crappy hour
This conventioneering thing is almost done, and, sadly, so am I. Despite the barn burning, roof-raising, political cock-stiffening speech that Alaska governor Sarah Palin gave at the Republican convention last night, I am still tired (and slightly late to my own crappy party) this morning. Luckily, HuffPo blogger
Jason Linkins always waits for
me and has funny things to say; after the jump we talk Palin, Rudy, Palin, McCain, Palin, Huckabee, and more Palin.
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crappy hour
It's a beautiful morning here, one of those mornings no one in Beijing ever has anymore where you can pretend it's the 70s and the world is less polluted but visions of stagflation might dance in your head, or you can be like Moe
and I and pretend it's the 90s and read about 90s music and China's human rights record and WTO negotiations and wish you lived in Berlin instead. But it's 2008 and real questions await like: What EXACTLY is a green collar job? Will Obama embrace Virginia governor Tim Kaine more fully than in this picture? And why do we care what some crazy guy's motives were for shooting a bunch of people in a church when he is
obviously crazy and thus his motivations are no more explicable that the motives of any other crazy person, including the first guy that ever sent me a crap-anything-from-a-dude...or Dan Quayle's? These questions and many, many others will stay unanswered after the jump, at least until you get to the comment threads.
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crappy hour
Moe is on the (supposedly) WiFi-enabled bus from Virginia, taking in the greatness of America (or at least that section between D.C. and New York City) while I'm stuck in upstate New York, so it's another episode of reverse-polarity Crappy Hour! We talk oil, what the GOP is doing wrong, what is wrong about what the GOP thinks it is doing wrong, what is a capital-punishment worthy offense (hint: advertising WiFi on your bus and not providing it) and kissing Bill Clinton's ass. It's all after the jump!
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crappy hour
Yesterday while Crappy Hour was in progress Barack Obama totally sold out the like MAJOR ISSUE OF HIS WHOLE POLITICAL CAREER and we didn't really talk about it because the campaign's media fellater relations department still hadn't distributed its key talking points, but then they
sent out this video and as you can see, there is really no need for Obama to take $80 million from you
taxpayers in the interest of running a "clean" campaign if he has made quite enough money already collecting from clean individuals like you and me! (Put another way: why build a welfare state when, like Toqueville pointed out, Americans have such a rich tradition of charity, concern for fellow man etc?) Anyway, so it's Friday, which means that even if
we don't think this financing thing is such a huge biggie David Brooks is using it as a chance to
dissuade Scarlett Johansson from carrying such a heaving torch for Obama by likening him to a fictional soulless Jew and
Peggy Noonan is reminding us again of the meaning of life and everyone else is still fighting about oil and
Megan and I try to get to the bottom of how much we can blame the crap economy on the war and get distracted by cute patriotic dogs.
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crappy hour
So Big Oil is finally going to get
some payback for its tireless efforts promoting that disastrous invasion of The Iraq! Megan and I are sooooo happy for them. The "unusual" no-bid contracts about to be awarded to Exxon, BP, Shell, Total and Chevron reunite all the original partners in the
Iraq Petroleum Company that held a monopoly on Iraqi oil exploration until 1961 when some communist decided that wasn't "fair" to the Iraqi people and nationalized oil, which is incidentally what the Republicans are accusing the Democrats of trying to do over
here. Newt Gingrich was on Fox this morning telling everyone America needs to "Declare Energy Independence" on July 4 this year but like this apparently Robert Palmer inspired propaganda poster points out we're probably going to have to figure out how to detox somehow, which would be one thing if we had some sort of growing employment sector to withstand the rising prices, like the South Koreans who are busy making all the ships out there looking for oil. That and Obama says no thanks to a nationalized campaign, some Bear Stearns guys get arrested and Larry Sinclair is insane with me and
Megan after the jump.
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petroleum patriarchy
The problem with being a liberal some days is that there are just so many things to oppose: the patriarchy, obviously; global warming; big business; the War in Iraq; the War on Drugs; oil companies; pharmaceutical companies; health insurance companies; zoos (but not when they do conservation work); circuses all the time; industrial farming... the list just goes on and on. It's probably even harder when you're an academic trying to write an important piece on why women in the Middle East often have it so bad because there's oil and patriarchy and big business and Islam, which we all know is a religion of peace and, really, not
that much more patriarchal than some religions (cough, Catholicism, cough) that many Americans are brought up in anyway and so Islam can't really be the problem because it's not all bad in all places and stuff. And, so, Michael Ross of UCLA has a
better idea: the problems facing women in the Middle East are all due to
oil. It's like, so many birds and one stone — not that liberals kill birds with stones because that's just
mean. But, is he right?
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