Why haven’t the media pointed out that after almost two and a half years of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror”, the biggest threat to our safety seems to be a repeat of the exact same thing that happened on 9/11?? I thought blowing up thousands of civilians and spending billions of dollars that we don’t have was supposed to make us safer??

Of course, there are things that really can make us safer, but apparently we can’t afford those. For a good example of what I’m talking about, re-read “The 9/10 President” by Jonathan Chait (which I’m reprinting in the extended part of this entry).
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It’s too bad Lenny didn’t live long enough to enjoy this :

Comedian Lenny Bruce was granted a posthumous pardon by Gov. George Pataki on Tuesday for a nearly 40-year-old obscenity conviction prompted by a foul-mouthed political commentary.

Pataki, a third-term Republican, called his decision to issue the first posthumous pardon in New York state history “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.”

The campaign to win a pardon for the groundbreaking 1960s comedian was supported by his ex-wife and daughter, more than two dozen First Amendment lawyers and entertainers including Robin Williams, the Smothers Brothers and Penn and Teller.
. . .
During a November 1964 performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Bruce used more than 100 “obscene” words. Undercover police detectives attended the show, and later testified against Bruce. The charge was giving an obscene performance.

He was convicted following a six-month trial. Bruce mishandled his own appeal, and, beset by legal and financial problems, died of a drug overdose in 1966 with the conviction still on the books. He was 37.

And for those of you curious to find out what was considered “obscene” in 1964, here’s an excerpt of the Judge’s opinion in the People v. Bruce :

All three performances of the defendant, Lenny Bruce, were obscene, indecent, immoral and impure within the meaning of Section 1l40-a of the Penal Law. While no tape is available as to the first performance [past midnight, March 31-April 1], this monologue, according to the testimony, was essentially the same as that of the second [April 1, after 10:00 p.m.] and third [April 7, after 10:00 p.m.] performances. In the latter two performances, words such as “ass,” “balls,” “cock-sucker,” “cunt,” “fuck,” “mother-fucker,” “piss,” “screw,” “shit,” and “tits” were used about one hundred times in utter obscenity. The monologues also contained anecdotes and reflections that were similarly obscene.

For example:
1. Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of “tits.” (1st performance; transcript of 3rd performance at p. 27)
2. Jacqueline Kennedy “hauling ass” at the moment of the late President’s assassination. (Transcript of 2nd performance at p. 22; transcript of 3rd performance at p. 13)
3. St. Paul giving up “fucking.” (1st performance; transcript of 2nd performance at p. 12; transcript of 3rd performance at p. 19)
4. An accident victim-who lost a foot in the accident-who made sexual advances to a nurse, while in the ambulance taking him to the hospital. (1st performance; transcript of 2nd performance at p. 25)
5. “Uncle Willie” discussing the “apples” of a 12-year old girl. (transcript of 2nd performance at p. 20; transcript of 3rd performance at p. 12)
6. Seemingly sexual intimacy with a chicken. (transcript of 2nd performance at p. 25)
7. “Pissing in the sink” and “pissing” from a building’s ledge. (transcript of 2nd performance at p. 24; transcript of 3rd performance at p. 15)
8. The verb “to come,” with its obvious reference to sexual or orgasm. (1st performance)
9. The reunited couple discussing adulteries committed during their separation, and the suggestion of a wife’s denial of infidelity, even when discovered by her husband. (1st performance; transcript of 2nd performance at p. 29)
10. “Shoving” a funnel of hot lead “up one’s ass.” (transcript of 2nd performance at p. 22; transcript of 3rd performance at p. 13)
11. The story dealing with the masked man, Tonto, and an unnatural sex act. (1st performance)
12. Mildred Babe Zaharias and the “dyke profile of 1939.” (transcript of 3rd performance at p. 27)

During the first performance Bruce fondled the microphone stand in a masturbatory fashion. In the second performance, while telling of an act of exposure, Bruce turned his back to the audience and moved his hand outward and upward from below his waist in an obvious and crude pantomime of an act of exposure and masturbation.

The dominant theme of the performances appealed to the prurient interest and was patently offensive to the average person in the community, as judged by present day standards. The performances were lacking in “redeeming social importance.”

The monologues were not erotic. They were not lust-inciting, but, while they did not arouse sex, they insulted sex and debased it. [A discussion of the legal authorities, sustaining such debasement as pornography, followed here.]

They [the monologues] were obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure. The monologues contained little or no literary or artistic merit. They were merely a device to enable Bruce to exploit the use of obscene language. They were devoid of any cohesiveness. They were a series of unconnected items that contained little of social significance. They were chaotic, haphazard, and inartful….

Goddamn, I wish I could have been there….

Here’s a few insults, false predictions, and plain bizarre comments about the Presidential candidates (and people who share their names) courtesy of googlism.com :

dennis kucinich

dennis kucinich is not a whore
dennis kucinich is a communist and he?s a traitor
dennis kucinich is one democrat that has supported the republicans
dennis kucinich is no yoda

al sharpton

al sharpton is evil
al sharpton is either a fool or grossly uninformed
al sharpton is nothing but a racial pot stirrer
al sharpton is in jail again

joe lieberman

joe lieberman is an embarrassment to judaism
joe lieberman is a fascist pig
joe lieberman is doing his mama proud
joe lieberman is a tragedy

john kerry

john kerry is not the kind of guy most would cozy up to at a bar
john kerry is not as ?cuddly’ as he could be
john kerry is guaranteed a free ride in the fall
john kerry is his remarkable resemblance to abraham lincoln’s horse

wesley clark

wesley clark is seriously flirting
wesley clark is willing to kill anyone in belgrade on the off
wesley clark is definitely in bed with clinton
wesley clark is a mass murderer with a personal vendetta against the serbian orthodox christians

john edwards

john edwards is helping people to realize that there is life after death
john edwards is a fraud and my crystal ball agrees with me and so does my magic 8 ball
john edwards is like drinking the water in mexico
john edwards is the best bloke around who does his job properly and with pride

carol mosley-braun

carol mosley-braun is one of the world’s most unskilled polticians
carol mosley-braun is just an enhanced version of al sharpton
carol mosley-braun is princess di’s

howard dean

howard dean is clearly the runt of this litter
howard dean is also expected wednesday to endorse gore
howard dean is far from my first choice
howard dean is a political whore

dick gephardt

dick gephardt is satan? or rather that satan is dick gephardt?”
dick gephardt is big and hairy
dick gephardt is no tap dancer
dick gephardt is “getting jiggy”

While looking around at the campaign donation statistics at opensecrets.org, this table of Lyndon Larouche’s top contributors’s caught my eye :

Lockheed Martin	$5,700
American System Publications	$5,675
Eastern States Distributors	$5,500
PGM Inc	$5,250
Hsdi	$5,130
US Postal Service	$4,600
Levit & James	$4,000
City of New York	$3,650
Internal Revenue Service	$3,100
Aerospace Corp	$3,000
EIR News Service	$2,700
State of New Jersey	$2,650
JC Penney	$2,625
City of Los Angeles	$2,590
US Army	$2,350
Esdi	$2,250
Continental Airlines	$2,250
Eirns	$2,250
Verizon Communications	$2,250
Sels	$2,200

Does anybody know if the highlighted sections are legal? I’ve searched the whole site looking for more details on the contributions but I can’t find anything. Is this kind of thing normal?

It seems to me that there are three possibilities here : (1) these government organizations are funneling tax dollars to a political candidate, (2) PAC’s set up by the employees of these government organizations are donating their personal money to a candidate in the name of their employer, or (3) this is all a big mixup by either opensecrets.org or the Larouche campaign. The most logical explanation is (2), but even that seems a little sketchy. Is it really a good idea for tax-supported groups to appear to support one candidate over another?

Since I received it from my sister, I’ve been devouring the book Presidential Campaigns by Paul Boller. With all the talk about next year’s election, it’s put two popular comparisons between this election and previous ones in perspective. While the similarities between previous elections and the upcoming ones are pretty minor, there are obviously a lot of lessons to be learned.

On the left, it’s popular to tar Bush as the new Hoover. Although Bush’s greatest strength has been his ability to fill his campaign coffers, both men had/have an equal knack for filling unemployment lines. With Bush facing a net loss of over three million jobs during his tenure, the Hoover comparison is an easy one to make. But as Boller points out, the similarities end there.

“By the time Americans launched their thirty-seventh presidential election, industrial production was at a low ebb, unemployment was widespread, and the farmers faced ruin. “Damn Hoover!” exploded a man who bit into an apple and found a worm there. By 1932 millions of people were damning Hoover and the Republican party. When the nominating conventions met in Chicago in June, the Democrats knew they could win if they avoided major errors. And the Republicans realized they faced almost certain defeat.”
. . .
“[Roosevelt’s running mate] Garner was so sure the election was in the bag that he advised : ‘Sit down - do nothing - and win the election.’ He did just that himself; he gave only one speech, over the radio, and decided that one speech per campaign was about right.”

Obviously the Democrats can’t emulate Garner and sit back if they expect to win this thing. Unlike 1932, not everybody feels the way about the President that we do. If Democrats want to draw parallels between Bush and Hoover, they’re going to have to work overtime to get that message out to the people.

A far more popular comparison, among both conservatives and centrist liberals, has been to compare senate front-runner Howard Dean to George McGovern. While both men were plucked from near-obscurity to prominence based mainly on their anti-war views, the McGovern campaign was an awkward one that managed to fail upward during the primaries only to crash and burn in the general election.

As big name Democrats (Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, & Hubert Humphrey) all dropped out of the race, McGovern won the nomination seemingly by default. Once assured the nomination, McGovern had a series of missteps ranging from delivering his senate convention acceptance speech at 3 AM, to picking and dumping a running mate with a history of shock treatment, to failing to draw a big enough distinction between himself and his more radical supporters. But perhaps his biggest failure was in the strategy itself :

“McGovern’s strategy was to do well in the primaries, achieve the nomination with the help of his anti-war constituency, and then persuade party regulars to work for his election. He never achieved his last objective.”

In 1972, there wasn’t a big “anybody but Nixon” groundswell among the left the way we see now with Bush. The biggest difference between then and now is that whoever wins the senate nomination will get the support of mainstream Dems. The Bush administrations policies on the environment, foreign policy, the economy, etc. have been so radical, that you’d see Lieberman stumping for the Kucinich/Chomsky ticket before you’d see a repeat of the 1972 election.

And finally, although there are few similarities between then and now, the closing remarks by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter seem especially relevant now. While one of the lines has become a huge clich? in the following 23 years, the sentiment seems more apt now than it was then.

“I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to whom you will vote for. If you don’t agree, if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have. This country doesn’t have to be in the shape that it is in. We do not have to go on sharing in scarcity with the country getting worse off, with unemployment growing. We talk about the unemployment lines. If all of the unemployed today were in a single line allowing two feet for each of them, that line would reach from New York City to Los Angeles, California.”

Maybe this speech is the real reason the Republicans didn’t want CBS to air “The Reagans”.

There’s nothing like a big-ass earthquake to wake you up from a post-vacation lull…

For the past month and a half, my good friend Tom Neely and I have been working on this top secret project. Now that MoveOn.org’s contest has launched, we’re proud to present our short, “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”. Here’s the description that will be appearing on the contest’s site :

“Following in the footsteps of Max Fleischer, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Job?’ is an original, fully-animated look at the underbelly of Bush’s economy which juxtaposes a depression-era style with modern-day quotes from Presidential radio addresses.”

You can view (and vote for!) the commercial by clicking on the picture below :

If you’d like to help spread the word about our commercial, please click on the “Continue reading…” link below.
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This is good news :

A U.S. advisory panel on Tuesday voted to recommend allowing the Plan B “morning after” contraceptive pill to be sold without a prescription.

The Food and Drug Administration will make the final decision, but the agency usually follows the advice of its advisory panels.
. . .
The panel’s 23-4 vote came after testimony from the product maker, FDA staffers and members of the public for and against making Plan B easier to obtain.
. . .
Others spoke against Plan B because they view emergency contraceptives as equivalent to abortion. Some research suggests the pills prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, although Barr said Plan B simply prevented ovulation.

Supporters said the pills should be made available over the counter to give women a second chance to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after unprotected sex, when a condom breaks for following a rape.

“If we are truly dedicated to lowering the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions in this country, let’s prove it by making Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter,” said Dr. Vivian Dickerson, president-elect of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Okay, for all you “pro-lifers” out there, here’s a brief explanation of how Plan B works : It’s essentially an overdose of the same kinds of birth-control pills that have been available for a few decades now. The result is a disruption of the woman’s hormones that will either stop the egg from fertilizing, delay ovulation, or prevent the egg from becoming implanted in the uterus, depending on when the pill is taken in relation to the woman’s menstrual period and when the woman had sex. In short, the morning after pill doesn’t terminate a pregnancy, it prevents a pregnancy.

So if abortion protesters are going to extend the definition of “abortion” to include anything that can prevent pregnancies, then what’s next? Are they going to organize protests against dry humping based on the reasoning that underwear is blocking sperm from reaching an egg??

And speaking of pro-lifers lying so they can win arguments, abortion foes were recently caught in Minnesota peddling another bit of misinformation.

Abortion politics led the state Health Department to publish unreliable information about a link between abortions and breast cancer, state health workers wrote in e-mails obtained by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Government e-mails obtained under the state’s open records laws reveal that a division director and others questioned an assertion on the department’s Web site and in a pamphlet that having an abortion may increase the risk of breast cancer.

The statement, posted in late September, was viewed inside the Health Department as a disservice to citizens and damaging to the department’s credibility, according to e-mails circulated in the department in October.

Critics of the department’s position on abortion and breast cancer say the statement is designed to frighten women considering abortion.
. . .
The e-mail cited findings of the National Cancer Institute. A panel of 100 breast cancer experts reviewed all the research and concluded last spring that some small, flawed studies published before the mid-1990s had found a link to breast cancer, but larger, more reliable studies showed no connection.
. . .
Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics, said of the abortion-cancer link: “Every medical association that has looked at this says the matter is closed. There is no relationship here.”

Now, I know that abortion is a very tricky issue. Even though I strongly disagree with it, I understand the “abortion is murder” argument. That said, it’s completely unethical for abortion opponents to blatantly lie in order to get people to take their side. Oh yeah, well two can play this game :

“According to a recent scientific study, there has been a significant link shown between being a Pro-Lifer and impotence, sterility, & being a total asshole.”

Al Sharpton, as usual, has one of the best quotes yet about the capture of Saddam Hussein (via Cursor) :

SHARPTON: Oh, I don’t think the capture of Saddam Hussein in any way justifies the war. I congratulate the military. I think it is good that he has been captured, but I don’t think that it in any way justifies the fact that we were told there were weapons of mass destruction and that we were in eminent danger and we had to go into a military operation.

We also see that this may not end the bloodshed. I think that in the spirit of this moment that the president ought to immediately try and appeal to a world body to take over, particularly the U.N. and appeal to Secretary General Kofi Annan and begin withdrawal of troops.

We have Hussein now. I think that we need to use this moment to withdraw and end occupation. I think the debate now will shift to occupation and the need of such occupation. And so I don’t think any of us that were opposed to the war were pro-Hussein, but I don’t think the capture of Hussein nine months later in any way justifies the American public and the general international public being told we were going in because of weapons that clearly were not there at that time.

LIN: But there is the opportunity now to interview Saddam Hussein to find out about weapons of mass destruction, if in fact they exist and where they are. Clearly, this is going to be useful to the United States and the war on terror.

SHARPTON: Well, if we went to war to get an interview, I don’t think that’s what we were told. We went to war because we said we knew there were weapons. Not that we wanted to capture and interview him to see if there was weapons.

We all know Sharpton can’t (and shouldn’t) win the nomination, but I hope whoever wins puts him in the cabinet as Secretary of One-Liners or something.

This headline from the New York Times is the best headline I’ve read since the infamous “Shatner’s ex-wife sues over horse semen”. The content of the article is pretty damn good too :

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship’s foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft’s well-known ‘’slideware” program.

NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide — so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ”It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the board sternly noted.

PowerPoint is the world’s most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?

This year, Edward Tufte — the famous theorist of information presentation — made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft’s ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ”faux analytical” technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker’s responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ”an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

I couldn’t agree more. Using PowerPoint makes sense when it’s being used for generic business interests, but it’s being used by NASA?? PowerPoint is a great tool for dumbing down information, but it’s too often used as a template for presenting any information.

Having worked for a big-ass corporation for a few years now, I’ve even encountered people who seem incapable to relay information without it. I was once in a small meeting with a vendor in which a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation was prepared for me and two other people. Information that could easily be presented in a five-minute conversation was instead turned into a sales pitch.

Of course, I’m just the pot calling the kettle black here. When you think about it, isn’t a blog just a dumbed-down version of a newspaper op/ed?