For Your Consideration.

Alicia Keys.

Sleeping with a Broken Heart.

IDOLATOR: Alicia Keys Fashions Herself As One Of The Beautiful Ones

Hustler's Anthem.

New flava in ya ear!

Jay-Z.

A. Keys.

Empire State of Mind.

This Magic(?) Moment!

Words.

"O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform.

Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have — guaranteed access to essential care — have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote.

But this time, broadly similar health-care bills have made it through multiple committees in both houses of Congress. And on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, unveiled the legislation that she will send to the House floor, where it will almost surely pass. It’s not a perfect bill, by a long shot, but it’s a much stronger bill than almost anyone expected to emerge even a few weeks ago. And it would lead to near-universal coverage.

As a result, everyone in the political class — by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon — now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Defining Moment

Oh Word?

Words. For Your Consideration...

"Old Soviet joke:

Moscow, 1953. Stalin calls in Khrushchev.

"Niki, I'm dying. Don't have much to leave you. Just three envelopes. Open them, one at a time, when you get into big trouble."

A few years later, first crisis. Khrushchev opens envelope 1: "Blame everything on me. Uncle Joe."

A few years later, a really big crisis. Opens envelope 2: "Blame everything on me. Again. Good luck, Uncle Joe."

Third crisis. Opens envelope 3: "Prepare three envelopes."

In the Barack Obama version, there are 50 or so such blame-Bush free passes before the gig is up. By my calculation, Obama has already burned through a good 49. Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad -- everything but swine flu.

...This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief two months later.

...Obama is obviously unhappy with the path he himself chose in March. Fine. He has every right -- indeed, duty -- to reconsider. But what Obama is reacting to is the failure of his own strategy.

...it is time he acted like a president and decided."

THE WASHINGTON POST: The three envelopes

EARLIER:

What If?

"We. Are. Your. Friends!"

A "Douchebag's" Moment of Clarity.

Oh Word?

A Moment of Clarity.



This can't be life!

VIDEOGUM: The Shake Weight, Now For Men

"Let's have some fun, this beat is sick!"

FREAK-A-LEAK!

Not today.

Words.

"Downey High School sent its homecoming queen packing, crown and all, after she was seen making sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor a few years back. Aliso Niguel High School Principal Charles Salter made good on a threat to cancel school dances in 2006 as officials there and elsewhere fretted over how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances.

Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft "dance contracts," binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.

Administrators say the graphic descriptions in the contracts leave little room for arguments over interpretation and put everyone on notice about appropriate behavior.

The Downey contract, for example, specifies "no touching breasts, buttocks or genitals. No straddling each others' legs. Both feet on the floor." Students get two warnings about sexually suggestive behavior before being booted without a refund and barred from other dances.

In Ventura Unified, the high school contract reads: "When dancing back to front, all dancers must remain upright -- no sexual bending is allowed i.e. no hands on knees and no hands on the dance floor with your buttocks touching your dance partner."

...The contracts arose as schools became concerned about potential sexual harassment charges from the charged dance-floor environment, not to mention images of dancers ending up on student Facebook pages or YouTube videos.

"I was a little apprehensive to do it and didn't think it would work," said Downey Principal Tom Houts. Now the school has a "freak patrol," a teacher who walks around the dance floor monitoring the action and, if need be, providing a first warning to dancers.

...Some schools are forgoing contracts in favor of less formal methods. The private Pacific Hills School in West Hollywood will hold a Halloween dance Oct. 30 and if couples are caught gyrating, lights will be turned up or the music changed to Burt Bacharach or William Shatner singing "Mr. Tambourine Man," said Mickey Blaine, the dean of students.

...Schools and parents will always find teen behavior that causes anxiety, said Karen Sternheimer, a USC sociologist. Currently, she said, concern seems to have migrated from freak dancing to the more high-tech "sexting" -- sending provocative pictures to friends via e-mail or cellphone.

Sternheimer noted that the freak-dancing craze coincided with sharp declines in teenagers' sexual activity, pregnancies and rapes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Anxiety often doesn't match the behavior," said Sternheimer. "It might offend the sensitivities of onlookers, but I don't know that anyone ever got a sexually transmitted disease or pregnant from dancing.""

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Schools putting the moves on hold

War & Peace (of mind).

Words. For Your Consideration...

"It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

...What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.

And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.

My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.

The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can’t afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that will get the most security for less money and less presence. We simply don’t have the surplus we had when we started the war on terrorism after 9/11 — and we desperately need nation-building at home. We have to be smarter. Let’s finish Iraq, because a decent outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.

Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats, but expanding there will, too. I’d rather deal with the new threats with a stronger America."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Don’t Build Up

EARLIER:

Reflection Eternal.

For Your Consideration.

Wait, WHAT?

WHO?

H-Town and Jodeci. That's who.

Knockin' the Heels.

A "New flava in ya ear!" Production.

For Your Consideration.

...

IDOLATOR: Adam Lambert: Making A Statement Without Leaping An Octave

Ruff Ryders.

The new GOP theme song.

Words.

"Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well.

The Gallup poll released Monday shows the public's conservatism at a high-water mark. Some 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, compared with 36 percent who self-describe as moderates and 20 percent as liberals.

The conservative number is as high as it's been in the two decades that Gallup has been asking the question.

...The implications of this for the Republican Party over the remaining three years of the Obama presidency are clear: The GOP is going to be pretty unapologetically conservative. There aren't going to be a lot of moderate Republican victories in intra-party skirmishes. And -- with the caveat that the political world can, of course, change quickly -- there will be a conservative Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

...The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.

The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.

So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be."

THE WASHINGTON POST: A good time to be a conservative

"IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE!"

No! It's Chris Brown (feat. Lil Wayne and Swizz Beatz) and he will TRANSFORM YA!

A "New flava in ya ear!" Production.

What If?

"I wish, I wish, I wish!"

Words.

"A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.

Snubbing the Dalai Lama.

Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.

Freezing out a TV network.

Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.

President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.

What’s remarkable is what hasn’t happened. These episodes haven’t become metaphors for Obama’s personal and political character — or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda.

It’s a sign that the media’s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news judgment, and an illustration that, in politics, context is everything.

Conservatives look on with a mix of indignation and amazement and ask: Imagine the fuss if George W. Bush had done these things?

And quickly add, with a hint of jealousy: How does Obama get away with it?..."

POLITICO: What if Bush had done that?

Brain Trust.

A Moment of Clarity.



Words.

"Student veterans began applying for education benefits in May, and we were supposed to have our tuition paid and receive our housing and book stipends in August. That didn't happen. Instead, more than two months into the school year, most of us have received nothing, although the VA is graciously offering to advance us emergency checks of up to $3,000 to ease the economic burden of not yet receiving the money we were promised.

Along with healthcare, job experience and a steady paycheck, the GI Bill was one of my primary reasons for joining the Army in 2004. I went into the military -- and spent a year in Kirkuk province in northern Iraq -- with the express intention of pursuing graduate studies when my contract was up. Truth be told, I wouldn't be writing this column right now, as a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, were it not for the GI Bill. Or at least for the promise of the GI Bill.

At this rate, it will take longer for the VA to get me my education benefits than it took for the Army to turn me into a soldier.

Why can't student vets get the money we were promised back when the Post 9/11 GI Bill was signed in July 2008?

...By the VA's own count, more than a quarter of a million education claims have been filed by eligible veterans since May 1, and about 70% of those have been processed. While this might sound great, let's not confuse processing with disbursement of funds. As of the first week in October, despite having about 900 employees working overtime to process claims, the VA had distributed only 27,000 payments for tuition or for living and book stipends. In other words, nearly 200,000 veterans hadn't received a dollar.

...To add insult to injury, some veterans who did receive emergency checks apparently are having trouble getting them cashed. The VA website doesn't say this explicitly, but notes: "In many cases these checks are handwritten and could pose concerns of fraud from banks." There's now a special telephone number for banks to call so they can verify the check's authenticity and the veteran's identity. Perhaps tellers will have better luck than I did in penetrating the automated phone system. As soon as my call went through, a digitalized male voice informed me that the VA was experiencing a high volume of calls. Then the phone disconnected.

...When Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) said veterans "who have been serving since 9/11 should have the same opportunity for a first-class educational future as those who served during World War II," I believed him.

So did hundreds of thousands of my fellow student veterans."

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Is the GI Bill just an IOU?

Oh Word?

Words. For Your Consideration...

"The jig is finally up. Shepard Fairey, an Echo Park-based graphic designer and longtime street artist, admitted earlier this month that he submitted false evidence and lied in a copyright lawsuit involving his most famous creation: the "Hope" poster featuring a stark red-white-and-blue image of Barack Obama.

The Associated Press had always maintained that Fairey created the image by essentially tracing over a close-up photograph of Obama taken by an AP contract photographer, Mannie Garcia, in 2006. Fairey insisted that he had used a smaller, cropped portion of another Garcia photo and that he was entitled to do so under the principle of "fair use."

On Feb. 9, Fairey filed a lawsuit seeking a declaration from the court that he hadn't violated any copyright in the creation of his work. The suit was an effort to forestall a copyright-infringement lawsuit by the AP. But on the very day the lawsuit was filed, Daryl Lang, an editor at Photo District News, posted a Photoshop overlay of the image of Obama captured on Fairey's "Hope" poster and the close-up that the AP maintained he used. The two images matched point for point.

Lang's overlay put the lie to Fairey's claim, but it took the artist months to concede that he had used, as the AP had maintained from the beginning, the close-up. Even now, he insists that expropriating the image was "fair use."

So why wasn't the jig up as soon as Lang posted his evidence? Because Fairey was "one of us" in the eyes of the fiercely liberal cultural and intellectual elite.

...Fairey has built his artistic career on a combination of vandalism, via graffiti-like hit-and-run art, and an expropriation of other people's images. While he insists he uses the art of others only as "reference points," his critics have termed his work outright plagiarism.

...Fairey boasts of having been arrested 15 times on graffiti charges in various cities. He pleaded guilty in Boston earlier this year to three counts of vandalism, including affixing a sticker to a traffic sign and putting a poster on a condominium building of his wife holding a gun.

...At 39, Fairey may seem a bit old for such merry pranks, but you have to remember that armchair Marxist intellectuals and others of Fairey's ilk still look back with longing to the grimy 1970s and 1980s in New York, when graffiti blanketed every car in the subway system. They were appalled by the successful efforts of mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani to crack down on the taggers in order to make the city livable for the philistines who had to take the trains to work.

Even some of Fairey's fellow leftists in the arts community have objected to his free-handed lifting -- without attribution -- of images created by others, even though many of those images are likely in the public domain."

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Shepard Fairey's true colors

Who Can I Run To?

Words. For Your Consideration...

"The "public option" is dangerous not for what it might do but for what it allows the politicians not to do.

From the start, the Obama administration has said that health-care reform has to make health care both more accessible and less costly . If Congress does the first without the second -- guarantees a new entitlement without controlling costs -- it will bankrupt us, because health-care costs are rising faster than the overall economy is growing.

So far, though, that seems to be where Congress is headed, for two reasons: First, no one knows for sure how to control costs; and, second, the reforms that are likeliest to work are politically unpalatable.

...If, as advocates sometimes argue, a public plan operates without favoritism, it will be simply one more entrant in the marketplace. Like other companies, it will have marketing and administrative costs. In some markets served by few private plans, it could offer a useful alternative. But it won't radically reduce costs.

If, as advocates argue at other times, the point is to insure sick people whom private companies, despite all regulatory efforts, find ways to shun, the public plan could offer a valuable safety net. But that wouldn't save money.

And if, as seems likeliest -- and as House legislation mandates -- the plan uses government power to demand lower prices from hospitals and drug companies, those providers may lower quality or seek to make up the difference from private payers. Private companies would have to raise their rates, so more people would choose the public plan, so private rates would rise further -- and we could end up with only the public option and no competition at all. Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door."

THE WASHINGTON POST: Shirking cost control

"IT'S MY PARTY!..."

A Moment of Clarity.



Words.

"The Obama administration's recent characterization of Fox News is a long overdue acknowledgment of the obvious: Fox News is not a legitimate news organization -- indeed, after many years of serving as the research and messaging wing of the Republican Party, it has now gone beyond even that, to become the electronic evangelist of an ultra-partisan and non-reality-based world view.

...What Obama and his aides are correctly pointing out is that the people working at Fox News are doing another job altogether.

The White House "attack" on Fox is being derided as bad politics, as ineffective and as a distraction from more important issues -- all of which may be true. But doesn't it kind of matter that, when it comes to the substance of what Anita Dunn, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, and now even Obama himself have said, they're exactly right?

...Pretending that Fox News is fair and balanced only serves the right wing, in the same way that it only served the Bush administration when traditional-media reporters pretended Bush didn't have a credibility problem -- and didn't call him out for his lies -- for fear of appearing partisan. It's self-muzzling, plain and simple.

...Sure, some of these people may be our friends -- and there are a few journalists at Fox who have maintained a modicum of integrity -- but the fact is that overall, these are people who have made a conscious decision to get out of the truth business. They don't deserve our support -- or our silence about what they really are."

THE HUFFINGTON POST: Why Journalists Shouldn't Be Defending Fox News

Brotherly Love. [NSFW?]

For Your Consideration...



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