October 27, 2010 archive

Snooki and Obama are alone in the Oval Office.

Voiceover: “The February assault on Marjah was the first major offensive since President Barack Obama ordered the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan and the biggest joint NATO-Afghan operation since the war began in 2001.”

Obama: “I’m the Commander-in-Chief!”

Snooki: “Pickles is my thing.”

Voiceover: “Eight months on, the Taliban are still in Marjah in force, waging a full-blown guerrilla insurgency that rages daily across a bomb-riddled landscape of agricultural fields and irrigation trenches.”

Obama: “Why do we keep having these meetings?”

Snooki: “It’s just a big ball of fuckness. That’s a new word: fuckness.”

Voiceover: “There was peace here before you came,” farmer Khari Badar told one Marine patrol that recently visited his home in Marjah. “Today, there is only fighting.”

Obama: “The strengthened Strategic Partnership Declaration is expected to:  reiterate the United States’ and Afghanistan’s shared vision and commitment to Afghanistan’s future; clarify how Afghanistan plans to increasingly take on responsibility for its own security, justice, and development; and articulate how the United States plans to work with Afghanistan to enhance its ability to contribute to regional stability and prosperity.”

Snooki: “My first thought was: I don’t wanna clean this up. My second thought was: I just fucked up dinner. My third thought was: What the fuck am I gonna eat?”

Obama: “Why do we keep having these meetings?”

Snooki: “I thought I broke my vagina bone.. it was terrible. Please don’t tell me I have missing teeth!”

Obama: “Everybody loves me, babies, dogs, ya know, hot girls, cougars. I just have unbelievable mass appeal.”

Snooki: “Where are the juice-heads? I don’t see any fucking guido juice-heads, you woke me up for nothing.”

Obama: “That hater-juice is best served cold.”

Voiceover: “How do you feel about Hamid Karzai, Mr. President?”

Obama: “I want to stab him in the eye with a fucking fork!”

Snooki: “Who said that, me or you?”

Obama: “It doesn’t really matter.”

Collaborative Planning

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

While many muse as a culture we cannot continue “Waiting for Superman” to transform our schools, others expect our Teachers to be Supermen or Superwomen.  Some say private school Educators are superior.  Only the Instructors employed in public educational institutions are flawed.  There seems to be agreement in our society; these Teachers cannot take the lead.   The system, critics cry, out must change.  Philanthropists proclaim they are here to save the day.  Privatization is the only way to work through what has been a woeful failure.  No, Administrators and the current Administration avow; Teachers are the problem.  We must assess their performance and pay Educators accordingly.

Earlier this week Amy Goodman of Democracy Now conducted an extensive interview with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks about his October 22, 2010 release of the nearly 400,000 documents of Iraq War Logs.

While the Obama administration is defending the US military’s record in Iraq, the allegations in the documents have sparked worldwide condemnation, with Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saying the allegations are quote, “extremely serious” and should be “properly examined“, while the United Nations chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, has called on the Obama administration to order a full investigation of the role of US forces in human rights abuses in Iraq.

Assange also confirmed that threats by the Pentagon would not stop WikiLeaks from releasing additional military documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

Craft

I have always been pretty much a fan of Keith Olbermann.  He has good views and applies logic to his subject matter.  But he outdid himself tonight, and I am NOT being sarcastic.

If you look at the Wingnut Channel, everything is just a very narrow slant on politics and some country music, now and then.  Olbermann just transcended all of that, and the rerun is playing right now.  I hope to finish this short post fast enough so that you can tune into it.

It’s been a few days now since we began a conversation that addresses the issue of how frustrated some number of LBGT voters are with the Democratic Party this cycle; this because they find themselves either frustrated at the lack of progress on the civil rights issues that matter to them, or because they see both the Democratic and Republican Parties as unreliable partners in the struggle to assure equal rights for all.

In an effort to practice some actual journalism, I assembled a version of an online “focus group” at The Bilerico Project (“daily adventures in LBGTQ”), with the goal of gathering some opinions on this subject in the actual words of those frustrated voters.

Part One of this story focused on “stating the problem”, and today we’ll take on Part Two: in this environment, with Election Day staring us in the face, what is an LBGT voter to do?

As before, there are a variety of opinions, including a very informative comment I was able to obtain from a genuine Member of Congress, Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania’s 8th District, and that means until the very end you won’t hear much from me, except to help “set the stage” for the comments that follow.