Starring Barack Obama as Luke Skywalker!
And apparently I missed the "Baracky" video last month. And it's been pulled because MGM claimed it violated its copyright. So watch this & enjoy before it too gets pulled down.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Not Going to Happen
NYTimes (Reuters): McCain Slowly But Surely Distancing Self From Bush
How can he distance himself when a) he's supported Bush's disastrous policies for the last seven years; and b) Bush's disastrous policies are his policies?
He's the McSame as McBush:
They're in lock-step on the economy:
How can he distance himself when a) he's supported Bush's disastrous policies for the last seven years; and b) Bush's disastrous policies are his policies?
He's the McSame as McBush:
They're in lock-step on the economy:
Obama on Letterman
'Top 10 Interesting Facts about Barack Obama' - Presented by Barack Obama. The Late Show with David Letterman
Obama in Indiana
Obama talking to voters in Indiana about the campaign and the gas tax holiday foolishness.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Happy Anniversary, John McCain
Or should I call you John W. McBush? This is a very short video clip of McCain on TV touting Mission Accomplished Day.
Happy Commander Codpiece Day!
Celebrate Mission Accomplished! Five years ago George W. Bush triumphantly declared the war in Iraq was over and a great success. The corporate media lapped it up.
So get out there and celebrate! It's not like 4,000 American soldiers or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died or anything.
January 20, 2009 can't come soon enough.
Champions League Exit
Chelsea player Didier Drogba celebrates after Chelsea beat Liverpool during the second leg of a Champions League semi-final game at Stamford Bridge in London. Chelsea won 3-2 to qualify for the final in which they will play Manchester United.
(AFP/Carl de Souza)
Chelsea beat Liverpool 3-2 yesterday in overtime to advance (4-3) to the Champions League Final in Moscow on May 21st.
Rafa made some baffling personnel selections; no Peter Crouch as usual, even though this was a must-win, must-score-to-win game and Crouch has an excellent record of scoring goals in international matches, for club and country. Riise and Arbeloa at the wing backs. I'd rather see Stevie Finnan hopping on one leg than Arbeloa, but I'm not Rafa. Arbeloa got beat like a rented mule on Chelsea's first goal.
Ryan Babel on the bench. Jermaine Pennant on the bench. Bennie Onion at least provided a little offensive spark, and created Liverpool's only goal in regulation time (and got subbed out early for his troubles), but Xavi Alonso was invisible as he has been for much of the year. Dirk Kuyt was so bad the ESPN announcers never even said "He works so hard" once during the game. Kuyt has the worst first touch I've ever seen. The ball bounces so far off his feet you'd swear he kicked it.
Rafa claimed Torres was hurt when he subbed him out for Babel in the 2nd overtime, but that was a stunning move when goals were critical. And then Babel scored that incredible 40-yard strike goal and you had to wonder, why wasn't he in from the beginning?
And it must be said, the pre-game taunting of Drogba by Rafa was nothing short of disastrous. MOTM Drogba made him pay & pay dearly with his two goals.
This morning I watched the
I'm an American so I don't have the Manchester United hate you get when you grow up a Liverpool fan in England. So I'll root for the Mancs in the final, for Paul Scholes, the best English player of his generation, who didn't get to play in ManU's last Champions League final in 1999 due to suspension. And I just can't root for Chelsea, the unlikeable Blues, Terry, Lampard, Cashley and co.
If Liverpool had won, it would have been an all-Reds final in Moscow. So appropriate. Warren Beatty would have had to attend. But Chelsea has its own connection to communism, as Roman Abramovitch looted the money he used to buy the Blues from the Russian people as communism collapsed in a frenzy of capitalistic greed. Another reason I can't root for Chelsea.
Guardian (uk): Player Ratings
Guardian (uk): BenÃtez left with empty feeling and unclear future
A trophyless season will do Liverpool's manager no favours in Anfield's civil war
Independent (uk): Chelsea 3 Liverpool 2 (Chelsea win 4-3 on agg): Lampard summons remarkable courage to fire Chelsea through
Independent (uk): Moscow prepares for an English invasion
Telegraph (uk): Liverpool manager Benitez looks to the future
The Times (uk): Absent Roman Abramovich gets his home brew
Liverpool Echo: Chelsea 3 - Liverpool 2
AT least there’s no need to worry about those Russian visas anymore.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
More DoubleTalk From McCain
John McCain, the man who stood next to George W. Bush as New Orleans was drowning and didn't do anything, now says he'd respond promptly to a massive natural disaster. Watch the video below for his lies and prevarications on this subject.
The State Hospital in BInghamton
Photo: Roger Luther/nysAsylum.com
When I was a kid and my brothers & sister & I were being particularly incorrigible my father would shout dramatically (as was his wont), "You kids are going to drive me to the State Hospital in Binghamton!" Or sometimes he called it the Psychiatric Hospital. Having grown up with a black & white TV and 40s movies in re-runs in the afternoons after school, I envisioned a creepy white-walled place of emptiness and despair.
Today I read in the NYTimes that such a place actually existed, and that (while beautiful) it was really quite creepy.
NYTimes: Binghamton Journal
Rescuing ‘the Castle’ From Some Dark Days, Architecturally and Medically
Built in 1858, the castle features hand-carved staircases, stained-glass windows and turrets. But its purpose was stark: to serve as a government-run treatment center for alcoholics and later “the chronic insane.”
The castle, known formally as the New York State Inebriate Asylum, was one of the early works of Isaac Perry, who would become a prominent architect in New York and design many buildings, including the State Capitol. From the castle grounds, there is a view of the city and the Susquehanna River below that is unmatched.
[]
As psychiatric practices evolved, the castle was renamed several times, finally becoming the Binghamton Psychiatric Center. The number of patients at the site began to decline in the 1960s, and by the 1990s many of the psychiatric patients there were deinstitutionalized, as were many other such patients around the country.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
All Hail the Ginger Prince
Manchester United are in the Champions League final for first time in nine years.
Manchester United 1-0 over Barcelona. The lone goal a fabulous 30 yard strike by Paul Scholes. As the song goes, Paul Scholes, he scores goals! This ensures an all-England final (against either Liverpool or Chelski)
For me MOTM was Rio Ferdinand who anchored the makeshift United defense, while Wes Brown (other than a few errant whacks on van der Sar's head), Evra, Park and Tevez had strong games. Hargreaves survived a game at left back, but barely. Hope Evra's injury is not serious but he got a boot in the head which is never good.
Here's the goal in all its glory:
BBC: Ferguson heaps praise on Scholes
One Fish, Two Fish
Red fish, blue fish. The classic Dr. Seuss book for children. Simple! Unfortunately, it's complicated buying fish these days. Today Dr. Seuss would have to add "good fish, bad fish" to his rhymes.
salon.com: Drop that salmon!
With the days of indiscriminate fish consumption long gone, food writer Taras Grescoe explains how to eat seafood ethically. (Hint: Order mussels; skip shrimp.) (You have to watch an ad to read; questions are in bold)
OK, so we can eat sardines, anchovies ...
Oysters, pollock -- it's got a terrible name, but that's the stuff that goes into [McDonald's] Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. It's very abundant. There's trout, which isn't a bad fish. Sablefish and Arctic char are currently quite abundant. I love herring, and there's herring off the Pacific Coast as well. Try to the best of your ability to buy things locally.
And which big fish are we supposed to stay away from?
Avoid big predator fish -- shark, swordfish, Chilean sea bass, tuna, with the exception of skipjack, which is pretty abundant light tuna. Avoid farmed carnivorous species like shrimp, salmon and bluefin tuna. Avoid imported farmed seafood because domestic standards are a lot higher. The exception to that is [domestically farmed] salmon, which is terrible.
Can you explain what's so bad about salmon farms?
Salmon from these farms tends to be full of persistent organic pollutants, [some of which] are highly carcinogenic. Salmon farmers grind up smaller fish like anchovies, sardines and anchoveta to make the pellets -- all of which should be going to feed humans, not making deluxe fish, especially in the context of food riots -- and salmon farms have been proven to spread disease and parasites like sea lice to wild fish populations, among them sea trout in Ireland and wild salmon in British Columbia.
Some farmed fish aren't so bad: trout and Arctic char, which are raised inland so there's no risk of spreading parasites to wild fish; tilapia and carp, which are herbivorous species; and of course oysters and mussels, which actually help clean the oceans of their excess plankton.
So is there a way we can safely enjoy salmon?
If you want to make a canned salmon sandwich or something like that, look for any can that has Alaska stamped on it. They should be all over. It's fantastic for you, and it's really clean protein. Don't buy Atlantic salmon. That's definitely farmed, because Atlantic salmon is commercially extinct right now. Those that appear in streams and rivers are actually escaped fish from salmon farms. Chinook and certain runs of salmon in California and Oregon are doing really badly this year. Nobody's quite sure what's going on -- it could be dams, fertilizer, ocean conditions. In British Columbia, they're not doing as well either, but Alaskan stocks are pretty good. And there's organic farmed salmon. I want to give those guys some credit. If you go to a restaurant and the menu says "organic farmed salmon," then the fish was raised under higher standards and it's probably better for you. The question is whether the fish are still spreading parasites to other fish. You can eat that in sort of "half-conscience." It's important to realize that right now about 45 percent of the seafood we get is farmed. And this is having a huge impact on the livelihood and well-being of people in other cultures. In the book I talk about how salmon farms affect native people in British Columbia and people who are affected by shrimp farms in India.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Headline of the Day: "Private Plane McCain feels your pain "
Christopher Morris / VII for TIME
From Americablog:
Private Plane McCain feels your pain
More on Richie Rich McCain and his use and abuse of private planes:
NYTimes: McCain Frequently Used Wife’s Jet for Little Cost
Boston Globe: McCain campaign violates own travel policy
Candidate's use of corporate planes at issue
Another Prius Owner
Mother Jones: James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk
NEWS: The former CIA director turned clean-energy enthusiast is part geek, part zealot—and all iconoclast.
Like many clean-energy enthusiasts, Woolsey is part geek, part zealot. He's happy to spend a Saturday morning showing off the three rows of photovoltaic panels on his roof, the meter in his basement that displays when his house is feeding electricity back to the grid, and his white hybrid with a "Bin Laden Hates This Car" bumper sticker. "In two weeks," he boasts of his next oil-saving upgrade, "my Prius is going to become a plug-in." He wrote the foreword to 50 Simple Steps to Save the Earth From Global Warming, appeared in Who Killed the Electric Car? and Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour, and cofounded a group to wean Americans from foreign oil.
As Woolsey explains it, there is a seamless connection between his strategic worldview and energy-independence convictions. In an op-ed he coauthored for National Review last September, he wrote of ending our reliance "on the whims of opec's despots, the substantial instabilities of the Middle East, and the indignity of paying for both sides in the War on Terror." He still thinks the United States should continue its global military role even as it untangles itself from the Middle East, standing by the decision to depose Saddam Hussein. "I'd support his ouster again if there weren't a drop of oil in Iraq," he explains. "If all that had been at issue was the oil, the simple thing to do would have been to just buy it."
I need a "Bin Laden Hates This Car" bumper sticker.
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