For Clarence.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
100 Days, 100 Nights.
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary “First 100 Days” in office — which stabilized a country ravaged by the Depression — the first 100 days of every president have been used as a measuring stick for success. That’s over. I’ve said this before, and I believe it even more strongly today: We’ve gone from the first 100 days to the “Only 100 Days.”
Really — it feels as if Barack Obama had 100 days to push through the basics we needed to stabilize the economy and then lay the basis for his one big initiative — health care reform — and then he was preparing for the midterms, and then he was recovering from his midterm losses and then he was announcing his re-election bid and then, judging from all the Republicans who have declared for the presidency already, the 2012 race got started. As such, the chances of the two parties successfully doing something big, hard and together to fix the huge problems staring us in the face are very small — unless the market or Mother Nature imposes it upon them.
...There is no way that America can remain a great country if the opportunities for meaningful reform are reduced to either market- or and climate-induced crises and 100 working days every four years. We need a full-time government, and instead we’ve created a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.
...The truth is, we need to do four things at once if we have any hope of maintaining American greatness: We need more stimulus to keep the economy from slipping back into recession. But we need to combine that stimulus with a credible, legislated, long-term plan for cutting spending and getting the deficit under control — e.g., the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan. And we need to raise new revenues in order to reinvest in the sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and government-funded research to push out the boundaries of knowledge.
That’s right. We need to do four things at once: spend, cut, tax and invest. And unless we do all four at once we’re not going to break out of our slow decline. But to do all four at once will require a new hybrid politics, which does not conform to the political agenda of either major party..."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: 100 Days
Words.
"Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary “First 100 Days” in office — which stabilized a country ravaged by the Depression — the first 100 days of every president have been used as a measuring stick for success. That’s over. I’ve said this before, and I believe it even more strongly today: We’ve gone from the first 100 days to the “Only 100 Days.”
Really — it feels as if Barack Obama had 100 days to push through the basics we needed to stabilize the economy and then lay the basis for his one big initiative — health care reform — and then he was preparing for the midterms, and then he was recovering from his midterm losses and then he was announcing his re-election bid and then, judging from all the Republicans who have declared for the presidency already, the 2012 race got started. As such, the chances of the two parties successfully doing something big, hard and together to fix the huge problems staring us in the face are very small — unless the market or Mother Nature imposes it upon them.
...There is no way that America can remain a great country if the opportunities for meaningful reform are reduced to either market- or and climate-induced crises and 100 working days every four years. We need a full-time government, and instead we’ve created a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.
...The truth is, we need to do four things at once if we have any hope of maintaining American greatness: We need more stimulus to keep the economy from slipping back into recession. But we need to combine that stimulus with a credible, legislated, long-term plan for cutting spending and getting the deficit under control — e.g., the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan. And we need to raise new revenues in order to reinvest in the sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and government-funded research to push out the boundaries of knowledge.
That’s right. We need to do four things at once: spend, cut, tax and invest. And unless we do all four at once we’re not going to break out of our slow decline. But to do all four at once will require a new hybrid politics, which does not conform to the political agenda of either major party..."
2012.
ME: "The GOP needs to just go ahead and nominate a bumper sticker,or an Animal See & Say, or a GOP Mascot Button as their 2012 Presidential Candidate."
STEPHEN COLBERT:
STEPHEN COLBERT:
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
"Love me, love me!"
Words. For Your Consideration...
"...is Weiner really a sex addict? He's clearly preoccupied with his genitals and the usage thereof, but all evidence suggests that his indiscretions had less to do with sexual relationships (at least the old-fashioned, in-person kind) than his relationship to his own masculinity. Based on what we know of his exchanges, it appears he had far more interest in his own chiseled chest than in anyone else's body parts. It would appear he's not addicted to sex as much as he's simply addicted to himself.
...Much has been made of Weiner's good looks (Cosmopolitan magazine once named him one of their "most gorgeous bachelors," and apparently a number of ladies on Facebook found him at least as compelling as Justin Bieber). But who are we kidding? Weiner is attractive for a politician.
Tall and sleek and chiseled though he may be, Weiner's still the high school geek in the photo he uses to make fun of himself so no one else will. No matter how many reps he does in the gym, no matter how advantageous the angle immortalizing certain body parts, no matter how many followers he has on Twitter, Weiner is still that scrawny, nerdy kid with the frizzy hair and the embarrassing name. And nobody knows that better than Weiner himself..."
Remember the Time...
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.
Let me note that this was tempered by another response to Bush that I’ll get to. Yet compared with the New Hampshire Seven — and with today’s Republican majority in the House of Representatives — Bush was the reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: After GOP debate, feeling nostalgic for George W. Bush
Words.
"Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.
Let me note that this was tempered by another response to Bush that I’ll get to. Yet compared with the New Hampshire Seven — and with today’s Republican majority in the House of Representatives — Bush was the reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt..."
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Addicted to Love.
"...whether or not Weiner manages to hang on, the episode underscores how rehab has become an all-purpose laundromat for irresponsible behavior, an infuriatingly easy substitute for accepting blame and living with consequences.
Increasingly, in our Rehab Nation, the concept of sin has been replaced by the language of addiction. Shame has been supplanted by therapeutic intervention. The disease model of misbehavior dictates that there are no bad people, only damaged individuals compelled to commit harmful acts. In this scenario, personal responsibility evaporates and virtue becomes an anachronism.
...We live in an age of rehab as reality show. The cable channel VH1 has aired four seasons of “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” which spawned a spin-off, “Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew.” If former House majority leader Tom DeLay could make it to “Dancing With the Stars,” I’m sure there’s a place on VH1 for Weiner.
Especially when it comes to actual addictions, to drugs and alcohol, I’m sure rehab can be a helpful, if not surefire, remedy. However many times it takes Lindsay Lohan, I hope it works.
The Weiner situation is different.
...Writing on Time.com, Maia Szalavitz, herself a former heroin and cocaine addict, described the dangers of defining addiction downward.
“If anyone can go to rehab when his actions lead to public humiliation, is rehab still a medical treatment or does it become some form of absolution?” she asked. “If every time someone behaves like a jerk and the reason behind it is addiction, doesn’t that mean addiction is just an excuse for bad behavior?”..."
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
The Game of Life.
Words.
"...Heavy users of Twitter, as Weiner used to be (he hasn’t posted since June 1), play a complicated strategy game. Like World of Warcraft and Halo, Twitter is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but with higher real-world stakes. It is grounded in the first principles of game theory, including variations on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. You have to give to get; you have to get to give. Managing these ratios — deciding how much of your attention to expend to win attention to yourself, say — is the lion’s share of the Twitter action.
Players of Twitter risk their reputations, their careers and their relationships. But incentives to keep playing Twitter abound, too, as Weiner discovered. Twitter can burnish reputations, as it did for Weiner when he broke news; gave fast, fresh takes; and used links inventively. It can build careers, as it also has done for Weiner, whom Newsday praised as the architect of a “new political paradigm.” And it can develop alliances, as it did by connecting Weiner to another sophisticated Twitterer, Meghan McCain, over their mutual support of gay marriage.
...Weiner’s Twitter game was mixed — energetic and sophisticated, but flawed. Weiner and other men in their 40s, as Marc Tracy put it recently in Tablet, “lie in the sweet spot that makes them unusually prone to this sort of Social Media Age gaffe: Too young not to be fully engaged in this hyper-fast, hyper-linked world, but too old to fully, intuitively understand its hazards.” At the same time, even Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, has admitted he doesn’t know exactly what Twitter is for. And if we don’t know what Twitter’s for, we can’t know who puts it to the best purpose. That’s why Twitter is more usefully thought of as a game than a service. Like all other immersive games — including tennis, fantasy football and chess — Twitter is spellbinding when you’re in it, and seems nuts and like a sicko waste of time when you’re not.
In the days immediately after the Weiner revelations, according to the statisticians at TweetCongress, posts by Republicans went down 27 percent, while posts from Democrats dropped 29 percent. That’s too bad. In Weiner’s apologia speech, he urged the media not to blame social media for his personal and sexual habits. We shouldn’t. There’s nothing intrinsically immoral about Twitter. It doesn’t have to be given up like drugs. But people who use Twitter do need to improve their skills, and, more than ever, we need people who understand the massive new online game, like Anthony Weiner, to help explain it all to us."
Friday, June 10, 2011
The Air Up There.
Words. For Your Consideration...
"Why do we keep on believing that we'll see the arc of LeBron James' career just around the next corner? It's all Michael Jordan's fault.
...As every sports fan knows, Michael Jordan's storybook career is not a typical one. Sometimes a great player gets drafted by a team that already has the highest-scoring player in NBA history and starts winning championships his rookie year. Sometimes an all-time great only starts winning when he spurns his first team. It's also possible to stay with the same franchise your whole career and never win squat, or to move from team to team in search of a trophy and never come in first. Sometimes you have a bad game. Sometimes you lose.
And yet, Michael Jordan, the ultimate outlier in team sports, has become the bar that every basketball player must leap over. He is the basketball world's infallible older brother—Michael Jordan never would've done that, we say, tut-tutting disapprovingly when some wannabe heir has the audacity to lose a playoff series or to miss a bunch of shots in the fourth quarter.
As every sports fan knows, Michael Jordan's storybook career is not a typical one. Sometimes a great player gets drafted by a team that already has the highest-scoring player in NBA history and starts winning championships his rookie year. Sometimes an all-time great only starts winning when he spurns his first team. It's also possible to stay with the same franchise your whole career and never win squat, or to move from team to team in search of a trophy and never come in first. Sometimes you have a bad game. Sometimes you lose.
And yet, Michael Jordan, the ultimate outlier in team sports, has become the bar that every basketball player must leap over. He is the basketball world's infallible older brother—Michael Jordan never would've done that, we say, tut-tutting disapprovingly when some wannabe heir has the audacity to lose a playoff series or to miss a bunch of shots in the fourth quarter..."
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
"REAL TALK!"
Words.
"...if people are writing lyrics that piss you off, hurt your feelings and make you feel like shit, don’t listen to it. I don’t think the best idea is to have a boycott. Just don’t talk about them and they’ll go away. The more you talk about them, the more attention they get.
...There are so many great artists that are doing interesting things, that I don’t want to focus on boring people."-Kathleen Hanna
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"...The press has become the enforcer of conventional morality, a parody of it, actually. The nation cuddles up at night with Internet porn and sings the obscene lyrics of popular music and grabs its crouch on the “Today” show and watches, smug as can be, as someone like Anthony Weiner get thrown to the lions. We looked the wrong way yesterday. It was not Weiner on TV that we should have watched but ourselves watching him."
Monday, June 06, 2011
Friday, June 03, 2011
American Promise.
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"As I step down from the chairmanship of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation, I’d like to make a plea to the members of Congress whom the foundation exists to serve: that they recapture the trust of the American people.
This is not a call for the parties to play nice with each other. In a two-party system, that is a rare occurrence. There are too many incentives to make your party look good and the other party look very bad. Partisan jockeying that translates into votes and power can be civil, but it will not become less aggressive.
...With the foundation of trust corroded, we risk the public having no faith in Congress’s capacity to represent the people’s interests in the event of a national emergency such as a new financial debacle or major terrorist attack. At that crucial juncture, with their trust in Congress so low, would Americans turn to their representatives and senators to meet their critical needs for physical and economic safety? Alternatives that might seem more expedient from either the executive branch or fringe non-government actors would lead to more authoritarian, centralized government or to political and social disorder. Either would be a tragedy for representative democracy.
...A member can say forcefully what is wrong with a policy, program, political philosophy or an opponent’s position without tarring the institution or the government that gives him or her a platform from which to speak and act. This requires personal commitment and rhetorical discipline. It requires refraining from populist demagoguery about Congress or the government. It requires sustained awareness that as a member of Congress you are a steward of the commons..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Congress’s tragedy of the commons
Words.
"As I step down from the chairmanship of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation, I’d like to make a plea to the members of Congress whom the foundation exists to serve: that they recapture the trust of the American people.
This is not a call for the parties to play nice with each other. In a two-party system, that is a rare occurrence. There are too many incentives to make your party look good and the other party look very bad. Partisan jockeying that translates into votes and power can be civil, but it will not become less aggressive.
...With the foundation of trust corroded, we risk the public having no faith in Congress’s capacity to represent the people’s interests in the event of a national emergency such as a new financial debacle or major terrorist attack. At that crucial juncture, with their trust in Congress so low, would Americans turn to their representatives and senators to meet their critical needs for physical and economic safety? Alternatives that might seem more expedient from either the executive branch or fringe non-government actors would lead to more authoritarian, centralized government or to political and social disorder. Either would be a tragedy for representative democracy.
...A member can say forcefully what is wrong with a policy, program, political philosophy or an opponent’s position without tarring the institution or the government that gives him or her a platform from which to speak and act. This requires personal commitment and rhetorical discipline. It requires refraining from populist demagoguery about Congress or the government. It requires sustained awareness that as a member of Congress you are a steward of the commons..."
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
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