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Showing posts from April, 2006

Spirit
On tolerance

In order to justify blogging on the Sabbath, your blogstress offers a new feature that will appear each Sunday: a spiritual thought for the day. Herewith a snippet from Chapter 58 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu, as translated by the great Stephen Mitchell : If a country is governed with tolerance, the people are comfortable and honest. If a country is governed with repression, the people are depressed and crafty. Prozac, anyone?

New York turns out for peace

Sunday watch: Pay close attention to how the major broadcast and cable news outlets cover today's impressive protest march , through the streets of Manhattan, against the war in Iraq. Will it be given its due? The day after tomorrow promises to be another big protest day, this one against the draconian anti-immigrant legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives. Your blogstress takes some small comfort in the fact that today's protest went off without the orange netting of protesters , or the illegal detention of dissidents that marked the arrival of the Republican Party for its 2004 convention in the city so nice they named it twice. Despite the danger, protest marches appear to have not lost their cachet; in fact they're gaining steam as a global trend. Alas, a glance at this month's issue of the fashionista's fashion mag, W , shows some rather grim and Gothic looks for fall. It's feeling a bit like, as one imagines it, Berlin in the late

More on Kristol melt-down

A far better recounting than your blogstress was able to muster this morning of Colbert feasting on Kristol under glass appears under the nom de guerre "background No15e" at TPM Cafe : Colbert settled in and sized him up. Kristol came out strong trying to deflect any attack by preemptively taking credit for what will likely be a great performance by Stephen this Saturday night. Stephen stopped him dead in his tracks with a straight to the face. Kristol rocked back on his heels a bit dazed at how badly his joke had backfired. Colbert laid into him..."How's that New American Century," he asked with all the sadistic glee of Edward G. Robinson asking, "Where's your God now, Moses?" Unprepared for the frontal assault, Kristol stumbled, fumbled, and clutched the table to keep from sliding into oblivion. You could hear the little voice in his head screaming, "Help meeeeeee!" He took a standing eight count and wobbled back to the fray, realizing

Kristol mauled by baby eagle daddy

If you've been locked away in your boudoir , tasting bon bons and other fine things, then you may have missed the fact that the San Francisco Zoo has named a baby eagle after Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert, and that the latter speaks of the fledgeling as "Stephen, Jr." And you may have missed the wild success of "The Colbert Report," a fast-paced, writerly send-up of the dominant talk show in the line-up of that fair and balanced news network. It appears that the neo-con pundit and former Dan Quayle speechwriter Bill Kristol unwittingly stepped right into an eagle's nest when he submitted to an interview by the quick-cogitating Colbert, who not only made mincemeat of Kristol -- a booster of the Iraq war that is the main product of the Project for the New American Century -- but threw Kristol so far off his game as to get the brains behind Mr. Potatoe-head to utter a stupid and misogynist statement. One wonders what possessed Kristol to appear on

Your money, their secret

Aided by an apparently disinterested mass media, the House yesterday passed a bill that, according to the Associated Press (AP), will "greatly increase" the funds available to the national intelligence director, John Negroponte -- by how much, you and your blogstress, dear reader, are forbidden to know. Seems the cost of the bill is classified. That this story has shown up in only a handful of outlets today reflects the media's aiding and abetting, whether by default or cowardice, the Republicans' not-so-secret plan to keep all manner of things secret from the people of the United States. From the AP via the Seattle Times : Democrats expressed outrage that the Republican-led House Rules Committee would not allow any of their five proposed amendments to be considered by the full House, including measures to expand congressional oversight of President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and the intelligence on Iran. Mad enough yet?

Blizzard?

Your blogstress appears to stand corrected on her verdict of Treasury Secretary John Snow as a dullard. Apparently, the former railroad captain is an object of some fascination to those obsessed with monetary policy, as is your cybertrix's foxy (but, alas, spoken for) friend, Glenn Kellis, who writes: I was chuffed to read your reference to the mind numbing John Snow. Might you be taking a slight interest in monetary policy? If you are you may have noticed the US dollar is in a hell hole swan dive. See this chart . The Mogambo has some interesting things to say this week. And sorry to be a jerk and point out that CSX and the railroads in general have been kicking ass for quite some time, mainly because they transport a lot of raw materials and commodities like coal, timber, iron, add the like which are being exported to China and India at record rates. Here's a glimpse at their ass-kicking. Well, as soon as your Webwench can schedule some quality time for consuming bon-bo

Snow day

Were there ever any doubt of the role of Fox News as the mouthpiece of the Bush administration, it has been dispelled today with the appointment of Fox pundit Tony Snow as the replacement for beleaguered White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Snow, no doubt, is feeling a bit vindicated among his Fox News colleagues after having been pushed out, several years ago, to the glamour-challenged world of Fox's radio network from his Sunday morning TV gig as host of Fox News Sunday. Considering, as documented by Media Matters for America , the numerous instances of prevarication, disinformation and bald-faced toadying exercised by Mr. Snow, liberals are rightfully horrified at the president's choice of a press secretary -- the official who exemplifies an administration's accountability to the American people via the nation's mass media. (In fact, Snow has engaged in a bit of a pissing match with Media Matters, which the watchdog group appears to be winning .) Herewith a

Mein Kampf for the 21st century

Your blogstress has been getting a lot of Al Franken these days, it seems, having found herself in the studio audience for yesterday's road version of Franken's Air America radio program , which was great fun. (The program broadcast for two days from the Jack Morton Auditorium at George Washington University, here in Our Nation's Capital, before moving on to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for a day.) Woefully underreported, though, was the news Helen Thomas made as Franken's guest when the host asked her to answer her own question -- you know, the one the doyenne put to our president at his latest press conference: Why did you really go to war? When asked why she thought Bush went to war in Iraq, Ms. Thomas attributed the attack to "the neo-con manifesto," which she described as "their Mein Kampf for the 21st Century." But what do you really think, madame ? Mme. Thomas explained her interpretation of that manifesto as the neo-cons' desire to &q

The sad state of our media
Brock, Franken, Clift and Helen Thomas explain

LINK TO VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS Holding court at the Jack Morton Auditorium at George Washington University yesterday was a most distinguished panel comprising David Brock, Al Franken, Eleanor Clift and the uncontested doyenne of the Washington press corps, the indefatigable Helen Thomas. Sponsored by Media Matters for America , the panel's focus was the Great Media Problem -- the ascendence of a disingenuous right-wing media and the cowering of mainstream media before the right's perceived might. Brock , once a self-described hit-man on the staff of the American Spectator , has made it his mission to expose the disinformation disseminated by the right, and he delivered an informative treatise on the means and measures by which the right does its dirty deeds. Eleanor Clift is one of few out liberals who has survived as such in the mainstream media, and she has found her rarified place not always appreciated by self-professed progressives. Recently, Clift penned a column for her em

Chertoff flak has short eyes

Whatever it takes to be a political appointee at the Department of Homeland Security is something your cyberscribe does not want to catch. At the helm, an egocentric incompetent -- at least as a protector of the homeland -- reigns. We know how the administration gutted and screwed FEMA, replacing career emergency professionals with political hacks and contractors, the conditions that led up to the unnecessary loss of life wrought by Hurricane Katrina. We've known about the budget crunch in the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that saw inspectors unable to fill the tanks of their official vehicles last summer because creditors had cut off the government's gasoline cards. And the rigging of assignments in the Transportation Security Administration and Customs & Border Protect that were designed to purge the personnel roles. Despite your blogstress's familiarity with these and many, many more of DHS's messes, nothing prepared her for the news com

The Hammer is hangin' --
with Barney Frank?

Just as he made his mug shot a happy head shot, today Tom DeLay used the occasion of his imminent resignation from the House of Representatives, on the heels of a plea deal for a former aide who has pleaded guilty to being party to running a criminal enterprise out of the majority leader's office, to take something of a surreal victory lap around the political talk shows. Particularly strange was DeLay's turn on Hardball with Chris Matthews . After making a big fuss over DeLay's profession of faith -- even quoting a right-wing minister friend of the Hammer's who compared DeLay to the crucified Christ -- Matthews asked DeLay if he believed Republicans are morally superior to Democrats, DeLay said no. When asked to name a moral Democrat, DeLay replied, "Barney Frank," the openly gay congressman from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Even despite Frank's "lifestyle?" asked Matthews. "I don't agree with homosexuality," DeLay said,

Mon Dieu! L'hammer est fini!
(or, DeLay is done)

Yet another amazing day in Our Nation's Capital. It appears that we won't have Tom DeLay to kick around anymore. The bug-man is said to be ready to withdraw from his congressional race, with the Abramoff probe edging closer to his door. Though it appears the story was broken by Time , your blogstress herewith links you to The Washington Post , which has done such comprehensive work on the Abramoff scandal. Mes amis , let's all light candles for the rescue of the good people of the State of Georgia from the clutches of Ralph Reed, who is running for lieutenant governor. You see, Mr. Reed, once the choir-boy-faced evil genius behind the Christian Coalition, is quite caught up in the Abramoff mess himself, as Max Blumenthal reminds us . And so are Dobson and Minnery. How delicious it is to see the pious leaders of the right exposed for what they truly are. Of course, it won't make a whit of difference if no one in the opposition party stands up to say something like

Outside the box

Indeed, it has been a while since your blogstress has checked in with her public, and for that she is most contrite. For the last several years, your cybertrix has felt the need to accept employment by others and, in recent months, the phenomenon of the pesky day job gobbled up all of the time one would ordinarily use for living and blogging (a.k.a virtual living). So, your écrivaine turned in her BlackBerry and hightailed it back to her beloved Oppo Factory, finding herself better suited to a life of creative poverty than one of well remunerated but restrained prose. But enough about her. On this evening’s edition of MSNBC’s Countdown , Keith Olbermann entertained the sporadically amusing Michael Musto in a conversation about celebrities and their foibles. Now, your Webwench is prepared to accept at face value the judgment of the critics on Sharon Stone’s latest feature, Basic Instinct II , a film your net-tête will not be seeing. And she let it roll off when the man who review