inbhirnis | Entries tagged with news/politics

Interesting story on Bush's life, post presidency. While I guess any president, after leaving office, is inevitably a bit cocooned from the rest of the world due to security concerns, you get the clear sense that this one is only too happy to be in a bubble - living in a rabidly conservative Republican neighborhood, interacting only with friends and supporters, and the regular folk are kept far away. As well as the physical separation, it's also clear from the article that he is living in a sealed-off world intellectually: all that matters to him is his legacy, as evidenced by his single-minded work on his library and memoir. As they left Washington on January 20, they watched unctuous videos from people singing his praises; his circle of friends sounds very small and fiercely loyal ("everybody - everybody - just loved him", said one); and he still loves to wear that jacket with the presidential seal.

One gets the impression that this president won't be jetting round the world on humanitarian causes (maybe because there's a decent chance he could be arrested for war crimes if he leaves the US), or building homes for the disadvantaged in this country.

---here's the not-too-impressive looking Presidential pad, courtesy of Google. I'm surprised it hasn't been pixellated, as happened with the Vice Presidential residence in DC when Cheney lived there. When Biden moved in, that pixellation was removed.

Colbert, as part of his "Better Know a District" series, visited with the Congressman for NY 25, Dan Maffei.

Bless his heart - Maffei is a Dem in a pretty Republican leaning district, so it was pretty ballsy of him to take part in Colbert's hijinks, including a bit (around the 4th minute) where Colbert gets self-confessed Star Trek fan Maffei to imagine what he'd be like in the evil universe, complete with goatee....

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Better Know a District - New York's 25th - Dan Maffei

comedycentral.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

NASA Name Contest

I hope my overseas friends can see this....

(and there didn't seem to be many who had an opinion in between those two poles)..Margaret Thatcher's rise to Prime Minister with the Conservative election victory, 30 years ago next month (wow), changed the UK forever and with Reagan being elected 18 months later, set the stage for an era of conservatism that we may just now be leaving. Ironically, it now seems that the US and the UK may be about to diverge politically, with a tired Labour government in power since 1997 almost certainly about to be replaced by a Conservative one by 2010. Mind you, UK Conservatives are rather different from their US counterparts; not beholden to a religious right, and actually pretty gay-friendly, at least at the leadership level. The Conservative candidate for Thatcher's hometown is openly gay, and nobody appears to be freaked out by it.

All this is preamble to a rather long but fascinating article from the Guardian that reads a little bit like an obituary for her (she's not in good health). The reporter goes back to Thatcher's hometown, and finds there the same absence of interest in her place in history that appears to exist in the country as a whole. It's almost as if she were a Stalinesque figure whose statues have been pulled down, and most references to her removed from the public square. Yet she is still alive, a shadow of her former glory. The article has some delicious little phrases that may resonate best with Brits of a certain age (reference to loss of society; the 'handbag thieves' sign). The psycho-analysis section is quite amusing, since the Freudian analysis of Thatcher is so at odds with her image of lack of sexuality, her non-feminism. So ironic that the first female PM was utterly inimical to women's issues and positively placed hurdles in the way of other women in her party trying to climb the ladder.

When she does finally shuffle off, it will be interesting to see how she is remembered, and what kind of send-off she gets. I think I can guarantee that there will be no push to name something in every part of the UK for her, a la Reagan.

Their Supreme Court just ruled in favor of same sex marriage.

Now - I wonder if Iowa is also hampered by a political system where a popular vote of 50%+1 vote can strip these newly won rights away?

He just gave a great shout-out to his Trek demo tonight. Criticizing the Republican budget unveiled today, which showed spurious projections of the Obama budget priorities out to the year 2080, he quoted an Office of Management and Budget official who said, tactfully, that such long-range projections had 'a significant amount of uncertainty' attached to them. Keith then said 'not surprising, since 2080 will be 17 years after we make contact with the planet Vulcan'.

Hee! He even got the date of 'first contact' right!

The big buzz on the telly here has been Jon Stewart (a comedian) doing what our journalists seem incapable of doing, taking to task the utter craven-ness of financial 'reporting' in the run-up to our great crash of 2008, where financial channels such as CNBC aired fawning interviews with CEOs and told everyone to buy, buy, BUY even when the whole house of cards was about to fall down.

It was perhaps CNBC 'journalist' Rick Santelli, who first attracted The Daily Show's attention when he ranted on the floor of the stock market about bailing out 'loser' mortgage holders (while delivering no such rant against the gazillions being poured in to keep the banks that provided the shaky mortgages in the first place - this is a terrific video clip - watch it all). From there, Stewart has been mauling one Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money" show (title really tells you all you need to know about the show), and this week, there's been something of a tit for tat over the airwaves between the two, culminating in Cramer's utter humiliation in the video above.

But - that's not what I wanted to memorialize in this post. Stewart rightly was praised for asking hard questions about these financial shows being basically stenographers for the industry, rather than starting from an investigative/skeptical point of view. They uncritically aired everything these captains of industry told them, and didn't research the rosy profit reports.

Now - the same media that is praising Stewart needs to turn the mirror on themselves and examine their stenography during the Bush years. Glenn Greenwald of Slate has an article that articulates it better than I can - he focuses in on the infamous Niger yellowcake incident and shows how our big name political journalists were/are just as uncritical as the financial twits at CNBC, allowing themselves to be used so obviously by the administration in the dissemination of the story. And, quite shockingly, there's a quote at the end of the piece where someone in the Washington Post says in so many words that their role is simply to regurgitate what they're told, and not to investigate since that might spark a debate - oh, the horror!

Dear media - your job is to investigate what the powerful are saying and doing, not simply to reprint it. I can get a press release for that. Your starting point should be skepticism and verification. Somewhere, Murrow is spinning in his grave.

--A quite breathtaking video from the loony Glenn Beck of FOX 'News' where he and his invited asylum-mates predict a Mad Max style future for the US in 2014 thanks to Obama's recent stimulus plan (well, they don't state it quite that bluntly, but that's clearly what they're getting at). How dare our government honestly account for the bills of the previous administration and decide that we need to, er, PAY them through spending cuts and tax increases. They wank along to anti-government, anti-tax, militia-loving memes of the right - amazing stuff.

It's hard to believe that a legitimate news organization can broadcast crap like this.

Oh, wait - we're talking FOX News - never mind the 'legitimate' bit...

(via talkingpointsmemo)

EDIT: If you can't take more than a couple of minutes of the video, you can read Glenn Greenwald's analysis of this wacky phenomenon instead...

...Bush officials are having a really hard time finding jobs - much more so than previous administrations.

There's one group of unemployed I will shed no tears for.

No-nonsense, slightly scary and fierce financial guru Suze talks about the non-sentimental reasons why marriage should be for all of us:

No - not

paterson_si or

mitjablazic or

vksi.... :-)

THE Queen is in that lovely country at the moment. So, I want my three Slovenian LJ friends to get into the crowds and wave, and get their picture taken with her. Those three beary boys and HRH Queen Elizabeth - what a pic that would be. :-)

I see she's going to be presented with a Lipizzaner horse while she's there. This reminds me of a TV show from when I was a kiddie, that was filmed in Slovenia (well, Yugoslavia then). The theme music is probably permanently stuck in the heads of all British 30- and 40-somethings... (about the first 1:30 mins of this clip).

Well.... Obama would be ahead 8,876 to 31, according to The Economist magazine (hat tip to

allanh).

McCain leads in Georgia (the country that he vowed to defend this summer, not the US state), Macedonia, and....Cuba?! The rest of the world appears to be Obama territory, including my homeland by an 88-12 margin.

....but it's still quite shocking to see them stated so bluntly in 2008, and not just by people in their 70s who were in the middle of the desegregation issues of the 60s.

They list the big events of the day in the correct order....

And on that subject, any East Coast LJ blogger who does a post between 10:01pm and 11:59pm EST tonight that gives away the outcome of the Project Runway finale that isn't behind a cut will get an internet spanking from me.... ;-) Just line up over there, boys.

And, I know this is an old joke I've pulled a couple of times before, but: "and after the spanking...."

(Actually, I'm not on tenterhooks re the PR Finale - this really has been an awful season. But, I don't wanna be spoiled. I'll probably just avoid LJ this evening).