May 2008 archive

Pickin’ up on 73rd’s Chillin’…

I like this version on Waitin’ for Columbus (sic)

And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine

and you show me a sign

I’ll be willin’, to be movin’

~Lowell George~

By now, we all know that former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is publishing a book and apparently telling some truth about George Bush and his minions. Karl Rove doesn’t like it:

“First of all, this doesn’t sound like Scott. It really doesn’t,” he said. “Not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger.“

White House Reacts Angrily to Former Aide’s Book

Also on Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…

1. Resources Scarce, Homelessness Persists in New Orleans
   By Shaila Dewan, The New York Times

   Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.

   Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.

   While many of the homeless do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

   Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.

   Read the whole article. What we’ve let New Orleans become is to our nation’s shame.

Four at Four continues with stories about Democrats, climate change, and the monkeys that will replace us all.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Guess what.  The traditional media have discovered the earth shaking news that their op-ed pages are too male and too white. Doh.  Like most readers didn’t realize that?

Nicholas Kristof today reports that the Washington Post’s ombudsperson has written that op-ed pages are too male and too white:

Deborah Howell, the ombudsman of The Washington Post, has an interesting column looking at the diversity – or, rather, lack of diversity – on the op-ed page of the Post. She begins:

The Post’s op-ed page is too male and too white. And there aren’t a lot of youthful opinions, either.

   I have nothing against older white men; I’m married to one. And the nation’s power structure, often represented in Post op-eds, is white, male and at least middle-aged. But a 21st-century op-ed page needs more diversity.

   The 2008 numbers as of Wednesday: 654 op-ed pieces – 575 by men, 79 by women and about 80 by minorities. The lack of diversity is partly a matter of tradition; The Post’s longtime stable of regular columnists consists overwhelmingly of older white men.

So the bottom line is that of a total of approximately 2,535 days as president, most of them during a time of war, Bush spent all or a part or 908 days, an incredible 36 percent of his time, on vacation or at retreat places. Hard to believe, but true. Nine hundred and eight days is two and a half years of Bush’s presidency. Two and a half years of the less than seven years of his presidency in which his main goal was to kick back and have fun.

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A great read from Vincent Bugliosi at HuffPo

Most of us agree that he should spend even more time on vacation; be it in Crawford, Paraguay or Leavenworth, but when many American’s have sacrificed their lives, family members and large sums of tax dollars to fund this fool’s fantasy, he has been working on “clearing my mind”.  I would include beautiful as an adjective but then it wouldn’t be a direct quote, but I’m sure astute readers here will make the genetic connection.

The brush clearin’, bike ridin’, segway fallin’, perch fishin’ golfin’, joggin’ CIC (Clown-in-Chief) needs  to “clear his mind”.

In fact, he himself admitted to the magazine Runners World (August 23, 2002) that after the Afghanistan war began: “I have been running with a little more intensity . . . It helps me to clear my mind.”

…  

“It’s interesting that my times have become faster . . . For me, the psychological benefit [in running] is enormous. You tend to forget everything that’s going on in your mind and just concentrate on the time and distance.”