| Friday, November 7th, 2008 |
| 6:09 pm |
KISW Racist Joke Friday
So tonight Melissa and I were listening to the radio and because there was nothing else on we stopped to listen to KISW. They were doing a segment called 'Bad Joke Friday'. This week the apparent subject was Barak Obama and the jokes included (I am paraphrasing here): "Knock Knock Who's there? Eye's Eye's who Ayes da new President" "How do you know that Barak Obama got elected President? They replaced the status of liberty with Aunt Jemima holding waffles in one hand and fried chicken in the other." "What do John F Kennedy and Barak Obama have in common? Nothing...YET" That was all I could take before I got disgusted and changed the station. I called them but the person I talked with defended the segment and indicated that they weren't responsible for the content because LISTENERS were the ones telling the jokes. They might have a right to provide a forum for this sort of racism and bigotry but we, as consumers have a right to ensure that our money doesn't go to support them. If you are as offended by this as I am I suggest that you contact the station to let them know: http://www.kisw.com/Email: hairclub@kisw.com I am also going to contact their advertisers to inform them of what happened and to request that they pull their advertising. If they don't, then I will be doing my best to organize a boycott. They have every right to exercise their free speech and say what they want about the President Elect, the same way we have a right to not spend our money with businesses that support that speech. Spread the word... make sure that reasonable people know and are able to take action on this. Current Mood:  Livid |
| Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 |
| 9:46 am |
Victory lap
Before we get too busy patting ourselves on the back lets consider the sobering thought that across this great nation we may be ready to elect an African American president but bigotry is alive and well. Bans on gay marriage passed in three states (CA, FL, and AZ). It's a painful setback, but the victory in the presidential race gives me hope that this is only a setback. This is one of the final frontiers of the civil rights movement, and we cannot give up the fight simply because a few battles have been lost. |
| Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 |
| 7:09 pm |
Calling it
PA and OH went for Obama. It's over. He has 207 EV's now. The idea that he would loose anything on the West Coast is completely insane. WA = 11 OR = 5 CA = 55 That's more than enough, everything else is icing on the cake now. |
| 12:18 pm |
Predictions
So I've avoided this up till this point but now, at the last minute, I'm going to go ahead and post my final electoral predictions. I'm giving the majority of the tossup states to Obama. I think that polling (because it excluded cell phone only individuals and tends to exclude new voters) has underestimated the level of support for the Obama campaign by enough to swing most of the toss up's into the Dem column. We'll see how it plays out in reality, but I'm on the record now so we'll see how I do: **UPDATE** A reminder from Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com that exit polls suck and should be ignored. Wait for the real returns! http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit.html |
| Monday, November 3rd, 2008 |
| 8:18 pm |
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| Thursday, October 30th, 2008 |
| 9:43 am |
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| Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 |
| 11:38 am |
Hypocracy... your name is Fox News
Anyone out there remeber the reation John Edwards' $400 Haircut? Of COURSE Fox News wouldn't dream of treating those two very comperable events any differently. |
| Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 |
| 1:58 pm |
Scraping the bottom of the barrel
The folks over at NRO are getting a little desperate to find good news for McCain/Palin in the polling out there. How desperate you ask? This Desperate.Don't want to click through? That's them analyzing how close the returns are in the NICKELODEON KIDS CHOICE POLL. The REALLY sad news? Obama still leads by 2 points. |
| Monday, October 20th, 2008 |
| 11:36 am |
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| Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 |
| 10:45 pm |
Trauma
Tonight while I was serving up dinner there was the sound of brakes locking up outside our house, followed by an impact and the unmistakable yelp of a dog in pain. Melissa popped out of the bedroom and I moved to the door. Outside it was pouring down rain, and in the road just down from our house there was a girl crouched over a dog in the street. The dog was clearly alive and as I approached it attempted to stand only to immediately fall to the ground again. I offered any assistance that she might require. One of my neighbors had beat me out there and he offered her his cell phone. I ran inside and grabbed a flashlight to help warn away cars since the section of the street where the dog was hit was very dark, without streetlights to show our location. I was only out there for a few more minutes before the girls mother arrived. I offered to help them load the dog into the car, and the girls mother warned me that the dog could be a bit snippy. I told her that I was completely unconcerned about that and should the dog bite me I would understand. The dog did not bite me, although it did nip at me a bit when I pushed it up onto the seat and that was because I had to push on the injured part of the animal to get it into the vehicle. The girl and her mother took off for the emergency vet. I returned to my house to wash the blood from my arms and face. |
| Friday, October 3rd, 2008 |
| 9:12 am |
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| Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 |
| 7:38 pm |
Living the Caricature
So, that brilliant SNL skit with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin is sexist according to the McCain campaign. Seriously, that's what their spokesperson Carly Fiorina is saying on all the cable talk shows currently: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26743182/I want you to pay special attention to this particular quote: "“The portrait was very dismissive of the substance of Sarah Palin, and so in that sense, they were defining Hillary Clinton as very substantive, and Sarah Palin as totally superficial,” McCain adviser Carly Fiorina told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Monday. “I think that continues the line of argument that is disrespectful in the extreme, and yes I would say sexist.”" Get that? An assessment of Sarah Palin's policy positions that finds them to be lacking in substance is sexism. At first I figured that they were just playing the victim card as aggressively as possible knowing that even if it backfires it keeps the news off real issues. Any day the Republicans can keep the conversation on ridiculous crap instead of substantive analysis of their record is a good day for them. Still, the more I think about it and the more I see the various Republican talking heads spinning these ridiculous claims of sexism I can't help but think that this is something deeper. For years figures on the right have created this caricature of the feminist movement, a convenient straw man that they can beat up on. In that caricature feminists are all reactionary victims who spend their time combing the airwaves looking for things to get angry about. Now that they are attempting to embrace feminism in order to defend their very poor VP pick suddenly they end up personifying the very thing they have railed against for so many years. I can't help but think that there is a connection here. That after so many years spewing this bullshit they actually believe their own lies. It's like their strategists said, 'Ok, we have to be more like feminists now, we know JUST how to do that!' I can't help but think that this is going to come back to bite them on the ass. |
| Sunday, September 14th, 2008 |
| 1:18 am |
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| Sunday, September 7th, 2008 |
| 2:52 pm |
Unexpected movie goodness
I decided to put my belief that the writer/director of a movie is a better indicator of quality than the actors to the test. Southland Tales, a movie starring 'The Rock' and Justin Timberlake, is not the sort of movie that I would normally consider renting. Still, after discovering that it was written and directed by Richard Kelly who wrote and directed Donnie Darko I gave it a chance. The cast is insane, it contains a ton of different actors that are well known and unexpected. The story line is disjointed and confusing at times but still amusing and interesting. I'm going to watch it again to see if I can sort out a bit more of what the movie is trying to communicate. I highly recommend watching it. |
| Friday, September 5th, 2008 |
| 12:37 pm |
I love you John Stewart
Jon Stewart once more manages to cut directly through the bullshit. The only unfortunate thing is that none of this blowhards will ever be called to account for their hypocracy since they all exist within an echo chamber of pro-right wing news outlets. In other news I think that the attacks by the GOP on Obama's time as a community organizer did a lot of show the ugly character of that party than it did to damage Obama, especially as communities around the country are hard hit by the tanking economy. Basically what they were saying was, "God, can you believe that this guy used to spend his time helping POOR people!?" Running a multinational corporation, spending taxpayer money to aid business interests, or cutting public services to finance a hockey stadium, those are all accomplishments that the GOP can understand. But the idea that someone would actually go out there and attempt to help those people who have been forgotten in our system doesn't make any sense to them. In a time when more and more people desperately need that help, when the system is failing much more than it is succeeding, that's a very dangerous statement to make to the American people. |
| Friday, August 29th, 2008 |
| 8:52 pm |
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| Sunday, August 24th, 2008 |
| 10:05 pm |
Olympic musings
Watching the closing ceremonies in Beijing and I'm quite impressed with the pagentry and elaborate extravagance of the opening and closing ceremonies. This is clearly a coming out for the Chinese regime, where they announce themselves to the world in grand fashion. I can only think of one other Olympics that was anything like it... That would be the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin. Lets hope that's where the comparison ends. |
| 3:20 pm |
Case in point
Last night I was watching this show on the Discovery channel called 'Destroyed in Seconds'. It was a stupid show, but all we have is basic cable and I couldn't sleep. About halfway through the show there was a segment that almost perfectly summed up the war in Iraq for me. Some US troops found a house that at one point had been occupied by 'Al Qaeda' (because all the bad guys out there are Al Qaeda). The house had been used as a torture chamber. The was clear evidence of it all over the place, pretty awful stuff. So our boys decided to teach those bastards a lesson, and they called in an airstrike... on the empty house. 6 JADAM munitions dropped from a B1 and all that remained of the structure was a smoldering crater 10 - 15 feet deep. Apparently no one had a cheap satchel charge or C4 on them that could have achieved the same result for a fraction of the cost. We had to drop 6 $75,000+ bombs, plus god knows how much it cost to fly them to the target, to destroy AN EMPTY HOUSE. We could have hired 50 of the locals at $1000/day to tear the thing down with their bare hands, salvaged the material, left the land in an immediately usable state, saved a ton of money, and done more to win over the population. Instead, we had to send a message to the people of Iraq. That message was; when bad people do bad things the US will show up 6 months late, not even try to catch the people responsible, spend the combined yearly income of your entire village to destroy a perfectly good structure, destroy it in such a way that it will take twice as much work to make the area usable again compared with a more traditional demolition, stand at the edge of the smoldering crater and say a few words about how this represents the 'victory of freedom over terror', and then leave. As I watched I could hear voices chanting in the back of my head, "USA! USA! USA!" |
| Thursday, August 21st, 2008 |
| 9:48 pm |
Isn't that the way
It's always AFTER the baby shower that you start seeing the stuff you should have asked for. Click through to read the whole article, funny as HELL!  |
| Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 |
| 8:54 pm |
Troublemaker
Our son has decided that the outside world is a big scary place, and he'd rather stay put. Melissa's labor never made it past the early stages and now it's stopped entirely. Tomorrow we go in for some testing and decisions will be made regarding the timings of inductions. At the moment they have scheduled her induction for Saturday, but Melissa would rather not go that route if it can be at all avoided. I don't blame her, there are many reasons why it's better to wait rather than go through an induction. Still, I'm on the fence because I want to see my son and I am tired of waiting! Anyway, in anticipation of the arrival of our little tyke I purchased a little gadget to allow us to transfer video from our video camera onto our computer. I've started the process of transferring our tapes but in going through the first one we found some footage that I had to share. |
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