OK, so I’m a lot more productive in the morning when I don’t have the radio on, but when I heard Rob Tannenbaum of Blender magazine say this today it was a laugh out loud moment that I am so glad I didn’t miss:
The Super Bowl is as American as the death penalty and children without health insurance.
I’d love to see a Tag Team Caged Death Match with Keith Olbermann and Rob Tannenbaum versus Bill O’Reilly and Curt Schilling.
I have no idea what this song means, but it does have a lyric appropriate to the ongoing financial crisis:
Who took the money?
Who took the money away? …
Regulate Wall Street? Stop making sense.
Something that really fits today was written 32 years ago by Warren Zevon:
Everybody’s desperate trying to make ends meet
Work all day, still can’t pay the price of gasoline and meat
Heck, even vegetarians are having a hard time making ends meet.
If I was in Congress I’d tell the admnistration that I’ll sign the bailout bill but only if Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and George Bush perform this number:
Saw something about Palin and witchcraft, so naturally this song has been playing in my head:
And it looks like folks are beginning to jump off the Sarah Bandwagon:
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. …
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. …
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. …
Props to Kathleen Parker for the nicely-written opinion. Of course she opens herself up for accusations of being a misogynist and — gasp! — being a Bad Republican. But, geez Louise, the writing is on the wall. Palin is a late-season call-up. She’s a solid double-A player trying to make a splash in the bigs. But she can’t hit a breaking ball, much less a major league fastball, and out in the field she’s shown she has no glove. And she throws like a girl.
No bat, no glove, no arm. She has to go back to the minors for more seasoning.
OK, this has absolutely nothing to do with dating the Nice Republican. Even before I met him I wanted to delete my Daily Kos account. I’ve been doing some housecleaning — the real kind and the cyberspace kind — just trying to get things in order. Cleaned up and rearranged things in the basement, cleaned out the car and vacuumed all the crud off the floors, deleted old email accounts, etc. It’s like spring cleaning, only in the fall. But for some reason when you sign up with Kos it’s for life:
Deleting Accounts
Accounts are forever, or at least as long as DailyKos remains in existence. Don’t ask to have your account deleted. Especially, don’t publicly demand that your account be deleted, as this is virtually certain to lead to large amounts of mockery. See GBCW.
Married for life? What, Kos wants us to be Pope-Certified Roman Catholics?
Hey, it’s not like I’ve gone all conservative or anything. I read the New York Times and The New Yorker, I’m a big fan of Keith Olbermann, I went to my Democratic caucus and cheered “Yes we can!” in support of Barack Obama. I just never go to Kos anymore and wanted to get out of their way and make a little room on their servers. I guess Kos must have enough money to maintain a big database of users, some of whom are no longer active. Still, they want dollars:
If you use ad blocking software while viewing Daily Kos, you’re getting all the benefits of our site but we’re not getting any of the advertisement revenue associated with your visits. This site relies on ad revenue for daily operations: a decrease in the number of ads seen means a decrease in the funding available to run the site, to pay those that work on it, and to create improved site features.
Yo, Markos! I use Adblock Plus. If you won’t let me delete my account then I won’t view your stinking ads. So there.
I wouldn’t have brought this up except that I tried to delete my Washington Post account this morning so I could register a different username. When I registered on that site a long time ago they didn’t have a comments feature. Now that they do I’d like to leave some comments, but I don’t want the username I picked to be published (it’s not my real name, but it’s too closely associated with me) and — again — I don’t want to clutter up their servers with old data. But so far I can’t figure out how to delete the account. I can register a new one, but leaving the old data in cyberspace is akin to leaving space junk floating around out in the Universe. It’s just so untidy. This is what happens when Microsoft writes a new operating system: instead of writing some nice, clean code from scratch they just pile it higher and deeper onto the old code, which is why you need a minimum of 2GB of memory just to run Vista and God help you if you want to run any major apps on top of that.
Barb commented:
Evil! A Republican? How fair and balanced of you! I’ve wondered how Carville and Matalan make it work. Good luck to you and your man.
Thanks, Barb. Maybe I’ll start a Kos diary all about how wonderful my Nice Republican is and how happy we are together. Maybe that’ll be enough for them to ban me.
Or even delete my account ….
OK, so I realize I haven’t been posting a lot here. It’s not like there has been nothing to write about:
The American financial industry — I’ve done my share of effing up in my life, but when I eff up I wind up paying for it myself. I think my problem is that I eff up in little ways. If I could eff up with a capital Eff (Hello, Wall Street!) then maybe someone will come in and bail me out. (Hello, Warren Buffett!) Getting someone else to pay for your bad karma — priceless.
Sarah Palin — I haven’t been following the news very closely lately, but it occurred to me last week that I hadn’t heard hardly anything about her in a while, not even any staged appearances before adoring crowds of Republicans. I was wondering if she was hanging with Dick Cheney at the Undisclosed Location.
Political miscegenation — I read this a while back: The Carville-Matalin Conundrum. (A really great advice column; her regular readers contribute a ton of perceptive and informed comments.) It is beginning to hit home because I’ve started seeing a Republican. But he’s a nice Republican, like Abraham Lincoln and Lowell Weicker are nice Republicans.
A recent road trip — Blew past a Prius on the interstate. Peeked over to see if DP was driving it, but he wasn’t. If it had been DP and if Lou had been riding shotgun I probably would have crashed my car.
OK, so it’s Wednesday and people are still whining about the call Ed Hochuli made in the Chargers-Broncos game.
I missed most of yesterday’s show (the gold medal rugby match at the Paralympics was much more interesting) and so I missed most of Tuesday’s whine. But here it is Wednesday and they are still going at it. I suppose emails, phone calls, and the chatter on DP’s “blog” tell him that it’s a topic most fans want to discuss. But for me this has reached a T.O. level of disinterest. I.e., time to turn off the radio.
It’s not that the situation wasn’t a mess and that the NFL doesn’t need to clarify its rules. It’s just that Hochuli has probably made a million calls in his career as a ref and this is like the one that anyone remembers. The NFL has said that it will review the situation. That works for me. Can we talk about something else now?
I enjoyed the Archie Manning interview in the first hour and would like to hear John Smoltz later on today’s show. But cannot bear to listen to anything else about The Blown Call.
Actually, it’s pretty nice sitting here without the radio on. I might just bag the rest of the live show today and wait for the Smoltz interview to be posted on DP’s Web site.
What would Ed Hochuli do?
He’s probably leave the radio off so that he can focus on his work.
Way to go, Ed. I’ll do the same.
Cold, grey, and rainy here, not at all like 9/11/01.
I’ve heard about “9/11 fatigue.” Apparently some people were getting tired of the memorials, the news coverage, etc. I agree that it can be a bit much. But the emotions are real, not contrived. And it’s part of our history, so we should remember. Americans like to flatter ourselves by saying that we are a “forward-looking people” who are focussed on the future and what it holds. This is just an excuse for the fact that we are so poor at understanding our history.
I’ve avoided news coverage of the 9/11 anniversary. I’ll catch up with it later. I prefer mulling things over for myself for a while. In thinking about it my mind wandered to songs with the theme of death; Ralph Stanley’s “O Death” came to me and I was glad to find his a cappella version, and post it here. I guess when it’s your time to go you just go; you don’t get to ask Death to skip your turn. But who’s to say when someone’s time is up?
OK, so there are a bunch of people over there, but not the zillion reporters and television cameras that were there for the Olympics.
After two solid weeks of Michael Phelps/Usain Bolt/Redeem Team/Shawn Johnson/Nastia Liukin Mania the Paralympics (i.e., the parallel Olympics) are being treated like a poor second cousin. A really poor second cousin who lives on the other side of the tracks. This is how the lesser-known sports like table tennis and field hockey get treated during the regular Olympics. I guess this is how American soccer fans feel when the World Cup is going on: There is this major event happening in another part of the world but for most Americans it might was well be happening on Mars.
I’ve been able to find news and videos of the Paralympics at ParalympicSport.tv and at Universal Sports. There have been a few stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I’m really glad for the Times’ Rings blog.
DP always talks about rooting for a good story line. If the Paralympics don’t provide great story lines I don’t know what does.
And while I’m still interested in mainstream sports and current events I’m getting sick of hearing about Tom Brady (he’s a great player, but some people are acting as if the president got assassinated — it’s an unfortunate injury, not a tragedy of Biblical proportions) and Sarah Palin (it’s Hillary Redux: if one criticizes the woman you are automatically branded as sexist). And I’m really sick of watching the markets sink further and further every day. My once chicken-sized nest egg is the now the size of a parakeet.
So for me the Paralympics aren’t just an interesting sporting event, they’re a respite from the other stuff I get bombarded with every day. I hope the baseball playoffs and NFL season are interesting because the way the presidential race is shaping up I’m going to need a heck of a lot of respite from political news from now until 4 November.
Palin’s Teen Daughter Is Pregnant; New G.O.P. Tumult
Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can’t they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
What’s the matter with kids today?— from ‘Bye ‘Bye Birdie
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
