making the rescue effort tortuous and extremely difficult. Dams have cracked or broken, roads and bridges have collapsed or been obstructed by mudslides caused by rainstorms, and falling rock from the sides of mountains that broke loose during the quake, making it almost impossible to airlift or otherwise transport goods and personnel to the innumerable stricken areas. Flooding is another imminent danger that has caused evacuations in a number of areas. Meanwhile, severe aftershocks and new earthquakes--this morning a 7.2 quake hit a nearby area, killing 3 and injuring another 1000 people--continuing to settle the rubble and hinder the rescue effort.

The Chinese people, too, have been admirable and moving in their relief efforts, already donating almost as much money as the government--somewhere in the ballpark of $180 million US dollars. Han Chinese and Tibetans (who form a significant part of the population of Sichuan) have worked together to save each other's lives. From sports stars (Thanks, Yao Ming) to companies, from contemporary artists and arts people holding relief auctions to ordinary citizens sending whatever they can, donating blood and volunteering to go help on the ground, the people here, including the huge expat population, have rallied together to do whatever they can. The victims themselves have also been heroic in their own attempts in the relief effort--turning aside food and help when it is more urgently needed elsewhere, and there is a conspicuous lack of disorder that often comes in situations such as these--no looting, raping, robbery and pillaging, just an incredible upsurge of mutual aid and selfless support.

But there is so much more work to be done before the lives of the victims can come even close to going back to normal.

Today, at 2.28 pm, exactly 1 week after the earthquake struck, a national period of mourning began with the wailing of sirens and honking of horns on streets across the country for three minutes. Here in Beijing, the moment was solemn and sorrowful. I went to the curb, along with everyone else in the area, and stood listening to the cacophony, weeping for those who could not be saved.

32,000+ are dead so far. 50,000 expected.

About 1/3 of this number are school children. The government is investigating corruption in what are called "tofu construction projects" made by greedy contractor with substandard materials and in violation of safety regulations that may have resulted in the unprecedented number of schools and hospitals that collapsed completely, and has vowed to punish those responsible. It has also been much more open about the crisis than in previous situations, and welcomes assistance and support from all corners of the globe, for there is still so much left to do.

Over 200,000 people are injured, over 15,000 have sustained severe, life-threatening injury or have been maimed. There are huge numbers of orphans, and families whose children have died.

4.8 million people or more are homeless. Their livelihoods have been crushed into oblivioun along with their homes and places of work.

Millions of animals, from livestock to pets, have been rendered homeless or injured. Foreign Animal Protection Societies need to get involved to help these animals, and administer shots to the packs of homeless dogs that are now starving, hurt, disoriented and being shot for fear of rabies and other diseases.

MOST NEEDED:
MONEY, tents, blankets, first aid supplies and other medicines: especially: medicines to stop bleeding, antibiotics, pain-relief medicines, disinfectants, rain gear (rain coats, umbrellas, boots), baby formula, food stuffs, feminine supplies, clothing, toilet paper, other basic life supplies. People with expertise in PTSD and who can offer basic training in psychological counseling are needed as well.

The threat of disease spreading in places where huge numbers of people are crammed together is enormous. The Chinese government and people has been admirable in its relief efforts, but this is a disaster bigger than any country can manage by itself, especially after the huge, and devastating blizzard that put South China under ice in February, and the enormous output of investment in infrastructure development for the Olympics, this kind of damage isn't going to be fixed quickly or easily.


Possible places to channel relief aid (their news is often quite out of date already, but they can help direct contributions to the right places):

This site has a plethora of good ways to donate and help out.
http://cnreviews.com/uncategorized/china_earthquake_relief_and_donation_guide_-_will_update_20080514.html

The RED CROSS CHINA site was hacked into by reprehensible vultures, so I won't offer a link to their site at present.

INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS
http://www.redcross.org/news/in/profiles/Intl_profile_ChinaEarthquake.asp?s_src=pre_aspLink

OTHER CHARITIES INVOLVED
http://www.charityinchina.org/2008/05/16/charities-to-help-victims-of-chinese-earthquake-in-sichuan/

http://www.globalgiving.com/china.html

http://www.mercycorps.org/chinaearthquake/?source=1062

http://www.china-crossroads.com/index.php/2008/05/12/sichuan-earthquake-how-to-help/

I have no idea which of these organizations is "best," but I think any kind of help at this point is of great value. Please act now and do or give whatever you can.

Also, see info on the Three Shadows Earthquake Relief Benefit Silent Auction (this info is only partial, as of May 13th, other artists including :
RongRong & inri
Adou (Sichuan native)
Xiong Wenyun (Sichuan native, donating a 1999 photograph from Wenchuan county, the earthquake epicenter)
Zhao Lian
Han Bing
Qiu
Huang Lei
Gao Bo (Sichuan native)
He Yunchang
He An
Mo Yi
Jiang Zhi
Yu Bogong
Alberto Garcia-Alix have also donated works to the benefit
Others are welcome to join!).

If you are in Beijing, or elsewhere, I urge you to make donations and come to the Benefit on the 25th.

http://www.threeshadows.cn/beta/en/news_Rescue.html
www.threeshadows.cn

Other info on the crisis and numerous links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake

We have gone through our home and donated an array of things from clothes to cooking utensils, photography art works and signed books (for the benefit auction being held by Three Shadows Photographic Arts Centre in Beijing) and cash. None of this can possibly come even close to enough, so I hope I can rally some of you to lend a hand.

Times like these are reminders of both the incredible fragility and also indefatigable resilience and tenacity of human life. I am reminded of the last lines of a poem by Marge Pearcy, For Strong Women. She writes, "Until we are all strong together, a strong woman is strongly afraid." I think the sentiment holds for all of us human beings, and is a reminder of the need to overcome the petty, artificial boundaries of nation, gender, age, religion, and even, way of life, and stand together in the face of adversity.


Let's be strong together in supporting those people whose lives have been devastated and yet are standing bravely side by side, struggling to overcome unthinkable obstacles.

Wishing you peace, love and the good fortune to live your lives unobstructed by disaster, disease, war and other catastrophes--humanly created and naturally occurring alike. It's easy to forget just how good we've got it.

With respect,

Maya Kóvskaya


People in Dark Times
"Even in the darkest of times we have the right to
expect some illumination, and that such
illumination may well come less from
theories and concepts than from the
uncertain, flickering, and often weak
light that some men and women, in their
lives and their works, will kindle
under almost all circumstances and shed
over the time span that was given them
on earth."
--Hannah Arendt (From: Men in Dark Times)

Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof

The danger when encountering a misogynist prescriptive grammar rant as extreme as the one just published by David Gelernter in the Weekly Standard (vol. 13 no. 24, 03/03/2008) is that one might get as angry and fired up and beyond reason as he is. That would be a pity. I will try to remain calm (it's not exactly my forte, though I have occasionally tried it). The right reaction for this one is sadness rather than indignation. Gelernter is a distinguished computer scientist at Yale; yet here he makes a complete fool of himself.

His claims are apocalyptic. Although English "used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers" it has now been taken over by "arrogant ideologues" determined "to defend the borders of the New Feminist state." A major "victory of propaganda over common sense" looms: "We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it." The language is on the brink of being lost, because although the "prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise", today "virtually the whole educational establishment teaches the opposite". This is the mild part. Soon he gets more seriously worked up, calling his opponents "style-smashers" and (I'm not kidding) "language rapists", and claiming that "they were lying and knew it" when they did what they did.

What, then, is the terrible thing that the style-smashers have done? The following is (and I stress this) a complete list of all the facts about English usage he cites:

* Some writers now use either he or she, or singular they, or purportedly sex-neutral she, instead of purportedly sex-neutral he, to refer back to generic or quantified human antecedents that are not specifically marked as masculine.
* Some people recommend the words chairperson, humankind, and firefighter over chairman, mankind, and fireman.
* Some try to avoid using the phrases great man when speaking of a great person, or using brotherhood when making reference to fellow-feeling between human beings.

That's it; we're done. That is the totality of the carnage to which he directs our attention, the sum of all his evidence that we have "allowed ideologues to wreck the English language".

...



Read the whole article on the awesome blog

Language Log

Beizhing, Pekin, Whatever


I almost snorted tieguanyin out of my nose when I read this. Cool blog, great resources and the voice of the speaker sounds awfully familiar.

Still, in spite of the three reasons to chill out when Americans bastardize the name of the Chinese capital with their nails-on-the-blackboard "Beizzhing" when the damn name is pronounced BAY-JING, I still can't overcome the impulse to correct.

Read the whole piece, plus listen to pronunciation samples...

Beizhing, Pekin, Whatever
March 1st, 2008

You know it’s bad for your hypertension to go prescriptivist on place names — “It’s Bay-Jing, you dolt, not Beizzhing!” But did you know there are even better reasons to take a chill? Here are the top 3 arguments for not giving in to the correctionist impulse:

Beijing Sounds 北京声儿

Han Bing's Walking the Cabbage World Tour

Walking the Cabbage (2000-present) is an ongoing performance art piece that has taken Han Bing across China--from his tiny home village to Tiananmen Square, from the colorful minority village of Dali in the southwest mountains to the tranquil water towns of Suzhou, from the Westernized Bund in Shanghai to the Great Wall and beyond--the USA, Japan and Europe. By inverting quotidian practice, Han Bing foregrounds the lowly cabbage--the Chinese comfort food and bottom line staple of the poor--as a laden signifier of the nature of the times in "modernizing" China. For the nouveau riche, the humble cabbage as a sign of basic material stability (once horded by urban residents en mass to get them through the winter) has been replaced by the pampered pedigreed pet. What do the objects we attach to ourselves say about how we define our identies and values in this rapidly changing world? How do our mundane everyday practices and routines serve to constitute our shared sense of the normal? Han Bing poses these question with his public performances of Walking the Cabbage, which are conducted as everyday practice across a diverse array of social spaces and in public places everywhere, inciting the emergences of the "Cabbage-Walking Tribe" who question the authority of the norm and bring our attention back to the way the world is shaped by our everyday actions.


Images by Han Bing, starting from top row left to right:
Walking the Cabbage in Brooklyn, NYC, 2007; Walking the Cabbage at the Capitol Building, Columbia, SC, 2007; Walking the Cabbage in Tiananmen Square 2, Beijing, 2006; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Jo E in Shin Tokorozawa, Japan, 2006; Walking the Cabbage at Harajuku III, Tokyo, 2006; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Mexican Day Laborer, Los Angeles, CA, 2006; Walking the Cabbage at Harajuku II, Tokyo, 2006; Walking the Cabbage at the Peace Hotel, Shanghai, 2005; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Lolita Girl at Harajuku 1, Tokyo, 2006; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Residents of Columbia, SC, 2007; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Red Dress in Paris, 2007; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Alternative Young People in Harajuku, Tokyo, 2006; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Cool Dudes in LA Chinatown, Los Angeles, 2006; Walking the Cabbage with Chickens in the Family Yard, Hanhu Village, Jiangsu, 2005; The Cabbage-Walking Tribe: Yi Pizzeria Girls in Dali, Yunnan, 2006.

one more reason

actually, i confess, there is a reason beyond sheer vanity that i should really jot things down here a bit more often. this blog is part of how i was recently reunited with my biological father's half of the family. my links were fwded around by one of my dear aunts, when i went with my partner to visit her and my glamorama-gramma in mississippi. inspite of the ice storm, it was a delight to stay up till 11:30 at night with my 79 year old grandmother (and i do mean "GRAND!" she is exceptionally beautiful, looks not day over 58, and is as feisty, opinionated, judgmental, and passionate as i am) discussing the way picasso chewed up all the masters and then spit them out again on his way to establishing his own distinctive vocabulary (we agreed that when he finally got where he was going, he got stuck in a rut, a creative stutter, if you will, and his power petered out). and my lovely aunts, what a bevy of beauties, each so different from the next and striking in her own way...it was so rewarding to get to know some of them as adults and to discover the great affinites that we share (some in spades and uncanny shades of deja vouz). i'm thinking of them tonight, glowing at me across the ocean from their massage tables, biofeedback machines, court houses and exotic, incorrigible fruit trees.

looky, looky

it appears that china is no longer blocking blogspot, and so after a long and luxurious hiatus (ha!), i am free to resume the occasional discombobulated rambling diatribe that masquerades as an innocent collection of freakishly long run-on sentences.

of course, now that i've seriously set about trying to get more work done in a given day than any sane person should ever have the hubris to contemplate trying, i shant dilly dally on the web as much as i would like (promises, promises).

shanghai biennale babes

still recovering from the tornado tour of the shanghai biennale and its many (not) satellite exhibitions. pix and quips to come.

Love in the Age of Big Construction II: Han Bing's Multimedia Peformance Installation

Beijing based artist Han Bing's multimedia performance installation, "Love in the Age of Big Construction II," opened the Soldiers at the Gate: China 拆那 (Demolish There) exhibition at the Dashanzi International Art Festival this May, offering a titillating cocktail of sensual arousal and cerebral stimulation. For three hours, the mostly nude artist used gender-blurring wiles to seduce and subdue the enormous steel clawed arm of a backhoe--a quintessential machine of destruction and construction, typically used in sites of demolition and building worldwide. On a bed of white cotton, fluffy like cumulous clouds, beneath a diaphanous white canopy that hinted of wedding night rituals, and behind a red neon rope and construction cones, for three straight hours Han Bing caressed, kissed, snuggled and stroked the hulking metal machine. His video "Age of Big Construction," projected ghostly images of brutal demolition, the frail hopes of construction, the elan of laboring people, and the uneuphemized realities of life in a zone of ongoing destruction and construction, onto his body and against the curtain behind him to the rhythm of industrial noise and the warnings of nature pushed to its limits. In a move that repudiates the logic of "fight fire with fire," or as it's said in Chinese, "use poison to fight poison," the artist embraced a strategy reminiscent of pacifist civil disobedience, employing a dialectic of antinomies to create a space for overcoming. The softness of the bed of cotton is used to overcome the hardness of the machine, weightless clouds to hold up tons of steel, sensuality to overcome the numbed philistine quality of the contemporary age, Eros to tame the death drive, seduction to overcome violation, feminine generativity to overcome masculine destructivity.

Check out Han Bing's website. It's spicy HOT.
www.amormundi.com

Need to Move My Blog Beyond the Firewall

Since I cannot actually SEE my blog from China, so I have no idea what's happening with the things I post, I think I'll have to find another place for this blog. :(

When that happens, I'll make a farewell post here. For now, though, stay tuned to my Artpost column and take a peek at the awesome work by Chinese contemporary artist Han Bing at his website: www.amormundi.com

visit me at my column on artpost.info

i can't ever get into my blog from here in china, but miraculously today i was able to log in and add a post, even though i can't actually view the damn thing. i have a regular column on Chinese contemporary art at the groovy art portal ARTPOST, so come check it out!

http://artpost.info/postcafe/index_maya.asp

the long silence

my apologies for the long silence. i've been in beijing, where the state has walled out blogspot (but not, inexplicably live journal). i'm just back in berkeley for surgery, packing and preparing to move my life back to china, where i'm happiest.

i plan to relocate my blog tolive journal and will post the link shortly, as well as concoct an update that doesn't take me a month to compose.
yes, a lot's been happening.

People in Dark Times

"Even in the darkest of times we have the right to
expect some illumination, and that such
illumination may well come less from
theories and concepts than from the
uncertain, flickering, and often weak
light that some men and women, in their
lives and their works, will kindle
under almost all circumstances and shed
over the time span that was given them
on earth."
--Hannah Arendt (From: Men in Dark Times)

USA: Support locked-out San Francisco hotel workers

USA: Support locked-out San Francisco hotel workers
Over 4,000 hotel workers are locked out of 14 downtown San Francisco hotels. The hotel companies have put a contract proposal on the table with miniscule pay increases and which would require hotel workers to make copays that would put health benefits out of reach for most workers. The workers are on picket lines 24 hours a day and fighting back, but they need your support.

On September 29th, Workers represented by UNITE HERE Local 2 went on strike in four downtown San Francisco hotels. The workers were seeking a measured step to move the hotel companies forward in negotiations that had been badly stalled. UNITE HERE Local 2 announced at the time of the strike that they would return to work after two weeks. The hotel employers in San Francisco responded by locking workers out in ten additional hotels. Later they announced that the lockout would last indefinitely.

Workers in San Francisco are seeking a contract that maintains their benefits, includes reasonable wage increases and a contract which expires in 2006 along with many other major hotel cities in North America. The companies have responded by proposing miniscule wage increases and benefit takeaways over the course of a 5-year contract. Hotel workers in Washington DC and Los Angeles, CA are locked in similar struggles with their employers.

Please support Hotel Workers in San Francisco and elsewhere by sending the message provided at the site below (or a message of your own) to the Hotel CEOs.

USA: Support locked-out San Francisco hotel workers

AAAUnite: October 2004

So I've been busy. No, seriously. Busy. And here is just one of many major issues that have been occupying my time and mind.

Take a moment to learn about the Lockout against hotel workers from the Multi-Employer Group, that includes the Hilton and other luxury, multibillion dollar hotels that are still trying screw the workers that run their facilities out of basic health care and a living wage, among other things.

The American Anthropological Association had planned to hold it's annual conference at the SF Hilton, but due to pressure from its members, who refuse to cross picket lines in order to give papers on the capitalist power, exploitation and the plight of marginalized people, from the comforts of a cushy hotel that locks out its own workers. The "compromise" decision to move the conference to a later date at the non-union Atlanta Hilton has also been met with anger, shock and collective action by disgruntled members of AAA who are unwilling to take that long walk around the picket line in a state that doesn't even support collective bargaining rights for workers. Plans to boycott or otherwise not attend the Atlanta conference, and find ways to coordinate meetings of our own here in the Bay Area are in progress.

For more information, check out the AAAUNITE site here:
AAAUnite: October 2004

BRICK LANE is a profound tale of self-making and cultural appropriation

monica ali's BRICK LANE should have won the booker prize. what a rich and delightful book! i devoured the book in a weekend, and her storytelling skills and powerful writing kept me enthralled from beginning to end. what struck me and has stuck with me is the poetic symmetry of the story. ali's narrative has the sort of structural balance for which i can only yearn. best of all, is her exquisite handling of the transnational dislocation, the clash of tradition and modernity, the dialectic of socially-constructed fate and human agency. With her powerful yet seemingly effortless prose, she uses nazneen's awakening to the possibilities of her own powers as a metonym for the immigrant experience, in which the sojourner claims the begrudging host country as a home, without allowing assimilation to whitewash her, and the feminist experience, in which the woman claims her own powers without giving up her own culture. BRICK LANE is a profound tale of self-making and cultural appropriation, whereby the encounter with a different culture is done with dignity and ultimately on her own terms. BRAVO!

marc and anja's trip around the world continues

blogspot keeps eating my posts before they get published. i wrote a long paean to marc and anja and it is gone. i am peeved.

a quick recap, since i have to finish a dissertation chapter today:

i met this lovely couple from the netherlands when i was finishing my novel last spring in dali.
anja had hurt her knee, so they sojourned in dali, before recommencing their trip around the world. during the month and a half we were there together, we bonded over our love of halal hotpot, black sticky rice and yoghurt popsicles, the quest to bring better tunes to the guys working at the guesthouse (one more 'knockin' on heaven's door' and we were going to lose our lunch), and the scrappy little runt pup, xiao taidixiong (lil teddy bear) whose life marc saved by giving mouth to mouth when taidixiong was choking to death on a hot dog.

lovely people, amazing travels. i'm sure some day we'll meet again.

check out there wild adventures and wonderful photographs at their site: www.zwervenoverdewereld.nl
if you can't read dutch, click the british flag icon on the bottom for english.

maya kulenovic delivers a visceral visual suckerpunch

with her series of paintings featured on www.artquotes.net

"I look into the darker side of humanity because I cannot pretend that I don't see it - and the only way to cope with it is to understand it better, " writes kulenovic of her work.

in particular, her painting of a crowd of naked howling bodies with eerily similar faces, entitled CHORUS, disturbs as it raises questions about identity, conformity and voice.

CHECK OUT THIS ARTIST'S FEATURED WORK

what the PATRIOT act means for writers

yes, it affects all of us, not just criminals and baddies. and even though congress passed this nasty and not so little piece of work without actually reading through it, that doesn't mean that we should put our heads in the sand and pretend everything is fine here in the land of the free (or not so free). POETS & WRITERS features an article by kay murray about some of the issues that PATRIOT raises for writers.

"BASIC PROVISIONS OF PATRIOT

In a nutshell, the act gives federal law enforcement agencies (for example, the FBI, Justice Department, U.S. Attorneys) and foreign intelligence surveillance agencies (the CIA, NSA, Pentagon, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS, formerly known as Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS], Secret Service) more tools and greater leeway to spy on citizens (and legal aliens) in national security and criminal investigations. It does so in the following ways (among others):

• Makes it much easier for domestic law enforcement to use tools like roving wiretaps and phone taps
• Lowers the standard needed to convince a court to issue search warrants and subpoenas (probable cause to believe a crime is being committed or planned is no longer needed)
• Greatly expands the scope of third- party records subject to subpoena
• Permits domestic and foreign intelligence agencies to share information gathered about citizens more easily
• Allows individual district courts to issue nationwide search warrants and wiretap orders
• Permits agencies to spy—even to exercise a search warrant without notifying the person being searched
• Expands the type of information subject to surveillance to include e-mail and other online activity
• Forbids citizens subject to surveillance to challenge it in court except after the fact if they are charged with a crime"

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

publicists

for a lengthy discussion about the relative merits of getting a publicist to promote your book, especially if you're at a small press, check out the debate going on on sarah's blog, which i learned about from the ever-helpful marcus grimm on his 'grimm perspectives' blog.

CHECK OUT THE DISCUSSION

queen is the first rock act allowed into iran

although western music has been subject to strict censorship in the islamic republic, a compilation album of greatest hits from the iconic band QUEEN was officially sanctioned for release.

frontman, gay icon "Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, was proud of his Iranian ancestry, and illegal bootleg albums and singles made Queen one of the most popular bands in Iran.

liner notes accompanying the cassettes explain the meaning of various songs to fans. for example,

"Bohemian Rhapsody is [said to be] about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution he calls God in Arabic, "Bismillah", and so regains his soul from Satan..."

ah...suddenly all becomes clear.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE on THE BBC

may a hundred flowers bloom

in the NYT today, charles mcgrath writes about the new flourishing of variety in short fiction.

excerpt:

"...freed from the dictates of the marketplace, short stories these days are often less formulaic, less imitative than they used to be. There's no preferred style or mode anymore - even The New Yorker no longer publishes "the New Yorker short story" - and there are now dozens of different camps of short-fiction writing, all happily coexisting. Many of them are on display in "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories," an anthology edited by Ben Marcus, who teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia."

may a hundred flowers bloom, and may people actually stop to smell them!

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

keep an out for for swanky new SWINK

leelila strogov et al bring out a hot new litmag, with juicy bites and naughty bits from contributors such as steve almond, neal pollack, elissa schapell, chris offut, and many more. with an emerging writer's award, and a commitment to discover new talent, this seems like a worthwhile place to submit. just received my first volume. it came within a few days of ordering and it looks lovely. may there be many more to come.

imagine what would happen if writers subscribed to a fraction of the places they submit...


CHECK OUT SWINK and SUBSCRIBE

"art as the one hex we have against the predigested pulp of public discourse"

says sven birkerts in his characteristically insightful way as he argues we need the "little magazines," that publish the bulk of short fiction, now more than ever...

excerpt:

"Existing somewhere between the ephemerality of the newspaper and magazine (and online zine -- another subject altogether) and the four-square permanence of the book, little magazines are well positioned to broker between topical and long-range perspectives. They are fluid and open in their relation to trends, even as the best of them can achieve a certain memorable -- perhaps even striking -- capture of energies. And because they are not essentially playing the for-profit game, they can hew just a bit closer to their own self-originated standards. They represent literature and opinion in repertory, talents en route, freeze-framed; they are a staking of bets on artists and artistic tendencies by editors who dream of eventual vindication."

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

one more reason to like sven birkerts

his candor, his insight, and his intellectual panache--never pretentious, always insightful, and stimulating down to the last word.

excerpt from his SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

" Still, I can’t get around it: For me editing means asserting my own taste as a kind of categorical imperative. I recognized quite early on (see Agni 57) that I would have to take the leap of trusting myself absolutely. I worried, naturally—still do—that this was the most deluded kind of solipsism, but I couldn’t see any alternative, unless it was to make the journal some sort of literary sampler, a potpourri of expressions, modes, and aesthetic outlooks.

But what would be the point of that? Why clap covers around the undifferentiated swirl that is already all around us? A literary magazine, I think, ought to declare a particular brand of excellence and seek to rally adherents, the ultimate goal being the conquest of the world by that excellence. Ha! As for the accusation of hubris, isn’t this what we all do as writers: look for the will to emboss our idiosyncratic vision of things onto the page? Maybe the editor is just the writer posing in a public face. "

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE ON AGNI

Exhaustion

...is not the way to start a new semester. but something about the date august 13th conspires against me. august 13th is the bearer of life altering unpleasantness, it has been over and over again for many years. if i were superstitious i'd really be worried. in the past week i have hardly had time to think, let alone do anything. summer is about to be officially over and i can't imagine how i'm going to finish everything i need to do before the end of the year and still sleep. i can barely pound out coherent sentences right now, hence the radio silence. sleep, that fickle master, calls me. resistance is futile.

on being a writer

excerpts from a speech delivered by a.l. kennedy at the 2003 edinburgh book fair:

"...you are not quite made a writer in the way that you are made blue-eyed, or diabetic. Writing is more of an inbuilt disposition – some children, suitably triggered, will grow up to perpetrate random murders: others, suitably triggered, will become heroin addicts, or clerics: still others will write. The trigger for writing appears to be very finely tuned – it may be sprung by chance qualities of light, coincidences, or any of the unpredictable odds and ends mixed up in the simple presence of everyday life. And, going back to those clerics, we might also describe the predisposition to write as a vocation, because it seems to be a need that comes from without as well within. It is ours, but it plays upon us, has an independent existence which sometimes argues with our own. This calling, like any other, can be resisted, abused, disappointed, or simply drummed into silence by external forces."

"... One of the things we look for when we read is just that level of commitment, that totality. We seek out the full realisation of a unique presence, a voice other than our own: the viewpoints of human beings beyond ourselves: the precision of experiences we cannot have, described by somebody we cannot be. When we read we can go where the geese are, because someone took pains to go there before us and write the way. The writer gives us two miracles, a world other than that which we inhabit and the ghost of their company, their voice."

READ THE WHOLE SPEECH BY THE INIMITABLE A.L. KENNEDY, in fact, read her whole site, esp. FAQs, she's hilarious. and read her books, especially her short stories. my favorite piece of hers is GROUCHO'S MOUSTACHE in ORIGINAL BLISS.

the kanga king

one of the best short stories i've read in ages is a piece by nick halpern at the fabulous gettysburg review. i won't give the story away, so go read it yourself. it's subtle, poignant and well-crafted, emotionally powerful without ever being maudlin or treacly. i cried.

READ THE KANGA KING HERE

carrying on the spirt of fannie lou hamer

Excerpt from "Forty years after Fannie Lou Hamer"

-- Joan Walsh

"Donna Brazile spends a lot of her time these days in front of the camera, but she was behind it Wednesday afternoon, to document a history-making reception by Future PAC, known by the shorthand "the black Emily's List," since it focuses on electing black women to office. On the 40th anniversary of Fannie Lou Hamer's historic trip to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where her Mississippi Freedom Party members challenged the seating of the whites-only official delegation, Future PAC honored three black women who represent "the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer," in the words of its chairwoman Gwen Moore -- Connecticut treasurer Denise Napier, philanthropist Gloria Gary and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris -- along with at least a dozen other black women elected officials who turned up."

"Black women are by far the most reliable Democratic voters, but their representation among elected officials doesn't match their voter turnout. Future PAC is an effort to marshal their growing if still limited economic power to change that equation. "Black women give money to church, church, church," said Kathy Taylor, managing director of WGBH and a board member, marveling at the crowd of women who paid $125 to attend. "We are the change that we've been looking for," Moore told the group...."

"...This is a new Democratic Party," Donna Brazile said. "Black delegates no longer come and expect nothing. We have the keynote speaker, and no one could have captured the spirit of the party better than Barack Obama. He gave the Democrats a reason to be joyful, and we hold the power in at least eight battleground states. This is a new political season...."

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT SALON.COM

glory to unruly women!

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet. Posted July 22, 2004. [NOTE: I got this from a chatroom, couldn't find the original URL, so I'm posting in full here instead of linking.]

Teresa Heinz Kerry is a breath of fresh air, so why are the media choking on it?

Almost every story about her these days includes at least one snarky remark – usually attacking her for her refusal to endlessly regurgitate the same pre-approved talking points.

According to the chattering class, Heinz Kerry is – and I quote – "too outspoken," "too opinionated," "slightly zany," "eccentric and unpredictable," "the queen of direct" and – cover your ears, kids – "says what she thinks, when she thinks it."

In other words, she's an unconventional straight shooter. The horror!

(Reporters also seem to have a big problem with her hair, which has variously been described as "unkempt," "unruly," "humidity-frizzed," "voluminous" and "expensively colored a rich auburn" – but that's follicle fodder for another column.)

Even Maureen Dowd, no slouch herself in the independent-thinking department, felt compelled to write not one but two columns in the course of 10 days slamming Teresa for, among other things, being "flaky."

You gotta love this about our media mavens: They are constantly bemoaning the lack of forthrightness in our public figures – the vast majority of whom wouldn't know a straight answer if it bit them in the butt. But when they are finally presented with someone who doesn't (pardon the expression) beat around the bush, they start sharpening the long knives.

They're like a bunch of little kids who have gotten so used to being fed nothing but vanilla ice cream for dessert that a serving of Rocky Road with some sprinkles on top leaves them sputtering and crying, "Yuck!"

Most of the American public, on the other hand, possess a far more developed and discerning palate – and can appreciate more complex and piquant flavors.

And when it comes to spicing up the political dessert tray, Teresa Heinz Kerry is one of the most flavorful and compelling public figures to hit the national stage in decades.

When I first met her in Washington in 1980, she was a very popular Republican wife, with views very similar to the ones she holds today. Now she's a Democratic wife, a philanthropist who oversees a foundation that gives tens of millions to causes like the environment, healthcare and early education, a loving mother, grandmother and stepmother. She grew up in Mozambique, went to college in South Africa where she marched against apartheid, is fluent in five languages and learned so much about medicine from her oncologist father that friends and family have nicknamed her "Dr. T."

And unlike most politicians, she has a natural gift for intimacy and interacts with campaign crowds of 5,000 as if she were sitting around chatting with a small group of friends.

Yes, she is indeed unabashedly open with her opinions on everything from the war in Iraq ("I would never have gone to war this way") to George Bush ("fazed by complexity") to Botox treatments (she's had them).

But isn't that what we claim to want from those in public life? Or are we comfortable with authenticity only when it's a contrivance manufactured to appear authentic?

"I am the product of living in dictatorships," Teresa has said. "It makes you cherish the ability to be yourself, to have feelings and to speak them when asked. People say I'm blunt. I say, 'No, just honest.'"

It's this honesty that has led the media to brand her with the scarlet O for offbeat – a caricature given national credence by a Newsweek cover that trumpeted: "Is John Kerry's Heiress Wife a Loose Cannon or Crazy Like a Fox?"

It was character assassination by headline – especially since the cover line was not in any way reflective of the story inside, which painted Heinz Kerry as warm, smart, alive, funny, and, yes, brutally honest.

It's hard to imagine that headline – which was written, incidentally, by a man – being used to describe a man. As Marlo Thomas once said: "A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold."

We may have come a long way, baby, but there is no doubt that there is still a double standard when it comes to women in politics – especially political wives – who are supposed to be smart but not so smart that they're threatening, and strong but not so strong that they are intimidating.

It's a high-wire tightrope act, one that's almost impossible to pull off to the political media's satisfaction. And this at a time when girl power is blossoming in other parts of our culture, especially sports and entertainment. Last week's Olympic Trials featured women going faster, higher, stronger than ever before. And our movie screens are filled with indomitable, determined women like "Kill Bill's" Beatrix Kiddo or Keira Knightley's kick-ass Guinevere in the new "King Arthur."

But try to apply these attributes to politics and the media start acting like it's 1958 – they suddenly don't know how to handle smart, accomplished, complex women. Judy Dean wasn't glamorous or supportive enough, Hillary was too smart and too strong and Teresa is too loose-lipped and too unpredictable.

So it really isn't much of a surprise that the political wife the media seem most comfortable with is Laura Bush, who has chosen to take on the image of the perfect 1950s sitcom housewife.

She's the Harriet Nelson of first ladies, the quintessential deferential spouse, praised by her husband for not "trying to butt in and always, you know, compete" and lauded by the media for her ability "to balance strength and subservience." I guess I missed the moment where subservience became a virtue.

When Laura Bush was asked what advice she'd given her twin daughters before sending them out this summer to campaign for their father, she replied: "Stand up straight and keep your hair out of your eyes." Words to live by – if you're Marabel Morgan. Somehow, I don't think those are the same words of wisdom Teresa Heinz Kerry passed on to her stepdaughters before they hit the hustings.

Both Teresa and Laura are scheduled to deliver primetime speeches at their respective party conventions. The contrast between the two – and what this contrast says about the men in their lives – should be stark. Out on the campaign trail, Teresa is given to in-depth discussions about health care and global warming. Laura tends to say things like: "I'm not privy to the policy disputes. I'm not over there at the table where everyone is actually formulating specific policy." Heaven forbid.

"We need to honor women in all their complexity," Teresa Heinz Kerry told me. "It's time that we acknowledge the wisdom women have acquired by managing the chaos of daily life. Women are realists, the glue that holds society together. They bring a reverence to life that's instinctual, not just intellectual."

Thirty-eight million women didn't vote in 2000, many of them because they were so disgusted with our inauthentic politics-as-usual. If even a small percentage of them turn out this November, they could very well end up deciding the election and the direction of the country.

So I propose that we turn on its ear the traditional good-old-boy political litmus test – which candidate would you rather have a beer with? Instead, let's ask the women of America: Which candidate's wife would you rather have a cup of coffee with?

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translation exchange

another fantastic site with great translation related information!!! all your language lovers should check this site out. it's a collective endeavor just bursting with translation trivia and interesting discussions of translation-related questions.

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impending vote on constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage

Congress is about to vote on amending the U.S. Constitution to deny marriage equality to same-sex couples. Never before has our Constitution been amended to take away anyone's rights. Yet our Senators will vote on this amendment in the next 48 hours. It's urgent that we speak up now. This hateful divisiveness has no place in America. Please join me in saying so.
Equality in marriage is the civil rights issue of our generation. We can't let anyone, or any group, be singled out for discrimination based on who they are or who they love. Thank you.

opposition to same sex marriage smacks of the same logic as opposition to interracial marriage

For those who object to same sex marriage, let me put on record several rather crucial considerations.

1) The primarily Christian religious-moral objections that same sex marriage is a violation of "God's Will," have NO PLACE being codified into the legal system of a nation whose cornerstone is the SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. To allow the religious beliefs of one sect to become normatively authoritative and binding for the society as a whole sounds like Theocracy not Democracy to me.

2) Granting only "Civil Unions" while denying marital rights smacks of Separate But Equal, which we all know simply isn't. Banning or refusing to sanction same sex marriage is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. It is a blatant violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and it is no less egregious and than the so-called "Anti-Miscegenation" Laws that banned interracial marriages and also had wide-spread "popular" approval. Anti-miscegenation laws were only ruled unconstitutional in 1967!!!

Anti-Same Sex Marriage Prohibitions are genealogically related to Anti-Miscegenation Laws, which implicated anxieties about gender more than one might suspect. While for most of American history, white men could rape, or otherwise engage in sexual relations with black women with impunity, the hysterical fear of "racial impurity" and interracial marriage as an aberration that would cause our society's moral downfall, was directed primarily towards unions of black men with white women and not the other way around (let's not forget Thomas Jefferson's many biracial children with Sally Hemmings, he was criticized, but not impeached or lynched!)--white women being the instantiation par excellence of Possessive Individualism enjoyed by white males.

Following the abolition of slavery, no "property" was treated by the dominant culture as more intimate and defining of white manhood than the "possession" and domination of the white woman in the domestic sphere. To allow that most intimate "possession" to be shared with black men or men of color would be to acknowledge their equal manhood. But this was threatening to the very definition of citizenship embraced by the dominant order. For most of American history, full citizenship was defined in terms of an exclusive, invidious amalgam of whiteness, ownership/self-possession/domination, and masculinity, as well as being defined as fundamentally oppositional and antithetical to blackness(otherness),slavery/servitude/submission, and femininity.

Just as interracial marriage was seen as a threat to the very order of things that supported existing power relations, so Same-Sex Marriage threatens those who cling to these same malignant and fundamentally anti-democratic notions of selfhood and citizenship. For men to marry men and women to marry women, implies a breakdown in the traditional domestic power structure in the same way that interracial marriage did. It grants a legitimacy that desacralizes the "axis of evil" that comes into being when we lump race, class and gender together in an invidious manner equating whiteness and masculinity with possession, domination and power, and non-whiteness and femininity with submission and subordination.

The relations implied above and in the mainstream metaphor of heterosexual union are inherently hierarchical and exclusionary. What model of power relations is implied in same sex unions if not relations of equality, fraternity (forgive the pun, I mean sorority too, but without all the bad bleach jobs, fake tans, french manicures and kegger parties) and the liberty to choose how to live and who to love for oneself? And what could be more democratic?

interpreter of maladies

jhumpa lahiri's debut collection deserved the pulitzer prize it received. i finally read this book yesterday and was enchanted. usually i am not crazy about such spare prose, but the storytelling technique that lahiri employs to frame the dislocations attendant to transnationalism and globalization drew me into the fragmented worlds of her characters. i particularly enjoyed "a temporary matter," and was entranced by "the third and final continent," the ending of which made me cry. speaking of his american born son, the narrator, who has come to the US by way of the UK, says:

"In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave hisway, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, there there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in the new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

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for all your linguistic needs! what a kickass site. i love you language hat!

Себе, любимому, посвящает

Четыре.
Тяжелые, как удар.
"Кесарево кесарю - богу богово".
А такому,
как я,
ткнуться куда?
Где мне уготовано логово?
Если бы я был
Маленький,
как океан, -
на цыпочки волн встал,
приливом ласкался к луне бы.
Где любимую найти мне,
Такую, как и я?
Такая не уместилась бы в крохотное небо!
О, если б я нищ был!
Как миллиардер!
Что деньги душе?
Ненасытный вор в ней.
Моих желаний разнузданной орде
не хватит золота всех Калифорний.
Если б быть мне крсноязычным,
как Данте
или Петрарка!
Душу к одной зажечь!
Стихами велеть истлеть ей!
И слова
и любовь моя --
триумфальная арка:
пышно,
бесследно пройдут сквозь нее
любовницы всех столетий.
О, если б был я
тихий,
как гром, -
ныл бы,
дрожью объял бы земли одряхлевший скит.
Я если всей его мощью
выреву голос огромный, --
кометы заломят горящие руки,
бросаясь вниз с тоски.
Я бы глаз лучами грыз ночи -
о, если б был я
тусклый, как солце!
Очень мне надо
сияньем моим поить
земли отощавшее лонце!
Пройду,
любовищу мою волоча.
В какой ночи'
бредово'й,
недужной
какими Голиафами я зача'т -
такой большой
и такой ненужный?

1916
Владимир Маяковский

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A Shorter Oxford English Dictionary or a Norton Anthology

who says theory is dead?

"Gender-theory superstar Judith Butler takes on 9/11 and its aftermath in a new book -- written in clear English! But the task of postmodern theory, she argues, is more crucial now than ever."

By Astra Taylor
July 6, 2004
Copyright 2004 Salon.com
- - - - - - - - - - - -
EXCERPT: "The essays that make up "Precarious Life" seem to be underscored by a single question, one that motivates and connects them: Who counts as human? This is the problem that concerns her in her consideration of grief and mourning, her essay on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories and the Guantánamo piece, "Indefinite Detention." What Butler is analyzing are the ways in which some individuals are not protected by law. Unnamed and unmourned, they are not counted as fully human."

"As Butler warns in her preface, the 'foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate of democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views of the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity.'"

READ THE ARTICLE

生肖好玩儿

酉 鸡

一生总运势

　　鼠酉年生人，其性诚实多智慧兼伶俐，能与人交际，望得贵人提拔，抱大志多计谋，终遂捷径光明，且有带快热冷的心理，致自抱自弃的缺点，对自己不利的时多与计较，致见少利而生大财之嫌。 忠告：属鸡的人，远方男性女性都容易受异性引诱，恋爱的次数相当多，而且每一次都会付出真情，自尊心高，讨厌依赖别人，个性直率，所以并不是每种类型的人都合适你，因此在选择伴侣时，一定要三思而后行。 特性：保守、热心、漂亮、坦诚、幽默。 缺点：傲慢、自大、盲目崇.

优点
做事很稳定，有现代新潮派的大志向，脑筋 转动很快。性急，喜欢打扮自己，善於交际，有贵人相助，有心和毅力如鸡司晨一样有信心。交友广阔善於言辞，善於辩论又具说服力。对色彩感觉有独到之处。想到什麽便说什麽毫不保留，常与权威抗衡 刚愎自信力很强，喜爱豪华气派。爱好别人恭维，同时喜欢赞美别人，看不起 那些不修边幅的人。坦白活跃，勇敢风趣，机智多谋，专心一意，勤奋热情慷慨。个性好胜专注，凡事不愿落人之後，头脑反 应快。深思熟虑勤奋能干，富责任感严守纪律，讨厌游手好闲的人。

缺点
具有忽冷忽热的心理，处事往往纸上谈兵很少付诸行动。心理一有不满马上反应毫不隐瞒。一切以自我利益为中心，处事乐观但刻薄短视，常自以为是喜爱自吹自擂。说话不保留，易忽视旁人的感受与尊严。出言欠谨慎为社交上最大阻力。不会接纳别人的劝告却会名正言顺地去教训别人。不喜欢正式传统的装扮，而偏爱奇特的式样 喜欢唠叨，心胸狭窄，傲慢自大，性情急躁，爱慕虚荣。
【以上各项缺点经修持是可以克服的。】

性格
鸡年出生的人，坦白直率，想到什麽便说什麽。自视甚高，不喜欢他人在背後指责，对他人的要求也一样严格，较不易变通。严守纪律，色彩感觉敏锐。
　　　　　　　　　　　

事业
集中精力，全力投入，事业会因为您的努力卓然增色，事业的扩展让您更上一层。年轻者若想开创自己的事业，可以在今年开始，会有一个很好的开端。

爱情
回避家庭内部可能出现的口角。恋爱中人不能因为自己工作的繁忙忽视了对情侣的联系和关心。未婚者的成婚率高，需要自己的珍惜和重视。
大喜婚配： 牛(丑)、龙(辰)、蛇(己)
忌婚配： 鼠(子)、马(午)、兔(卯)

a few of my favorite things (in no particular order)

david bowie's hunky dory
henry miller's the tropic of cancer
red dragon fruit 火龙果
furry kitty tummies
qingshan lushui 青山录水
eye contact with strangers
arundhati roy's the god of small things
foot massages (receiving)
single-lidded eyes 单眼皮
pj harvey's dry
helen dewitt's the last samurai
chongqing mala huoguo'r 重庆麻辣火锅
live poetry readings in St. Petersburg
lack of inhibition
my dinner with andre
riding bareback
wittgenstein's philosophical investigations (he also wins the award for best preface)
passion fruit
furry kitty paws
talks that last all night
erguotou 二锅头
kisses, and more kisses
nan goldin's photographs that capture the beauty of transgender heroes, daring to be who they know they really are
freckles across the bridge of a most beloved nose
sisters who are also best friends
teachers with authority who deserve it
il postino
more kisses
scarlet harlot lipstick
black nail polish
hannah arendt's the human condition
nick cave's from her to eternity
blueberries
tequila
tieguanyin green tea 铁观音
anne sexton
wings of desire
passion
anything by alice fulton
compassion
logic
gomen wot
the ocean
bumblebee gobis
lorrie moore's the jewish hunter

the obsolescence of minimalism

Atlantic Unbound | January 24, 2001

Raymond Carver's reputation as an American master of short fiction is as good as etched in stone. But his hardbitten prose style has had its day

by Sven Birkerts (check out AGNI, the litmag he edits)
"...Doubtless there are many other forces in play, but the upshot is the same. The ground, the cultural soil—that element that our writers represent and from which they draw—has been completely spaded up and turned since Carver's day. The writer who now picks up his pen—or, as is more likely, turns on his laptop—tunes in to a very different frequency. Understatement, once very nearly reflexive, sounds suddenly wrong. The held-back sentence looks almost funny on the page; there is a perceptible pressure to open out, annex, pull some of that overwhelming ambient complexity into the circuitry of the sentence. And if this is an exaggeration, it is nonetheless true enough to warrant our attention.

Short sentences are—structurally—all alike. Every complicated sentence is complicated in its own way. Even a glance at some of the touted prose of recent years will confirm the new expressive plenitude—or chaos."

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

david foster wallace's oblivion

"...The narrator of "Good Old Neon" [one of the stories in the collection] (another ad man) is smothering in self-awareness. "My whole life I've been a fraud," he announces, relating a history of triumphs, each one curdled by his consciousness that "all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people." Admitting as much to a psychoanalyst only leads him to further spasms of self-loathing: "My confession of being a fraud and of having wasted time sparring with him over the previous weeks in order to manipulate him into seeing me as exceptional and insightful had itself been kind of manipulative.

"This dilemma, in which every layer of self-knowledge is nested inside yet another layer that scrutinizes it mercilessly for inauthenticity, is a Wallace trademark."

check out laura miller's review in salon.com of david foster wallace's new collection.

michael moore's message

EXCERPT PASTED FROM HIS WEBSITE
Sunday, July 4th, 2004
My First Wild Week with "Fahrenheit 9/11"... By Michael Moore

"** More people saw "Fahrenheit 9/11" in one weekend than all the people who saw "Bowling for Columbine" in 9 months.

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" broke "Rocky III’s" record for the biggest box office opening weekend ever for any film that opened in less