AddieStan

When's the revolution? In the line of AddieStan readers who seek to convince your blogstress that reality is no substitute for wishful thinking, your cybertrix's dear friend, Nancy the New York Artist, writes: I think that of all times we need to keep on having some sort of faith that good will win over evil, and that responding to the display with fear is exactly what they want. It's propaganda, and there are those who will buy into it, and there are others who have to fight to keep their faith in the intelligence of our neighbors... Jaded though she be, your Webwench truly does appreciate the sentiment expressed by the Artist. She does not necessarily find her own defeatism to be a good thing; it's just her thing--for your cybertrix lives to fight another day by getting her mind beyond November 2nd, a day she contemplates with a deep sense of foreboding. And so your blogstress asks her readers to consider this question above all else: What kind of art should...

You get what you pay for You'll recall that your blogstress's dear White Dragon (yes, dragons can be dear), provided AddieStan with a link to a remarkable clip (which has mysteriously disappeared from its Web location) of the president of the United States before an audience of women, discussing the problem of those pesky frivilous law suits that prevent ob/gyns from "practicing their love". Here's the president's riff, lifted from the transcript of Keith Olbermann's September 6th "Countdown" show on MSNBC: OLBERMANN: And one last political item in our No. 3 story. We mentioned last week that President Bush struck an odd tone in his acceptance speech by referencing the plight of doctors, specifically, OB-GYNs, who had to give up their practices due to legal and insurance costs. Not that it wasn‘t a valid point necessarily, just that it rang so oddly in a president‘s acceptance of his renomination, making the world safe for gynecology. ...

Cheese log It is with great pride that your blogstress cites AddieStan's listing on a charming site, The Toon Show presented by one Harry Claude Cat, in the category of "cheese log". (Hey, the cat has Al Franken there, too.) Today our feline friend treats us to Don Imus's interview with John Kerry, plus a delicious bit of Texas Air National Guard propaganda. As for cheese, your cybertrix imagines herself as an inventive blend of Velveeta and Camenbert: inescapably American and creamy-smooth, but with a bit of a bite.

Major arcana, no. 15 The correspondence keeps rolling in regarding your blogstress's prediction of a Republican win in the presidential contest. Karen, Executrix from Jersey, sent us this Wall Street Journal piece on the ostensibly tightening race, as seen by the Harris poll people. The Harris poll, conducted by telephone Sept. 9-13, shows Sen. Kerry leading Mr. Bush 48% to 47% among likely voters nationwide. The poll also found that a slender 51% to 45% majority doesn't believe that Mr. Bush deserves to be re-elected. Another reader points us to this Pew poll: Sept 16 - Pew: Bush 47 percent, Kerry 46, Nader 1 (likely voters). Margin of error 4 percentage points. Your cybertrix does indeed hope they're right, but she has ceased to believe the polls, since to do so would require a level of gymnastics in the mental and psychological departments of which she is capable only in the realm of good lovin'. Why? Because it is impossible to simultaneously accept ...

The quick and dirty How your blogstress hates to overdo her occassional "Sentence of the Week" and "Graf of Every Other (or So) Day" features, but this week has seen some excellent writing from some of your Webwench's favorite fellas. To wit, the very witty William Powers, whose editors at National Journal have seen the wisdom of expanding his porfolio from media-mavening to theorizing everything. For the maiden voyage of his new column, Off Message , Powers offers this gem: At every turn, strategy defeats candor. Superficiality trumps depth. Lincoln, schminkin. This is the 21st century, and it's all about winning, baby. Watch the political shows for a while, listen carefully to the operatives' patter, and Iraq doesn't feel like a war any more. It feels like a poker chip. And it gets better once he ties in some scary trends from Teenland.

Confluence Thanks to the inimitable Wonkette , your blogstress has discovered a fascinating blog called The Turnspit Daily , which appears to be the brainchild and house organ of one Josh Rhoderick. "The Turnspit Daily is a freethinking, progressive weblog focusing on American politics, religion, and their confluence," explains Mr. Rhoderick on his "About" page. Indeed it is, and indeed a great need for such a blog exists. In case you missed it, yesterday's Washington Post carried a sharp analysis of President Bush's religiosity by Alan Cooperman, who implies that the president's use of religious language does little to illuminate his actual beliefs, and "much about his faith remains opaque or open to interpretation." A must-read. Cooperman leaves open the possibility of shrewdness in the president's use of faith talk (a probability of which your blogstress wrote during the last election).

Who needs three branches when two will do? Perhaps your blogstress missed that day in civics class when they explained how Congress could trump the Constitution by creating laws that prohibit federal courts from arriving at a particular decision. But that's exactly what the Republican-led House of Representatives has decided to do. Reuters reports that on a party-line vote of 17-10, the House Judiciary Committee voted yesterday "to prevent federal courts from declaring as unconstitutional the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance." Your Webwench is confused. She has somehow gotten through life worshipping at the altar of our nation's civic religion--praying rosaries to Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson--in the mistaken belief that the Constitution was to be intepreted by the federal courts, that Congress was to make the laws, and the courts were to determine their constituionality. Did some kind of constitutional Vatican II happen while you...

Recovery from what? Our most excellent friend, Phillip Coons of DelusionalDuck.com , calls our attention to " target=resource window>this item on that brand of missionary that deems the missionary position mandatory for all humanity (within the bonds of holy matrimony, of course). Note that Mr. Coons has redesigned his informative Web site and given it a new name. The duck part, okay, your blogstress is down with: the guy lives in the wild and obviously identifies with that tasty creature. (Fits in nicely with his Navy background, too.) But your Webwench begs to differ on the "delusional" part. If only our leaders were as delusional as Mr. Coons, our nation would be in quite good shape right now.

Flubbo op of love The White Dragon, a reader very dear to your blogstress, sends us the following clip, c/o of the Dragon's friend, Murph, from MSNBC, whereby the president of the United States lauds the talents of gynos: Love docs

Okay, so maybe they won't win Having been roundly admonished by readers for writing from the convention floor that the Republicans were going to win the presidential election, your blogstress wishes to reconsider her prediction, however certain she is of her supernatual powers. "It's just not productive," said your cybertix's lifelong friend, Karen from Jersey, of your Webwench's oracle of doom. (Karen spoke as her daughter protested something at the U.N. and her son returned from playing football on what Karen described as "a normal day in heterosexual suburbia.") Yeah, but if it scares the cr*p out of people, maybe it is productive. Witness the windfall the other side is getting out of fear-mongering. Along similar lines, Michael Tomasky has a more nuanced piece appearing on The American Prospect Web site today. Since we already offered a sentence of the week several days ago, let us today serve up, from Tomasky, the graf of the day: ...

McCarthy's ghost She comes to this late, your blogstress admits, but a peculiar development is worth noting. Last month, it seems, a phase of the USA Patriot Act kicked in that all but demands a loyalty oath from the non-profit organizations to which federal government employees can donate via payroll deduction, a program known as the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). Under the USA Patriot Act (an Orwellian bit of nomenclature if there ever was one), organizations participating in the CFC must provide employee rosters to be matched against so-called terrorist watch lists. Any matches between names disqualifies the organzation's participation unless it fires the branded employee. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asserts that most such watch lists employed so far in other homeland security endeavors have been riddled with errors, and so it has withdrawn from the CFC program rather than comply with government vetting of its personnel rolls. The ACLU stands to lose...

Department of self-promotion Just to demonstrate that she toils not entirely alone in her garrett, your blogstress offers proof of her live interaction with actual media people. The occasion was the launch of TV Newser by MediaBistro.com . TV Newser is the product of media wunderkind Brian Stelter, who created the famed CableNewser site from his dorm room. Kid is way too smart for the good of us age-before-beauty types.

Giving a tragedy its due An extraordinary piece of writing appears today on the New York Times editorial page, a concise explanation of the tragedy after the tragedy that was the attacks of September 11, 2001. It's been some time since we last conferred the "Sentence of the Week" title on the work of any particular writer, and since this comes from an unsigned editorial, we may never know the author of this elegantly rendered nugget of wisdom (Staples?): The moment vanishes, and what we are left with are impressions, recreations and the solid residue of fact, which doesn't merely lie there waiting to be picked up but must be carefully elicited. The tragedy after the tragedy, of course, is the simultaneous reluctance to truly look at the deeper meaning and precipitating events of the viciousness visited upon us while selected images of that day become appropriated as political symbols. The simplistic idea that our nation was hit because "they hate our ...

A belated "by your leave" Out among the denizens of Our Nation's Capital this morning, your blogstress took all manner of guff for having disappeared from the blogosphere for the last week without notice. All she has to say for herself is that Blogstress does as Blogstress pleases, and for some reason, she has not wanted to blog. Perhaps it was the hangover of the hate vibe she ingested while covering the Republican National Convention. She's still not sure what to make of the whole deal, and she's certain that much has yet to be said about what actually transpired last week in the city so nice they named it twice--the hundreds of unnoticed arrests and detentions, the sight of the city where anything goes suddenly becoming the city where nothing went unless the authorities--often in possession of semi-automatic rifles--said it could. Then there was the reality of one's hometown occupied by an enemy that neither understood it nor cared about it, except f...

Day of rest WASHINGTON, DC--Wouldn't it be nice if a health care package came with every job, and if every job paid a living wage? Wouldn't it be cool if everybody got overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week? Oh, well. Guess we should be happy for the 8 hours off that some of us get paid for today. Your blogstress wishes all a Happy Labor Day. Now, rest up, dammit!

Future shock NEW YORK, NY--Favorite line from the president's speech: We are on the path to the future and we are not turning back. Nice to know we plan to keep the planet moving in its orbit. (And somebody got paid, probably rather well, to write that line.) Speaking of Alvin Toffler, his biggest booster appeared in the dignitary stand along with the vice president and his family, and former New York Senator (and vice presidential candidate) Jack Kemp. The biggest booster of Toffler's Future Shock ? Why, defrocked House Speaker Newt Gingrich, that's who--and he's obviously in some stage of rehabilitation. In fact, one might say that Newt is on the path to the future and he's not turning back.

Grabbing the apple NEW YORK, NY (Madison Square Garden)--A reporter colleague from a very reliable publication tells your blogstress that she witnessed a young woman dressed in a garment festooned with anti-Bush slogans roughed-up by security personnel before they knocked her down and dragged her off. She appeared to be one of the Axis of Eve protesters. She was standing, watching the proceedings when she was attacked, says your blogstress's source. Throughout the Garden during the course of the convention were security guys who looked like Secret Service, with the curly-cue wire coming out of their ears and everything, but who actually worked for the GOP operations team. Many of them applauded throughout Bush's speech tonight. I saw one of them block Al Franken's path, apparently for the hell of it, on the first night of the convention as the comedian tried to report from the floor. After he turned Franken away, a colleague of his said, "I'm sorry sir, you can...

Drop another bomb on your mosque NEW YORK, NY--Noting with interest the song chosen to close the convention, your cybertrix thought the lyrics (above) to the piece selected were frighteningly appropriate to the ticket. What? Wait that's? You mean that's "love", not bomb? Are you sure? No, I'm sure I heard "mosque". You say it's "heart"? But the rest is right, right? Just one word? Oh. Let's try again. It's actually "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," which apparently has something to do with bombs, mosques and democracy in the Middle East.

We are so screwed NEW YORK, NY--Greetings from inside the hall where your president just spoke. With the hard energy of true believers piercing your blogstress's body armour (a rather arresting bustier that John Kerry, no doubt, would have declined to pay for), this your blogstress can virtually assure you: they're gonna win. (And we don't mean those guys nominated in Boston.)

Help from the swing states How disheartening to see yet another moderate carry giant buckets of water for the president. Tonight we witnessed pro-choice New York Gov. George Pataki laud President Bush just as the latter was to restate his regressive social agenda. Particularly annoying to your blogstress was the show of bringing to their feet the delegations of the three swing states about which Pataki told 9-11 stories. The stories were about truly touching displays of support: one thousand Oregonians coming to the city right after the attacks to take 1,000 hotel rooms in their bid to revive New York's economy; the young Pennsylvanians who gave up to a Brooklyn firehouse the $900 in savings they had set aside for a trip to Disneyworld; the Iowans who sent 100,000 quilts to rescue and recovery workers at Ground Zero. The annoying part was in the fact that Republican state delegations were taking credit for the acts of thousands of people, a few of whom just might have been Democr...