In the fall of 1939 Benito Mussolini condemned the Marx Brothers and ordered his subjects not to laugh at them.
I went to one of these suburbs that's currently ablaze three years ago. And what was interesting to me is I had to bribe a taxi driver a considerable amount of money just to take me out there. They're miserable places. But what was interesting to me is that after that, I then flew on to the Middle East, and I was in Yemen, and a couple of other places. And what was interesting to me was that I found more menace in the suburbs of Paris than I did in some pretty scary places in the Middle East. I mean, there is a real...this, I think, is the start of a long Eurabian civil war we're witnessing here.Robert Kagen writes about power and weakness.
I am the founder and director of a unique, progressive homeless facility in downtown Los Angeles, known as the Dome Village. Yet the 35 men, women and children and their pets who call the Dome Village home are being "evicted" from privately owned property after 12-and-a-half years -- apparently on account of my political beliefs and activities. You see, though I am a leading homeless activist, I am also a conservative Republican and a strong supporter of President Bush.
Here's how the situation played out. Recently, I was invited to address a local Republican Women's Club; my landlord read an article in the local paper reporting on the event. Soon after, I received a notice raising the Dome Village rent from $2,500 a month to $18,330. Shocked, I inquired as to the seriousness of the change and the property owner blurted out that the cause of our "eviction" was "because you are Republican." He said that as a Democrat, he was tired of helping me and the Dome Village. In other words, let the homeless be damned.
And people think the Democrats are the party of compassion and tolerance.
Police in Blue Springs, Mo. said they received a call Friday from a man who said his girlfriend was having trouble breathing after she swallowed a cell phone. The two had been arguing about the phone, which ended up being lodged in her throat.
Police said the woman, who wasn’t identified, was taken by ambulance to St. Mary’s Medical Center.
Later, police indicated the woman may not have swallowed the phone but may have been the victim of an assault in which the phone ended up lodged in her throat. The Associated Press reported that the police declined to reveal the details of the incident.
Iraq the Model is telling me at least as much about what's going on in Iraq as the New York Times these days.One blogger working for free in Iraq is telling the world as much about his country as the mighty New York Times.
Reviewing the falsehoods, myths and misrepresentations spun by the press, politicians and pundits after Hurricane Katrina, one is reminded of Nora Ephron's bon mot: "No matter how cynical I get, I can't seem to keep up."Did the media get anything right about Katrina? And is it a coincidence that the mistaken reporting made the Bush administration look bad and sank his poll numbers?
Most recently, we have word from the National Hurricane Center that Katrina was not a category 4 storm at all, but rather, a category 3 when it slammed into the Gulf Coast Aug. 29. So much for the notion the levees were built to withstand anything less than a category 4.
This is only the latest in a string of stories correcting, amending and often reversing what we were told at the time. The string is so long the fabric of Katrina reporting has unraveled utterly. It's enough to encourage caution, if not outright cynicism, about all reporting, particularly during emergencies.
I was reading your latest Mapes post and was struck by the irony of the situation she has manufactured for herself -- anyone who buys her story (hence her only daily company of friends and followers) is a fool. And she is quite aware of that fact. It seems a special kind of hell on earth.
Does Corn really want to be associated with fun blogs like Little Green Footballs and Gates of Vienna ("At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war")? I guess he does, because he'll be appearing on a panel at Pajamas' gala conference in November in Manhattan, where Roger L. Simon and company will break out the ginger ale and announce their new monicker. Then everybody will adjourn to invade Syria, if they can arrange transportation.
Corn is going to be seated at the Rainbow Room listening to keynote speaker Judy Miller justify her journalistic debauchery and his eyes will begin to wander the room, the faces of his fellow board members and new comrades swimming before him...
John Podhoretz...Roger L. Simon...Charles Johnson...Michael Barone...May...Ledeen...Glenn Reynolds...Mark Steyn...Larry Kudlow...Dr. Josef Mengele...the ghost of Roy Cohn, chewing on a chicken carcass...
And his soul will utter the silent cry, Sweet baby Moses, what have I got myself into?
In June 2003, after television cameras caught a cheering, thousand-strong mob in Fallujah dragging the charred, dismembered bodies of American contractors through the streets, Moulitsas linked to the reports and said of the contractors: “I feel nothing… Screw them.”As Crank put it:
…the problem with Kos' remarks is that they were vicious and mean, and effectively took sides with a lynch mob. Now, I recognize that many on the Right have been equally rough on Ahmed Yassin, Uday and Qusay, and even on less thoroughly evil figures like Rachel Corrie. But there's a common denominator there: those are all people who chose to take sides with those who want to kill us. They're on the other side.
And that's how Kos treated the men who were lynched in Fallujah: as not on his side. Except that, whatever you think of "mercenaries" and their motives… there's no dispute that these guys' were in ultimately in Iraq because the Coalition Provisional Authority wanted them there to assist in its efforts to rebuild the country into a democracy. The fact that Kos sees the people engaged in that task as being on the other side puts him, at least emotionally, on the side of the lynch mob, the fascists, and the Islamists.
“Everybody says I'm an asshole, and they're right, I am,” Moulitsas says.
Moulitsas used the site to raise $500,000 for Democratic candidates in the last****
election cycle—making him one of the party's top fund-raisers…
Moulitsas has become so well incorporated into the party machinery that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) uses him to recruit candidates.
Blues and Greens, political factions in the Byzantine Empire in the 6th cent. They took their names from two of the four colors worn by the circus charioteers. Their clashes were intensified by religious differences. The Greens represented Monophysitism and the lower classes; the Blues, orthodoxy and the upper classes. In 532 the two factions joined in the Nika revolt against Emperor Justinian I and Empress Theodora. However, Theodora's resolute stand and the aid of Belisarius and Narses ended the revolt. The factions continued to oppose each other into the 7th cent., but by the 9th cent. they had become mostly ceremonial.The two parties had religious and class differences, but neither had a bright idea as to what Byzantium should do. Neither was interested in the advance of freedom. They were just two gangs fighting for power. The Republicans and Democrats are looking more and more like Blues and Greens.
Oh, she had expressed strong concerns at the time! That's why she was asking for Congressional hearings, and sending cryptic letters to the White House and the Justice Department, letters she will no doubt produce in due course. (No, I can't think of a reason in the world she has not produced them already - maybe her staff has been busy with their holiday shopping).
But what if, after four or five hundred million years, you get bored and want to do something else?For years, the property has been home to Golden Era Productions, where Scientologists work around the clock producing videos, audio recordings and e-meters, to be sold to church members. Rinder said nearly all of the members at Golden Era have signed billion-year contracts to serve the church.
In his own spiritual life, Cruise has continued to climb the "Bridge to Total Freedom," Scientology's path to enlightenment. International Scientology News, a church magazine, reported last year that the actor had embarked on one of the highest levels of training, "OT VII" — for Operating Thetan VII.Operating Thetan VII? Is this a religion or a role-playing game?
At these higher levels — and at a potential cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars — Scientologists learn Hubbard's secret theory of human suffering, which he traces to a galactic battle waged 75 million years ago by an evil tyrant named Xenu.
According to court documents made public by The Times in the 1980s, Hubbard espoused the belief that Xenu captured the souls, or thetans, of enemies and electronically implanted false concepts in them to keep them confused about his dirty work.
Fantasy literature has numerous open doors for the casual reader. How many does SF literature have? More importantly, how many is SF perceived to have? Any honest follower of the genre has to admit the answers are "few" and "even fewer than that," respectively. The most accessible SF we have today is stuff that was written decades ago by people who are now dead. You all know I love me that Robert Heinlein as much as anyone, but why does my local bookstore still have more of his books than anyone else's in the genre? The most effective modern "open doors" to SF are media tie-ins, which have their own set of problems: They're fenced in grazing areas that don't encourage hopping into the larger SF universe, and also, no one but unreconstituted geeks want to be seen on the subway with a Star Wars or Star Trek book in tow.In the 1920’s and 1930’s, all science fiction was entry level. The stories were, with notable exceptions, crudely written and simple; children could read them with ease. John W. Campbell, Jr. revolutionized the field when he became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. He wanted stories that were well written, had more realistic science and had some ideas in them instead of just action. Other magazines such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories and Captain Future still had the action-adventure stuff teenagers love. Typically, kids would start with the cruder magazines and graduate to Astounding and in the 1950’s, to the more literate Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy.
Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is "ridiculous." "You're going to relegate my history to a month?" the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" to air Sunday (7 p.m. EST). "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history."…
Freeman notes there is no "white history month," and says the only way to get rid of racism is to "stop talking about it."
The actor says he believes the labels "black" and "white" are an obstacle to beating racism.
"I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man," Freeman says.
Freeman is about to find himself lumbered with the Cosby charge of speaking while being insufficiently... black. He'll just have to content himself with being, like Cosby, more than sufficiently right.
Senate Democrats say they will launch a filibuster to prevent the extension of the Patriot Act, which expires at the end of the year. If they are successful, a wall between intelligence and law enforcement agencies will once again prevent them from sharing information about terrorist activities within the U.S.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held a press conference yesterday to tout part of the bill she's worked on for years aimed at cracking down on the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine.Part of the Patriot Act is about methamphetamine? Politicians can add riders and amendments that are sometimes worse than what the bill was originally about. By now the Patriot Act is probably a pork-laden monstrosity.
Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.I think West is onto something here. Women don’t do the lunatic things men do. Women don’t climb a clock tower with a rifle and shoot people. Women don’t kill people and eat them like Jeffrey Dahmer. The male defect is lunacy -- not a controversial statement in contemporary culture because feminists have been saying this for decades.
Add Memphis to the list of cities Jackson has slammed in his time with the Lakers. He took one look at the desolate downtown on Tuesday and declared, "It's like Dresden after the war."I get the impression Jackson is a big city kind of guy.
