Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
SCORTCHED EARTH
The Long Defeat
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 25, 2008 (NYT)
Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign.
First, Barack Obama weathered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair without serious damage to his nomination prospects. Obama still holds a tiny lead among Democrats nationally in the Gallup tracking poll, just as he did before this whole affair blew up.
Second, Obama’s lawyers successfully prevented re-votes in Florida and Michigan. That means it would be virtually impossible for Clinton to take a lead in either elected delegates or total primary votes.
Third, as Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has reported, most superdelegates have accepted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination. Instead of lining up behind Clinton, they’re drifting away. Her lead among them has shrunk by about 60 in the past month, according to Avi Zenilman of Politico.com.
In short, Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.
Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.
Five percent.
Let’s take a look at what she’s going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping. For another three months, we’ll have the Carvilles likening the Obamaites to Judas and former generals accusing Clintonites of McCarthyism. For three months, we’ll have the daily round of résumé padding and sulfurous conference calls. We’ll have campaign aides blurting “blue dress” and only-because-he’s-black references as they let slip their private contempt.
For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.
For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.
For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.
Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?
The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.
If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Scandal Rocks Detroit!
Detroit Mayor Charged With Perjury
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 24, 2008
DETROIT (AP) -- Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a one-time rising star and Detroit's youngest elected leader, was charged Monday with perjury and other counts after sexually explicit text messages surfaced that appear to contradict his sworn denials of an affair with a top aide.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy also charged the popular yet polarizing 37-year-old mayor with obstruction of justice and misconduct in office.
Former Chief of Staff Christine Beatty, 37, who also denied under oath that she and Kilpatrick shared a romantic relationship in 2002 and 2003, was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.
In all, Worthy authorized a 12-count criminal information.
"This case was about as far from being a private matter as one can get. Honesty and integrity in the justice system is everything. That is what this case is about," Worthy said at a news conference.
"Just when did honesty and integrity, truth and honor become traits to be mocked, downplayed, ignored, laughed at or excuses made for them? When did telling the truth become a supporting player to everything else?"
The charges could signal the end of Kilpatrick's six-year career as mayor of one of America's largest cities.
Perjury is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But for Kilpatrick, a conviction also would mean his immediate expulsion from office. The Detroit City Charter calls for any elected official convicted of a felony while in office to be removed.
Kilpatrick has said he would not resign and last week said he expects to be vindicated when all aspects of the scandal are made public.
The mayor was expected to hold a news conference at noon.
Worthy said she expected the mayor and Beatty to turn themselves in by 7 a.m. Tuesday.
Worthy has said she and her staff have pored over more than 40,000 pages of documents since January, when the Detroit Free Press published excerpts of sexually explicit text messages sent to Beatty's city-issued pager in 2002 and 2003.
The messages contradict statements Kilpatrick and Beatty gave under oath during a whistleblowers' trial last summer when each denied a romantic relationship.
My Habibi
Went for a Hike with
the Razor.
Never a Dull Moment.
Tossed her favorite toy,
The Stick, into a pile...
of sticks. She found "hers"
anyway.
Good Dog!!
Rome-In
Hooked.
Watched Rome with Jeff tonight.. first 2 episodes. Bloody, Nasty, Treacherous. Washington another day.
I think Jeff liked it though, so will have to watch the rest. Great Series.
Not Jim's genre, so will line up Carnivale' and Weeds. Love them ALL.. no worries here!
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!!
Madonna’s ‘Hard Candy’ hits shelves April 29
Album will be singer’s last release for Warner Bros.
LOS ANGELES - Madonna has dubbed her final album of new material for her longtime Warner Bros. label “Hard Candy,” and will release it on April 29, her publicist confirmed on Tuesday.
The album, which features such songs as “Candy Store” and the first single “Four Minutes,” is the follow-up to ”Confessions on a Dance Floor,” which debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. pop chart in November 2005.
The title and release date were first reported by Entertainment Weekly’s Web site, and the details were confirmed by Madonna’s spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg. Entertainment Weekly quoted Rosenberg as saying the 49-year-old singer “loves candy.
4 Minutes
Ok, so you can't SEE Madonna as it's not even her in the video (it's a clip from Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake for Promiscuous), but I can barely HEAR her either... hope this is not a sign that "Hard Candy" is going to be Rotten. No matter, you can rest assured I will be picking this up the Instant it hits the shelfs!
Full review to follow.....
Diego Riveria "Detroit Industry"
- DIEGO RIVERA
Mexican, 1886-1957
Detroit Industry, 1933
Fresco
Founders Society Purchase, Edsel B. Ford Fund and Gift of Edsel B. Ford
In 1932, when Diego Rivera was well known in the United States as one of the leaders of the Mexican muralist movement, he was commissioned to decorate the walls of what was then called the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Although he was originally asked to paint just two of the largest panels, Rivera was so captivated by Detroit and the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge industrial complex that he soon suggested painting murals on all four walls. The project took eight months to complete.
The only stipulation of the project agreement was that the theme of the murals should relate to the history of Detroit and the development of its industry. Major sections are based on Rivera's study of the Rouge; other sections are devoted to different industries active in Detroit at that time. The complete cycle combines the artist's love of industrial design and admiration for North American engineering with his philosophical opinions about industry's positive and negative contributions to society.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
From Small Beginnings...
Happy Spring 2008!!
Just snapped this pic. Here come my Daffadils!
A Dozen are reaching for the sky.. a few Thousand
more to come!
Just snapped this pic. Here come my Daffadils!
A Dozen are reaching for the sky.. a few Thousand
more to come!
Obama Chooses Reconciliation Over Rancor
NEWS ANALYSIS
By JANNY SCOTT
Published: March 19, 2008 NYT
It was an extraordinary moment — the first black candidate with a good chance at becoming a presidential nominee, in a country in which racial distrust runs deep and often unspoken, embarking at a critical juncture in his campaign upon what may be the most significant public discussion of race in decades.
In a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, Senator Barack Obama, speaking across the street from where the Constitution was written, traced the country’s race problem back to not simply the country’s “original sin of slavery” but the protections for it embedded in the Constitution.
Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.
“As far as I know, he’s the first politician since the Civil War to recognize how deeply embedded slavery and race have been in our Constitution,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School who has written extensively about slavery, race and the Constitution. “That’s a profoundly important thing to say. But what’s important about the way he said it is he doesn’t use this as a springboard for anger or for frustration. He doesn’t say, ‘O.K., slavery was bad, therefore people are owed something.’ This is not a reparations speech. This is a speech about saying it’s time for the nation to do better, to form a more perfect union.”
Mr. Obama’s address came more than a year into a campaign conceived and conducted to appear to transcend the issue of race, to try to build a broad coalition of racial and ethnic groups favoring change. In the issues he has emphasized and the language he has used, as well as in the way he has presented himself, he has worked to elude pigeonholing as a black politician.
He has been criticized as “not black enough” and “too black,” he acknowledged Tuesday. In recent months, the issue of race has stirred up the smooth surface of his campaign and become a source of tension between him and his opponent, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the past week, videotaped snippets of the incendiary race rhetoric of Mr. Obama’s longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., seemed on the verge of tainting Mr. Obama with the stereotype he had carefully avoided: angry black politician.
He faced a choice: Having already denounced Mr. Wright’s ferocious charges about white America, he could try to distance himself from the man who drew him to Christianity, married him and baptized his two children. Or he could try to explain what appeared to many to be the contradiction between Mr. Wright’s world view and the one Mr. Obama had professed as his own.
To some extent, he did both.
In a setting that bespoke the presidential, he began with the personal: He invoked his own biography as the son of a black Kenyan man and a white American woman, grandson of a World War II veteran and a bomber assembly line worker, husband of a black American who carries “the blood of slaves and slave owners.” Seared into his genetic makeup, he said, is “the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.”
He condemned Mr. Wright’s remarks as divisive but at the same time embraced him as family, “as imperfect as he may be.” He traced the roots of black church preaching deep into “the bitterness and bias” of the black experience. He offered a primer on the link between today’s racial disparities and the system of legalized discrimination that prevented blacks from owning property, joining unions, becoming police officers and firefighters, and accumulating wealth to pass on to future generations.
“For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away,” Mr. Obama said. “Nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.” And occasionally, he said, “in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”
He acknowledged white anger, too — over things like affirmative action and forced school busing — but urged both sides to address the subject to find a way forward.
“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” Mr. Obama said. He said the controversies over the past couple of weeks “reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.”
Historians and others described the speech’s candidness on race as almost without precedent. John Hope Franklin, a Duke University historian who led an advisory commission on race relations set up by President Bill Clinton, said Mr. Obama pointed out how easily the question of race can be distorted in this country, “which has three centuries of experience with it and yet we act like this is something new.”
Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights activist, said the speech moved him to tears. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, said he believed the speech would “go down as one of the great, magnificent and moving speeches in the American political tradition.”
“I hear so many people saying we want a national conversation on race but it’s never quite worked,” he said. “He was able to do this in one speech. But he was able to do it in a nonpartisan way in that he saw both sides.”
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
The Plan
The Dining/Living Room of the Future.
The Cold retreats inside and out as the warmth of natural wood fills the house. I am so looking forward to sitting down at a table and having one of Jim's Specialties!
The Cold retreats inside and out as the warmth of natural wood fills the house. I am so looking forward to sitting down at a table and having one of Jim's Specialties!
Monday, March 17, 2008
TRAGEDY!
Shock and Horror Filled the bustling streets of the Big Apple this week when a beautiful Mini Cooper was Crushed by a falling construction crane.
No further details are available on the status of the Mini, though we are watching this story closely.
Updates as they come in....
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
What was in that Banana Cream Pie??
'Gilligan's' Mary Ann Caught With Dope
DRIGGS, Idaho (March 11) - Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," is serving six months' unsupervised probation after allegedly being caught with marijuana in her car.She was sentenced Feb. 29 to five days in jail, fined $410.50 and placed on probation after pleading guilty to one count of reckless driving.
Under a plea agreement, three misdemeanor counts - driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a controlled substance - were dropped.
On Oct. 18, Teton County sheriff's Deputy Joseph Gutierrez arrested Wells as she was driving home from a surprise birthday party that was held for her. According to the sheriff's office report, Gutierrez pulled Wells over after noticing her swerve and repeatedly speed up and slow down. When Gutierrez asked about a marijuana smell, Wells said she'd just given a ride to three hitchhikers and had dropped them off when they began smoking something. Gutierrez found half-smoked joints and two small cases used to store marijuana.
The 69-year-old Wells, founder of the Idaho Film and Television Institute and organizer of the region's annual family movie festival called the Spud Fest, then failed a sobriety test.
Big Tex
Clinton Will Lose Texas
The Texas Secretary of State will release the official results of the Democratic primary on March 29th. But if initial estimates hold, Barack Obama will beat Hillary Clinton in the race for delegates. CNN confirms what others have been seeing for days. While Clinton won the state's popular vote, Obama racked up more caucus support, so that, now that the dust is settling, the Lone Star state's delegate total reads:Obama: 61 delegates from the popular vote + 38 delegates from caucuses = 99 delegates.
Clinton: 65 delegates from the popular vote + 29 delegates from Caucuses = 94 delegates.
So news people can now stop saying "two big wins in Ohio and Texas." Big win in Ohio, sure, but not Texas. Yes, Clinton could still pull it out, but that seems increasingly unlikely.
A further analysis of the delegate race over at DailyKos reveals that Clinton's supposedly big week has actually resulted in a net loss of 15 delegates to the front-runner. That's right, Obama continued to widen his delegate lead. Add to that another 5 delegate cushion after Mississippi, as well as another 99,000-vote-advantage to buttress Obama's overall lead in the popular vote, and one gets the feeling that Obama's momentum didn't really subside as much as was reported.
Who's the VP??
| Current Delegate Count | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Barack Obama 1,510.574.6% of the | | |||||||||
 | Hillary Clinton 1,40369.3% of the | ||||||||||
Another Win for Obama
Senator Barack Obama won Mississippi’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, building his delegate lead over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the final contest before the nominating fight heads to Pennsylvania for a six-week showdown.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting across Mississippi, Mr. Obama led Mrs. Clinton 60 percent to 37 percent.
“It’s just another win in our column, and we are getting more delegates,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in declaring victory in an interview on CNN from Chicago, where he arrived Tuesday evening after spending the day in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. “I am grateful to the people of Mississippi for the wonderful support. What we’ve tried to do is steadily make sure that in each state we are making the case about the need for change in this country.”
- NYT (03/12/08)Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Madonna Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Leave it to Madonna to make the right gesture. For her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she didn’t worry about whether her career as a pop hitmaker, image maker, sex symbol and provocateuse qualified her as a important figure in any narrowly defined genre of rock ’n’ roll. She just brought on an unquestioned rocker — Iggy Pop, the blunt, anarchic and durable songwriter and performer who’s a fellow Michigan-born musician — to sing punk-chorded versions of her hits “Burnin’ Up” and “Ray of Light.” He was shirtless, hyperactive and backed by the Stooges, who along with him have been nominated but snubbed by the Hall of Fame.Madonna entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its 23rd annual induction ceremony, held Monday night at the Waldorf-Astoria and telecast live on VH1 Classic. She was named to the hall alongside the Indiana rocker John Mellencamp, the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, the instrumental band the Ventures, from Tacoma, Wash., and the British Invasion band the Dave Clark Five, whose lead singer, Mike Smith, died on Feb. 28.
The Louisiana-born blues harmonica player Little Walter, a major figure in Chicago blues, was inducted as an influence on rock ’n’ roll. The songwriters and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, whose Philadelphia International label was a 1970s soul powerhouse, were named as nonperformers; their award had been renamed the Ahmet Ertegun Award, after the founder of Atlantic Records and one of the founders of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But it was Madonna’s night. She was introduced by the multimillion-selling pop singer Justin Timberlake, who collaborated on her coming album, “Hard Candy.” He said that while they were working together, he had come to the studio one day feeling ill, and Madonna had suggested a shot of vitamin B12. She didn’t call a doctor, he said. She took a Zip-Loc bag of B12 syringes from her designer bag, said, “Drop ’em,” gave him the shot, and added, “Nice top shelf.” Mr. Timberlake said, “That was one of the greatest days of my life.”
Madonna, calling herself a “control freak,” immediately corrected him. “I said, ‘Pull your pants down,’ ” she asserted, before starting one of the longest speeches given at any Hall of Fame ceremony. Among the people she thanked were naysayers: “The ones that said I was talentless, that I was chubby, that I couldn’t sing, that I was a one-hit wonder,” she said. “They pushed me to be better, and I am grateful for their resistance.”
The annual induction ceremony, for musicians whose first commercial releases were at least 25 years ago, took place as the recording business struggles.
- NYT (03-11-08)
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