It is the season of Over the Top, and from moment to moment the most adept speakers edge each other out in the ad lib and the prepared statements of the moment...With the off the cuff, exhausted remark being the most revealing, its clear who is planning what.
Personally, I think the Over the Top Award goes hands down to Hillary.
In a world where people openly talk about being afraid for Obama's health should he get the nomination, wouldn't it have been wiser for Hillary to apologize to both the Kennedy's and the Obama's and then say that in her exhaustion she merely mentioned something that comes up all the time. The American public would get it. Its not something to be spoken of by the inexplicably ongoing opposition within the party, who has taken to bending the truth and numbers, to the point that it seems like maybe she IS just waiting around for the slot to open because Obama will surely be vacating it one way or another...
I dunno what to think about any of whats going on...it smacks of someone telling us that they know what is better for the American people than the American people themselves.
Its the "look! Shiny, shiny!" of Joe Lieberman politics that changes only to get into office and then goes on about its business...I don't like it.
Here, Keith Olbermann again, because YouTube seems to be pulling these videos as quickly as they can be put up. Within this clip is Hillary's clip and transcript.



I think that he is spot on...exasperated...and I agree with him completely.
This is where Hillary supporters say, "Well, you have to forgive her because she is A) tired as hell, and B) wants whats best for the country and truly believes that she knows better than we do, and C) she probably DOES know something more than we do, being in such a powerful position and all....so it follows that D) she knows that Obama will be taken out because she is on some security committee, so we'd better hold onto the devil we have...she really cares about us and will be the Hillary that we know she is, under the tough-girl act, again once she is in office...
and daddy wont hit me anymore because he says he's sorry....you know the drill.
This is the definition of insanity!!
Look for Hillary next to try to break all laws to make a Hillary for Hillary party and run independent...I'll bet she's looked into it!

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, Kennedys

Oh, yes she did:



You know, I never put any stock in all the stories about Clinton Body Counts and stuff like that. I remember the whole shooting-watermelons-in-the-yard thing and all the raving about how the Clintons were responsible for everything from the crucifixion of Jesus to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby to the fixing of the 1919 World Series to Steve Bartman catching that home run ball in game six of the 2003 NLCS. But holy moly, when she pulls shit like this you almost have to wonder.

She "clarified" later on...



...but note how she ONLY apologizes to the Kennedy family, not for the obvious reference that if the presumptive nominee has someone, say, someone who attended an NRA conference at which Mike Huckabee joked about it, take a shot at him, then she'd be the logical choice.

As always, you can rely on Rachel Maddow to strip away the bullshit and get right to the point:



There's something about the idea of Barack Obama in the White House, constantly watching his back while Bill and Hillary conspire in the hallway, that makes me think about Papa Boleyn and son George talking about how if Henry VIII dies from his jousting wounds and Elizabeth becomes the heir apparent, then Papa Boleyn gets to run the country until she comes of age. And remarks like this don't help. Either Hillary is mind-bogglingly tone-deaf, or she knew damn well what she was saying.

I'm not ascribing any murderous intentions to her, but this sure doesn't look like what you want to say if you're hoping to be picked for the Vice President slot. At BEST it's another example of the kind of sloppy, off-the-cuff remark that brought us news of her plan to "obliterate" Iran.

And no, this isn't about smacking her around for saying this because she's a woman. It's smacking her around for saying this because she's smart enough to know better.

UPDATE: I should have figured that some of those reading this would latch onto my mention of the wingnut Clinton Derangement Syndrome that characterized the years 1992 through 2000 and musing on perhaps this kind of remark is why they escalated these people into Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. I don't believe for one minute that Hillary Clinton is going to assassinate or hire someone to assassinate Barack Obama. She may be ruthless and utterly convinced that she deserves this nomination, but she's not a monster. But as Keith Olbermann just mentioned in his special comment tonight (which was both accurate AND over-the-top), there are other examples of a campaign going on into June without invoking assassination that she could have used in a year when a black candidate is the, or a, front-runner for the nomination, one who had Secret Service protection early on because of death threats, one whose candidacy has had people telling pollsters to hang him from a tree.

We're finishing up eight years of someone who doesn't think before speaking, who says "Bring it on" and shoots (if you'll pardon the expression) first and deals with the press later. Throughout this campaign, Hillary Clinton has shown the same alarming tendency, along with an ominous inability to admit to mistakes. Whether it's the Iraq War vote, or her Bosnia tales, or drawing this unfortunate analogy, she refuses to admit to being wrong. She could have defused this with a public statement acknowledging how awful it sounded and how she didn't mean it to sound the way it did. She should have called the Obama campaign and apologized not "if they were offended", but for how it sounded. But instead she did what she always does -- dug in her heels, apologized for something completely different from what the problem was, and so the story goes on.

People say unthinkingly thoughtless things sometimes. I recently went on a rant about parents who don't discipline their kids and then wonder why their kids are using drugs in their teens in front of someone who lost her child to drugs. After I realized how it must have sounded, I called her and apologized, saying I hadn't been impugning her parenting and acknowledging that it must have sounded terrible to her, that it was thoughtless and I was sorry. It's hard to do, but not that hard -- and it's mandatory in a presidential candidate. I'm sure that being reminded of that day in 1968 is painful to the Kennedy family, especially now. But being reminded that a man who's a father of two young children has to deal with the reality that there are people who would rather see him dead than president is painful too. And Barack Obama deserved an apology too -- not "if he was offended", but for the remarks made. Because if Hillary Clinton can't acknowledge a mistake, she's no different from what we have now.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, You can't make this shit up

Emily Steel starts out her Wall Street Journal article, "More Digital Ads are Produced Offshore", with this eye-opening statement:

Outsourcing has hit Madison Avenue.

I don't think that's exactly late-breaking news, but if that's what the WSJ implies, than in a sense, it is late-breaking news.

The article continues:

Until recently, Web ads were produced mostly by creative types in downtown lofts in places like New York City or San Francisco. But big marketers are now increasingly shipping off that work to little-known businesses in places like Costa Rica and Bulgaria.

One company reaping the rewards is avVenta Worldwide, which has 415 employees in San Jose, Costa Rica; Kiev, Ukraine; and London, as well as Charleston, S.C. Since avVenta launched in 2005, it has built a business out of doing behind-the-scenes production work on Web ads for the agencies that work with some of the world's biggest marketers, including General Motors, Microsoft and Bank of America, at rates about 20% to 50% lower than what agencies pay for similar work in the U.S., ad executives say.

The article then goes on to talk about exactly which processes are being outsourced, and how American advertising agencies view outsourcing as necessary for survival.

Of course, it isn't always about lower costs. Emily Steel nicely says that "The campaigns are labor-intensive to produce -- and most ad agencies can't find enough talent in the U.S. to fill their needs." The article then talks about a Charleston-based company that expanded into Costa Rica "...because its time zones are compatible with those in the U.S., and it has a high concentration of English speakers and a work force with experience in design and development."

I didn't realize that Costa Rican schools were producing such prodigious quantities of ready-made digital design workers. Sigh! I guess we'll just have to lengthen the school day by one more hour so our children will learn yet another skill in order to become competitive in the global economy.

This guy wasn't as nice as Emily Steel in talking about American workers: "

There are a lot of talented people in this country, but there is just a different work ethic that comes with working with people from another country," said Dan LaCivita, senior VP-executive director of Firstborn, a 40-person digital agency headquartered in New York. Referring to a one-to-ten scale system, he said that in the U.S. you can hire "100 'sevens' or 'eights', but you can't hire 100 '11s'. And I want there to be 40 '11s' here."

LaCivita's quote was taken from AdAge.com (login ID required, but the article was copied into one of Rob Sanchez' Job Destruction Newsletters).

I decided to visit the Firstborn Multimedia website. Was it designed by one of their "seven's" or one of their "11's"? Is it my eyesight? Do I not have some sort of essential flash media installed on my PC? Or is it most of it almost (besides the pretty pictures) totally unreadable? I immediately found out why they can't find qualified American workers. It must be some sort of "If you can't read this, you're not good enough to work for us."

I was curious how a foreign-born "11" working in the United States is paid compared to a Costa Rican working in his or her own country. I have no way of knowing how much Costa Ricans earned, but I could find out a little bit about the H-1B's working for Firstborn through the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center website. According to the Labor Condition Applications (LCA's) filed for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, a Senior Designer makes $65,000 per year, Flash Developers make between $50,000 and $70,000 per year, and a Senior Producer makes $80,000 per year. I doubt if the Costa Ricans are making that much money.

I also can't help but notice that Emily Steel doesn't seems to think the necessary talent exists in the U.S., while LaCivita says, yes, we have the talent, we're just not very good.

Food for thought. If we start producing a bunch of American-born "11's", would the ad agencies start bringing the outsourced jobs back into the U.S., or start replacing the H-1B's with Americans? Shouldn't we start demanding that our nation's executives and politicians also be "11's"?

(Note: John McCain, in a recent Silicon Valley fundraiser, was very sympathetic to donors complaining about the low H-1B limits, and the fact that foreign students "must return" back to their own countries after graduation rather than seek employment in the United States. Do you think McCain is an "11"?)

Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.

Labels: H-1Bs, offshoring, outsourcing

This weekend, John McCain has invited some prospective running mates to one of his eight homes, presumably for barbecue. Specifically, those being interviewed are the closeted governor of Florida, a card-carrying member of the Christofascist Zombie brigade who thinks joking about bombing Iran and about assassinating a black presidential nominee constitute humor, and Paulie Walnuts.

The Obama running mate hunt is just beginning, despite the Clinton campaign's attempt to rewrite history and spin the Florida/Michigan situation as being (pick one) Zimbabwe, Florida 2000, or Jim Crow, even though it was HER VERY OWN PEOPLE who helped put together, and voted for, the rules that put us into this mess.

I haven't got a freaking clue who Obama should pick, but I'm emphatically opposed to the so-called "dream ticket." It's clear that Barack Obama can't trust Hillary Clinton one bit, and there's something Shakespearean about the idea of a young president with the wife of a former president as his #2, with said former president lurking around the hallways. Obama's dilemma is in finding someone who can represent change along with him, but who can fill in some of the experience gaps. I'm kind of leaning towards Jim Webb on that front, for all that Webb isn't exactly a progressive dream candidate. But I could also live with this guy:



More of this speech here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Joltin' Joe smacks down Holy Joe and his Republican friends in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal today.

Labels: Joe Biden

What does still surprise me is there are still people who think we shouldn't spend money on universal health care, education, or food for poor families, but don't seem to care about this:

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federalThe audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment without any basis for the payment.”

“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.

The new report is especially significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on anything resembling this scale.

John McCain says that the G.I. Bill which passed the Senate yesterday is too expensive. Let's see what he has to say about this. Somehow I'm not expecting him to say much about it. After all, it's the Memorial Day weekend, and he's too busy very quietly releasing his medical records as part of the Friday news dump and hoping nobody notices.

Labels: corruption, government waste, incompetence, Iraq

This one comes to us via Earth-Bound Misfit:

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

[snip]

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

See also: Oil panics, food riots, chances a Democrat could be elected, etc.

See you in the camp. I'll save you a bunk.

Labels: fascism, martial law, police state, tinfoil

Before you get all into a lather and call me an anti-Semite, let me be quite clear: I am a member of the tribe, so I get to write this.

Would you people please stop this idiocy about worrying about whether Barack Obama is "good for Israel"? You're making us all look like morons:

At the Aberdeen Golf and Country Club on Sunday, the fountains were burbling, the man-made lakes were shining, and Shirley Weitz and Ruth Grossman were debating why Jews in this gated neighborhood of airy retirement homes feel so much trepidation about Senator Barack Obama.

[snip]

“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch.

“They’re going to vote for McCain,” she said.

Ms. Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning.

“They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,” she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz.

But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. “I keep my mouth shut,” she said.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama will court Jewish voters with an appearance at a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla. A longtime Democratic constituency with a consistently high turnout rate, Jews are important to his general election hopes, particularly in New York, which he expects to win; in California and New Jersey, which he must keep out of Republican hands; and, most crucially, here in Florida, where Jews make up around 5 percent of voters.

This is the most haunted state on the electoral college map for Democrats, the one they lost by hundreds of votes and a Supreme Court decision in 2000, and again in 2004.

“The fate of the world for the next four years,” mused Rabbi Ruvi New as his Sunday morning Kabbalah & Coffee class dispersed in East Boca Raton.

“It’s all going to boil down to a few old Jews in Century Village,” he added, referring to a nearby retirement community.

[snip]

Because Mr. Obama is relatively new on the national stage, his résumé of Senate votes in support of Israel is short, as is his list of high-profile visits to synagogues and delis. So far, his overtures to Jews have been limited; aside from a few speeches and interviews, he has left most of it to surrogates.

American Jews hold two competing views of Mr. Obama, said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington. First, there is Obama the scholar, the social justice advocate, the defender of Israel with a close feel for Jewish concerns garnered through decades of intimate friendships. In this version, Mr. Obama’s race is an asset, Rabbi Saperstein said.

The second version is defined by the controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., worries about Mr. Obama’s past associations and questions about his support for Israel and his patriotism.

“It’s too early to know how they will play out,” Rabbi Saperstein said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he had been deluged with questions from Jews about the race, especially about what to think of Mr. Obama. “I have gotten hundreds of e-mails asking me, ‘Who should we vote for?’ ” he said. Mr. Dershowitz, who supports Mrs. Clinton, says he tells voters that Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, are all pro-Israel and to reject false personal attacks on Mr. Obama.

Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors about Mr. Obama have flourished. Among many older Jews, and some younger ones, as well, he has become a conduit for Jewish anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern’s friends told him in Aventura. (He’s not.)

He is a part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama’s children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he’s not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

South Florida is “the most concentrated area in the country in terms of misinformation” about Mr. Obama, said Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida, the co-chairman of the Obama campaign in the state. His surrogates can put these fears to rest, Mr. Wexler said, by simply repeating the facts about Mr. Obama — his correct biography, his support for Israel, his positions on other important issues.

But the resistance toward Mr. Obama appears to be rooted in something more than factual misperception; even those with an accurate understanding of Mr. Obama share the hesitations. In dozens of interviews, South Florida Jews questioned his commitment to Israel — even some who knew he earns high marks from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies the United States government on behalf of Israel.

I can't even begin to tell you how angry this makes me. It's one thing when people who don't have a lot of education and who don't have access to sources of news other than Fox News refuse to consult any part of their brain other than the reptilian one. But I know who these "few old Jews in Century Village" are. My grandmother was an old Jew in Century Village and I spent four days with her in the early 1980's. These are not stupid people. These are not people who don't know where to get information. This is willful fucking ignorance.

My mother isn't an old Jew in Century Village, but she's an old Jew in North Carolina. She's been to Israel, she loves Israel, and she voted for Barack Obama. So don't tell me that these people don't have access to the same information she does.

So who are these people going to vote for? John McCain, who's "proud" of his endorsement from a so-called "pastor" who thinks God Himself sent Hitler to move the Jews to Israel?



Come on, people! The deal has always been that we may not be athletic, but we're smart. Don't take that away from us.

Labels: American Jewry, Barack Obama, idiocy, Israel

Rachel speak, you listen:



(h/t: JedReport)

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow

ZOMG....he has an unusual name....his middle name sounds MUSLIM....his SKIN is DARK!!! That's so SCARY!!

For weeks we've heard about "white working class voters" -- the voters in states like Kentucky and West Virginia who utterly refuse to vote for Barack Obama under any circumstances. They'd rather see their sons drafted, their jobs sent overseas, their Social Security and Medicare gutted, than take the chance on someone who might work to make their lives better, but who flies in the face of their lifelong fear and loathing of anything different.

I will forevermore have ringing in my words of my friend, a 60-plus-year-old grandmother who asked me, in all seriousness, if I really think Barack Obama is "loyal enough to our country" to be president. She hates what the Bush Administration has done, she hates John McCain and everything HE promises, but this fall she will either stay home or vote for McCain, because friends who send her e-mails have led her to believe, or at least to fear, that Barack Obama is somehow dangerous.

And she's not alone:

Prefacing a question about the challenges of winning over white, blue-collar voters, the reporter offered this observation: "They think you are un-American," he said.

Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.

What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America.

[snip]

The anti-Obama e-mails now bouncing around the Internet have multiplied and are difficult to track, though the website Snopes.com has catalogued and debunked many of them. But the themes are similar: Elements of his biography make him too exotic, or unknown, to be president.

One features a made-up quote in which Obama "explains" why he purportedly doesn�t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem.

"There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression," the e-mail quotes Obama as saying. "And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message."

Obama has never said such a thing.

Another makes the false claim that Obama was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.

He took the oath on the Bible.

Then there is perhaps the least subtle e-mail, "The Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama in Pictures," which includes numerous pictures of the candidate's dark-complexioned relatives on his father's side in native African garb.

The e-mailers aren't troubled by the dissonance between two lines of attack -- the assertion that he's a Muslim and the claim that he belongs to a radical black Christian church -- though one goes as far as to try to reconcile the apparent conflict by arguing that Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ is covertly Muslim, something that would come as a surprise to its parishioners.

These e-mails are racist, they are libelous, and they are lies. But they work.

Democrats have made the mistake year after year of insisting that "The American people are too smart to fall for this." Republicans, on the other hand, understand the power of fear and loathing. They know it works. They know that since they can't win people to their side with the doctrine of Stuff More Cash Into the Pockets Of The Wealthy, they'll win it through fear -- fear of Scary Negroes™ (sic). Fear of Scary Middle Eastern Men™. Fear of Scary Women Who Want To Cut Off Your Penis&trade. Funny how it's never about fear of Scary Corporate Executives Who Want To Send Your Job Overseas While Raking In a Nine-Figure Salary And Poisoning Your Water Supply™.

Lower Manhattanite also understands:

Rugged in its raw form, and rougher still through what has been done to it by man and moguls, this is a place where large corporations make mega-fortunes on ripping the very heart out of the earth and cleaving off its scalp. The coal mining industry, while not employing the huge numbers it once did, is still a major economic force in the area. With upwards of 600 open and active mines in the region, pulling out close to 300 million tons of coal every year, pitting and scarring the land as the dark manna is hauled out on the cheap, the region's workers average a paltry $25,000 per year in pay for this back-breaking hollowing out of the earth beneath them. You add in the mills that have taken up the slack, where every fiber-filled, right-to-work breath steals a little bit of a person every day, and then stir in the “legacy” economy that pays to keep alive the people who gave of their bodies for decades—pensions and stratospheric late-in-life health care costs, and you have a population dangling by its economic short and curlies. And the moguls who own and ioperate these cash-cow companies have a vested interest in keeping the area's population ill-educated (which lessens the opportunity to gain work beyond home), financially on eggshells and “American Dream”-starved. Were these folks to in large numbers move beyond the necessity to work in these life-stealing industiries, where-oh-where would the cheap labor come from? There simply isn't enough of an incentive for “illegals” to descend upon the mountains and snatch these jobs up. For that low level of pay (and it'd be lowered still for brown-skinned folks) and body-busting work, there would have to be more of a secondary, benign payoff than Appalachia-as-it-stands can provide. Things that many take for granted, like ease of inexpensive travel and access to the culturally familiar would work against a replacement, outsider workforce. So you have in effect, a group almost permanently chained to the corporations that call the shots in the area. That is what is called “a captive workforce”.

This is the main reason why the young leave there in droves—the limited opportunities for success compared to the rest of America. Sadly, Appalachia is not a place you think of when thoughts of making the most of the “American Dream” come to mind. And that's the way the region's controlling interests want it. Born poor, keep them poor, and said poverty keeps enough there to be used as fuel for the money machine. It's also why the voting populace skews so heavily older. These are the folks tied to home—be it by duty to family who needs them, or an inability to escape. They will be born there, live there, work there, and yes—die there.

Now, this is not to say that they are terminally morose, or constantly unhappy...or dare I say it—bitter. They most certainly are those things when times are at their hardest, as would anyone who feel the weight of clouds limiting their sight of prosperity's sky. But they get by. It doesn't consume them. They live their lives as fully as things allow. And they no doubt know that the country outside of where they are experiences life differently—maybe with the odds stacked in a less-high pile against them. It's only human for there to be some envy, and even some antagonism.

Here's where race creeps into the picture. When you take into account the relative scarcity of Black folk in the region, racism's spectre seems odd in that it would appear hard to hate people who aren't there to be hated. Racism though, is a chameleon, changing pattern and texture depending on environment and situational catalysts. It manifests itself in Appalachia as an outgrowth in large part from socio-economic pressures and good, old self-esteem issues. This is also in the interests of the “bosses” whose businesses so dominate the region, and further, the local politicians in their pockets. As a distracting straw man, they unsubtly perpetuate the dusky, but actualy unseen “other” as a factor in their doing so poorly. And since time immemorial, no group wants to be regarded as the low man on the totem pole (The irony of using a Native American metaphor should give us all pause.), and in America, regardless of social station, African Americans can never truly escape that position.

You may be bad off. You may be under-educated, or ill-housed...but as long as you ARE NOT a n*gg*r, you ARE NOT at the bottom.
For some people—for a LOT of people, that's more than enough to make them feel a little bit better about themselves. And anything that enables that is hunky dory when you're effectively parked in what America deems its sweaty regional armpit.

It should be easy to combat this; it really should. It shouldn't be so difficult to point out how Republican Parties serve to eliminate any dreams these people have for themselves, their neighbors, and their children. Barack Obama's name and skin pigmentation are just the latest manifestation of the Democrats' failure to reach these people for nearly four decades.

The war in Vietnam gave patriotism a bad name. Conservatives who supported the war changed the definition of patriotism from love of country to blind obedience to that country's leaders -- a definition that persists to this day and was exacerbated by tha 9/11 attacks. Of course the media help perpetuate this notion that patriotism = unquestioning jinjoism and boosterism, but we liberals have been astoundingly ineffective as framing what "love of country" means. Perhaps it's because our country has this bloody history of kicking indigenous people off their land, using slave labor to grow crops, and exploiting workers for the benefit of the filthy rich. It's hard to pull a patriotic message out of that. But we have to find a way to get out of the grievance politics that make us feel we have to self-flagellate in perpetuity for the heinous acts of those who built this country and create the compassionate nation of opportunity and welcome that can benefit all of us -- including the descendants of those who were the victims of these parts of our history.

If Barack Obama were a Republican, he could beat the drums of war and wave the flag and spout the standard right-wing horseshit, and maybe (like Alan Keyes) he might occasionally be granted the title of Honorary White Person when it behooves Republicans to do so. But the irony is that more than any presidential candidate in my lifetime, Obama most fully represents the true meaning of the country for which we're supposed to wave the flag -- E Pluribus Unum -- "out of many, one".

Labels: 2008 election, idiocy, racism

My Anonymous Tipster sent me a link to a January 29, 2008 blog post, "David Perla - Anti-American Traitor". You may or not recall reading Perla's name before in a prior post I did dated January 15, 2008, where he was one of the main speakers at a Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) summit in New York City. Perla, the co-CEO of the LPO firm of Mumbai-based Pangea3, has a very dim view of the abilities and work ethic of American workers.

In his view, the temporary [American] lawyers typically hired to perform document review on major litigation have minimal skills and zero motivation. In contrast, Pangea3 can attract the best and the brightest young lawyers in India, fluent in English and trained in English common law. Perla said clients have held "bake-offs" in which the Pangea3's Indian lawyers were asked to perform the same tasks as U.S. contract lawyers. He said the Indians soundly trounced the Americans.

The article this quote is taken from, in Law.com, goes on to state:

The only lawyers who work for [American] staffing agencies, said Perla, "are the ones who couldn't make it as real lawyers."

Don't think this type of attitude doesn't affect the salaries and job prospects for all of us good worker bees.

I actually ran across this blog site, Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition, once before. I neglected to bookmark it, so I lost track of it. It's a horribly depressing, but informative, site chronicling how entering the legal profession is hardly a sure road to instant wealth. Take a look through some of the other blog posts. It's a real eye-opener.

My Anonymous Factchecker sent me this link for a company named NRISoft, which bills itself as being "The Un-Sweatshop". ("NRI", by the way, stands for "Non-Resident Indian".)

I thought it was a joke at first, but it's a real company and a real web site. However, we have a little story within a story. On Monday, when I first read this web page, it said the following under "Who Is eligible to apply for jobs at NRISoft?"

NRISoft is taking applications from professionals holding H1b visa status. We predominantly serve the H1b community. Although we do accept professionals with greencard and American citizenship.

[Note from Carrie. That part about accepting professionals with American citizenship is probably just a little CYA].

By a wild coincidence*, today, the wording has changed to:

NRISoft is an equal opportunity employer. However among professionals residing in America, the ones with H1b visa find our services most useful because of the inequity of pay of a H1b workers vs US citizen/greencard holders. Only jobs that cannot be filled by US Citizen are offered to H1b workers.

[Whew! A little more ass is covered now.]

So why should a potential employee work for NRISoft?

Why is NRISoft so generous?

We at NRISoft, do not consider ourselves generous. We just happen to think that most other consulting companies are just unfair. For example, you spend 4 yrs at an IIT. They pay you $80,000/yr or ($40/hr). They bill you at $100/hr. Are they being fair? They will tell you, that you are not being fair leaving them. At the end of the day, we all need to watch out for the best interest of our family.

War on Sweat Shops and Body Shops! Is NRISoft fighting this war?

No, NRISoft is not fighting the war against exploitation. NRISoft is just a weapon. If you are a first class professional, we hope you will make the right decision to get paid what you really deserve, based on the wages in America (not in India/China/Russia).

A commenter in the "Guestbook" section took issue with NRISoft claiming to be a more generous bodyshop than the others. Unfortunately, that comment was deleted before I could copy it. However, the gist of it was "I'm taunting you because you are a little company that is doomed to fail because you are paying your workers too much. I work for a highly successful company that pays its workers much less, and owner of the company is one of the richest men in the world." (It sounds like he was describing Wipro's owner, Azim Premji.)

The remaining Guestbook entry is just as illuminating, as the worker described how he used to work for a company that paid him $36,000 per year, but billed him out for $160,000 per year!

*That wild coincidence being, Rob Sanchez, the perpetual thorn in the side to H-1B apologists, posted an article about NRISoft at VDare earlier today. I discovered his post just as I was putting the finishing touches on my own post. I opted to publish this as is.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Labels: H-1Bs, outsourcing

Labels: Edward Kennedy

Too bad we can't find a way to have a kind of Clean House purge for the brain -- you know, a way to get rid of all that stuff that clutters up your head after a certain number of years. I know that the details of C syntax are still in my brain, but they're at the bottom of a dusty pile somewhere, back there behind the memories of the cloud over Negril that looked like a kitten playing, and the layers of the OSI model, and the lyrics to It Sucks to be Me from Avenue Q, and where we've seen Richard Alpert before on Lost, and the other effluvia that gets stuffed into our brains during the course of day-to-day life.

One of the knocks on older workers is that we aren't as quick on our intellectual feet as we used to be and we don't learn as quickly and easily as we used to. But it turns out that having to find storage space in the hard disk of the brain for all that new information doesn't mean we can't do it. It just means that in our quest for organization, we want to find the file cabinet that C is in so that we can store the PHP code in there right next to it. It means that when we're designing a user interface, we want to reach back to that awful client meeting when they pointed out everything we did that didn't work for their users and use that information to design it better now.

We may not access prior information as quickly, nor store new information as quickly, but we seem better able than younger people to utilize what we have in there:

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

Hiring managers, take note.

Labels: ageism, employment

We face an opponent, John McCain, who arrived in Washington nearly three decades ago as a Vietnam War hero, and earned an admirable reputation for straight talk and occasional independence from his party.

But this year’s Republican primary was a contest to see which candidate could out-Bush the other, and that is the contest John McCain won. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans that once bothered Senator McCain’s conscience are now his only economic policy. The Bush health care plan that only helps those who are already healthy and wealthy is now John McCain’s answer to the 47 million Americans without insurance and the millions more who can’t pay their medical bills. The Bush Iraq policy that asks everything of our troops and nothing of Iraqi politicians is John McCain’s policy too, and so is the fear of tough and aggressive diplomacy that has left this country more isolated and less secure than at any time in recent history. The lobbyists who ruled George Bush’s Washington are now running John McCain’s campaign, and they actually had the nerve to say that the American people won’t care about this. Talk about out of touch!

I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don’t represent is change.

Change is a tax code that rewards work instead of wealth by cutting taxes for middle-class families, and senior citizens, and struggling homeowners; a tax code that rewards businesses that create good jobs here in America instead of the corporations that ship them overseas. That’s what change is.

Change is a health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants; that brings down premiums for every family who needs it; that stops insurance companies from discriminating and denying coverage to those who need it most.

Change is an energy policy that doesn’t rely on buddying up to the Saudi Royal Family and then begging them for oil – an energy policy that puts a price on pollution and makes the oil companies invest their record profits in clean, renewable sources of energy that will create five million new jobs and leave our children a safer planet. That’s what change is.

Change is giving every child a world-class education by recruiting an army of new teachers with better pay and more support; by promising four years of tuition to any American willing to serve their community and their country; by realizing that the best education starts with parents who turn off the TV, and take away the video games, and read to our children once in awhile.

Change is ending a war that we never should’ve started and finishing a war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan that we never should’ve ignored. Change is facing the threats of the twenty-first century not with bluster, or fear-mongering, or tough talk, but with tough diplomacy, and strong alliances, and confidence in the ideals that have made this nation the last, best hope of Earth. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy.

That is what change is.

That is the choice in this election.

Labels: Barack Obama

Well, it doesn't look so good for Anne Boleyn, now, does it.

I don't know what it is about the short-lived Tudor dynasty so compelling. After all, Henry VIII wasn't the only European king who fooled around with women to whom he wasn't married. Queen Victoria's son Albert, who became King Edward VI, had an extended affair with Lillie Langtry, after all. It's tempting to think that the story of Henry VIII and his wives is about the sex -- especially when the series currently running on Showtime is populated with so many relentlessly gorgeous people and more flesh than we've seen in any other treatment of this story. But there's so much packed into this particular piece of history -- the Reformation, Henry's break with Rome, the tragedies of the various women unfortunate enough to catch his eye and his interest, the relentless stream of pride goingeth before a fall. But one of the most compelling aspects of this story has always been Henry's moral relativism in the face of the intense religiosity that characterized the age in which he lived, and how that moral relativism led him to the heinous acts that books and movies and television have retold over and over and over again.

For all the fine dramatizations that have been done in the past depicting this story, and for all that this one plays so ridiculously fast and loose with certain historical details, there's a kind of raw immediacy that this series has. Once you suspend disbelief enough to buy that a slightly-built young man with cheekbones you could grate cheese on, impossibly perfect teeth and an Elvisish curl of the lip is the large, hearty king we know from the Hans Holbein portraits, and if you can avoid ticking off the many historical liberties taken in this series in the name of narrative, there's a palpable intensity here that sucks you into the emotional lives of these people.

In last Sunday's episode, we saw quite graphically the miscarriage that was literally the final nail in the coffin of Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry. Anne has always been portrayed as this strong, defiant creature that has often made it difficult to find her sympathetic. We forget how she was pimped out by her family to curry favor with the king and expected to somehow hold onto his interest when her own sister had failed to do so. Imagine what it must have been like for an intelligent young woman to try to balance the headiness of attracting the attention and gifts of a king, one's obligation to one's family, and at the same time be witness to your own sister's plight as a discarded mistress. Imagine watching your male fetuses bleed out of you knowing that you only have so many tries to produce a male heir. We've always seen Anne Boleyn as a schemer, fully complicit in her own fate, a homewrecker who on some level we always felt got what she deserved. Natalie Dormer's interpretation of the character is just as self-assured as those that have preceded hers, but she finds the human part of Anne that we've so often missed:



Life for women in Tudor England just have been horrible:

Young girls were given hardly any personal freedom.

Religion was at the very center of life in Tudor England. And girls were raised to obey their parents without question.

Girls were taught their only function in life was to marry and bear children.

They learned they were commanded by God to render unquestioning obedience to their husband and to learn in silence from him in all subjection, the same way they behaved at home to their parents.

[snip]

Most people in the first half of the 16th century didn't believe in education for women. They held the medieval belief that teaching girls to read and write would cause them to waste their time and skills on love letters.

[snip]

Husbands of upper class girls were chosen for them by their fathers or other male relatives. Very few men and women of noble birth chose their own partners.

Marriages were arranged for political reasons, to cement alliances, for riches, land, or status, and to forge bonds between two families. The idea of marrying for love was considered bizarre and foolish.

Royal marriages were contracted largely for political, military, or trade advantages. It sometimes happened that the couple never saw each other until the day of their wedding.

[snip]

A girl's chances of marriage depended more on the wealth and social position of her family than on her beauty or accomplishments (though a comely appearance and a pleasing demeanor never hurt).

The Pre contract would contain a clause calling out the terms of the bride's Dower Rights; the amount settled by her husband or father for her living expenses in case of widowhood.

Even if she was widowed, she didn't gain and keep control of those funds unless she didn't return to her father's house or remarry.

[snip]

The Tudor concept of marriage fit into what they believed was the divine order. God ruled the universe, the King ruled the country, and a husband ruled his family.

Like subjects to a King, wives were bound in obedience to their husbands and masters.

Men expected to rule their wives and thereby gain their love and reverence. They believed a man could make, shape and form the woman to his will. They thought a loving, virtuous, and obedient wife was a gift from God.

For the woman, even queens, that meant total subjection to and domination by her husband, who was often a domestic tyrant.

Marriage was a period of upheaval and adjustment for any woman. Even more so for a Queen. Often she had to face a dangerous journey to a new land and a stranger, leaving her home, family, and native land never to see them again.

Royal wives could come to enjoy considerable power and influence as did both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. But all such power emanated from her husband. She had no authority or freedoms except those he allowed her. Without him she was nothing.

Queen consorts were housewives on a grand scale with nominal charge of vast households and many estates which produced huge revenues.

They had a battalion of officials to administer the estates for them. The Queen only controlled the income allowed to her by the King. No major transactions of any kind could even be considered without his consent.

As a matter of fact, any decisions made, from financial matters to domestic issues, were subject to his approval. Usually the Queen had a privy council appointed by the King to oversee and advise him about her affairs.

The chief duty of the Queen was to produce heirs for the succession. She was also to set a high moral tone for the court and kingdom by being the model wife, full of dignity and virtue.

[snip]

The chief function of Queens and of wives of lesser status as well, was to produce sons to ensure continuation of her husband's dynasty.

Pregnancy was usually an annual event.

Many women and babies died in the childbed. Pregnancy and birth were extremely hazardous.

The expectant mother not only prepared a layette and the nursery for her new baby, but also made arrangements for someone to care for her child if she died during childbirth.

Even if she did survive the birth she could be physically scarred for life.

There was such a lack of medical knowledge even doctors, who were usually only called in if there were complications, had no real idea of how to treat or even diagnose.

Couple that with their almost total lack of understanding of even basic hygiene, and you begin to see why so many women died.

Anne Boleyn got caught up in power games played by men, was a pawn in her own family's ambition, succumbed to the headiness of being able to get a king to make her a queen, and then failed to remember what her function was.

Today we are once again hearing the rumblings of religious fundamentalism. That fundamentalism has worked its way into our government, where the judicial branch of government is one retirement away from the addition of another Samuel Alito to the Court. This breed of justice believes that because the word "privacy" is not seen in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, there is no right to privacy. There are people in this country who would return women to their place in Tudor England -- whose role is solely that of wife, mother, breeder. They would not only make abortion a crime, but they would also turn back the clock and overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, thereby allowing states to outlaw contraception the way some states outlaw sex toys today.

While some so-called feminists have obsessed about how Hillary Clinton has been treated by the media, and whether Barack Obama has been condescending, and have been threatening to stay home or vote for John McCain in November, they're forgetting how much of the progress women have made in the last four decades is because they are no longer slaves to reproduction. I have no doubt that Anne Boleyn wanted to have a male child as much as Henry did, and her inability to do so -- perhaps caused by Henry VIII having syphilis, as one theory has it -- cost her her life. Not so long ago, NOT wanting a child one had conceived could cost a woman her life.

A John McCain presidency means an end to the reproductive freedom we've all come to take for granted. I'm hearing women say that we should allow McCain to be president so Hillary can come back triumphant in 2012. John Paul Stevens is not likely to stay on the Court another four years. 2012 is too late. The march of the Court and of this country's attitude towards women cannot afford anothe four years of a Republican president in service to the descendants of those in the early 16th century who accused intelligent women of witchcraft, and behaded women on trumped-up adultery charges because their own Y chromosomes were too weak to turn a human egg into a healthy male child, and treated women as possessions and pawns in their power games and who twisted religion and their God to justify the most heinous of crimes against humanity.

These women claim to want their daughters to live in a world where nothing is off limits to them. We've come so far since Anne Boleyn lost her head because she didn't produce a male heir. Yes, there's more progress to be had. But the road we've been on for my entire adult life comes to an end with more conservative Supreme Court justices -- justices who will rule against pay equity and the right to self-determination. So if you're a Hillary Clinton supporter who is tempted to stay home just because you believe that a woman "deserves" the chance this year, just think about what you'll have to tell your daughters about how you helped the retrogressive aims of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade make sure that the world you envisioned and hoped for never comes to pass.

Labels: 2008 election, Hillary Clinton, The Tudors

Senator Teddy Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and will need aggressive treatment in the coming months. This is heart stopping news for me, but I hadn't realized how devastating this would be for not only his colleagues in the senate, but the entire government, and the American people as well.

Kennedy's great friend, CT Senator Chris Dodd, could barely make a statement, as he stood with senators Harry Reid and John Kerry, reacting to the news. The level of emotion gave me the impression that prognosis may be worse than we in the public know. The way that MSNBC covered this, and went over the historical implications of Kennedy's career made it seem like he was dead already. But Kerry assured us that Kennedy was up and around the hospital, making decisions and weighing his options. He will fight this with the best medical care that this country has to offer, and the closest family...he has everything going for him, including a strong fighting spirit and the knowledge that he has much left to do for this country before he is finished.

Best Wishes can be sent to Senator Kennedy and his family here, and I believe that they will put updates there as well. There is really not much to know yet, except that this is horrible news at this point in time, and considering that Kennedy has been such a strong voice for the disenfranchised. Now is when his voice is going to be needed the most, as we watch the economy sink into ruins as the final blow of the Bush legacy.

Barack Obama was featured on all of the news outlets this afternoon talking candidly about Senator Kennedy and what it was like to work as a young senator beside him; how its been to have this heroic figure support him so strongly, and how much he admires the work that teddy has done. This Kennedy, the third brother, and surrogate father and grandfather to too many Kennedy children, has touched us all pretty deeply. His sense of moral outrage at the reluctance of the senate to move ahead with foundational democratic issues has been a constant force in what little is left of the sanctity of our government in the era of Bush's criminal activities, and what America was founded to be. Godspeed Teddy; you are well loved across this country by real Americans who understand the importance of the moral, empathetic, voice of America. We are there fighting this thing, right alongside you, just as you have been fighting for us, and before you know it you will be sailing off of Hyannisport with the salt spray in your full sails...Get well soon!

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: Kennedys

This is the most dumbass -- and scariest -- definition of reality since Ron Suskind quoted a Bush Administration official saying that when you're an empire, you can create your own reality.

Via HuffPo:

KLEIN: I've done some research, and um -


MCCAIN: I have too.

KLEIN: Also checked, also checked with the Obama campaign and he never, he's never sai -- mentioned Ahmadinejad directly by name. He did say he would negotiate with the leaders, but as you know - Ayatollah,

MCCAIN: (Laughing) Ahmadinejad is, was the leader.

KLEIN: But if -

MCCAIN: Maybe I'm mistaken.

KLEIN: Maybe you are, because -

MCCAIN: Maybe. I don't think so though.

KLEIN: The Supreme, you know, according to most diplomatic experts, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the guy who's in charge of Iranian foreign policy and also in charge of the nuclear program, but you never mention him. Do you, you know, um, why do you always keep talking about Ahmadinejad since he doesn't have power in that, in that realm?

MCCAIN: Oh I thin-Again, I respectfully disagree. When he's the person that comes to the United Nations and declares his country's policy is the extermination of the state of Israel, quote, in his words, wipe them off of the map, then I know that he is speaking for the Iranian government and articulating their policy and he was elected and is running for reelection as the leader of that country. Yes sir, go ahead.

NEW REPORTER: One more quest-

MCCAIN: I mean, the fact is he's the acknowledged leader of that country and you may disagree, but that's a uh, that's your right to do so, but I think if you asked any average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they'd know. Go ahead. Or anyone who's well-versed in the issue.

The implications of "asking any average American" as constituting truth are breathtaking -- and we've already seen what happens when we do that: we get a country that supports invasion of a sovereign nation that did nothing to us because "any average American" got it into his head, via constant repetition by the Administration, that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks and most of the hijackers were Iraqi. And we're likely to get people voting for more of the same because "any average American" is going to believe the e-mails his wingnut friends send him claiming that Barack Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate. Just because "any average American" has gotten an idea through having one ear on the 6:00 news and the other on his kids' homework doesn't make it true. Americans are tragically uninformed about what's going on in the world, and relying on their perceptions to constitute understanding of other nations is no way to lead.

Labels: idiocy, Iran, John McCain

What else can one say, but Jesus H. Christ:

Georgia Republican Party chairwoman Sue Everhart said Saturday that the party's presumed presidential nominee has a lot in common with Jesus Christ.

"John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross," Everhart said as she began the second day of the state GOP convention. "He never denounced God, either."

I guess the Apostles were really lobbyists getting rich off doing business with the Romans, that Jesus really was married (presumably to Mary Magdalene) and that when Mary got "uppity" he called her a c--t. Oh yeah, and Mary Magdalene was the heiress to a wine distributorship fortune and owned eight houses.

Yup. John McCain really IS just like Jesus.

Just shoot me.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, icepick meet forehead, idiocy

I spent most of this past weekend on travel sites, trying to figure out what we should do for vacation this year.

I've long been convinced that there are two kinds of vacationers -- sightseers and relaxers. Mr. Brilliant and I tend to be relaxers. I think it stems from the years both of us spent commuting to New York -- the idea of spending a vacation shlepping around is about as appealing as spending it in, say, Branson, Missouri. So this is why Jamaica has been so appealing to us over the years. It's a beautiful place, the pace is slow, slack is encouraged, the food is awesome, the rum is plentiful, and you can spend entire days staring off at the water, reading a book, and being narcoleptic. We will probably end up going back this year, but I've had this hankering to do something different this year.

Part of it is sticker shock from looking at airfares. Sure, you can still fly from JFK, but the round trip to JFK from New Jersey is such a horrific pain in the ass, especially the trip home on a Saturday night, that it makes me just want to stay home. With the airlines in serious crunch mode, that means the only option out of Newark is Continental, which now charges almost $700 just to get there. There's something offensive at having to pay more to get to a place than it will cost to stay there (the place we stay is $110/night per person including meals and drinks).

I've always thought a cruise sounded hellish. I've had visions of being trapped on a big boat with the collected recordings of American Idol failures blaring nonstop, garish casinos, surrounded by a bunch of people who cruise so they don't have to spend too much time around Brown People™ or deal with Strange Native Cultures (sic). Then there's the idea of having to buy a bunch of dressy clothes just to go to dinner, small overcrowded swimming pools, and general American hokiness, and I've always said "No, thanks."

But with air travel becoming so expensive and so miserable, the idea of driving into New York City, getting onto a ship, and being immediately on vacation, is starting to sound appealing. And if my sister, who participates in African drumming circles, doesn't find cruises appalling, maybe there's something to it. And after all, even we aren't as hip and cool as we used to be. And if sitting on a balcony staring out at water is an integral part of one's vacation, well, this might be just what the doctor ordered.

We're kind of limited to Norwegian Cruise Lines, though, largely because of that line's fancy-dress-not-required policy and the fact that they still allow those who are enslaved to their Marlboros to support Altria Corporation in their cabins and balconies. Norwegian and Royal Caribbean seem to be the only non-Carnival lines operating out of New York and Bayonne, and I have to admit to a prejudice against Carnival. I think some of it is the designation of Carnival ships as "Fun ships." What does "fun" mean? Gambling? Bad Vegas-type shows? Silly games? What about those of us for whom fun is a good night's sleep, a good book, and not having to do much of anytthing? But more of it is the lingering stench of Kathie Lee Gifford that continues to pervade Carnival's ads long after the line threw her overboard as spokesperson. It's part of the peril of celebrity endorsement -- if your endorser commits a crime, or even if s/he is guilty of nothing more than being, as Gifford was, terminally annoying, it can taint your product forever.

So between my prejudice, however irrational, against Carnival, and Royal Caribbean seemingly having a policy that if you complain in public about sewage seeping onto your cabin's carpet you can be banned from their cruise line, and trying to convince both myself and Mr. Brilliance that whatever American Trash Culture we might have to endure might be offset by the generally reduced hassle factor, I'm not sure what we should do this summer, especially since with the economy as it is, who knows when we might be able to travel again?

Labels: travel

This week my dear blogbrother ModFab decided to end four years of fabulousness by ending Modern Fabulousity as an ongoing blog. It's hard to blame him, for ModFab is arguably the one person in the world who's even more compulsively busy than I am. He works a full-time job AND he's a playwright and director, and for the last four years he's been THE go-to guy for all things pop culture. Now he wants to devote more time to his personal life and his creative endeavors. It's especially bittersweet for me to watch him largely leave the online world, because he was there for me while we navigated the insanity that was our time in the Online Film Critics Society, we collaborated on a movie review site together (which he designed), and he's been a dear friend for nearly a decade (and will continue to be). But while we'll miss his updates on theatre, movies, and just general fun, we're excited about what he's going to come up with next.

Since I've sorely neglected the many other bloggren whose work I respect, here's a little compendium for your enjoyment and edification.

Joshua Holland interviews John Cusack about War, Inc. -- and we're pea green with envy.

BJ at Newshoggers on Hubberts Peak.

bmagnus at Shortwoman has a post up about ectopic pregnancy. It's a bit old by blog standrads, as it's from Mother's Day, but still worth a read -- especially for women who think that by electing John McCain they'll be getting revenge on that mean old sexist Barack Obama.

Batocchio takes on Karl Rove.

Older Voter says we'll survive the exodus of racists from the Democratic Party.

Maya's Granny hasn't been well. Click over and pay her a visit -- and get the snail mail address where you can send her a card.

Mmmmmmmmmm....Chocolatissimo....nutellla....bomb....ice....cream..... The Minstrel Boy haz it, and I'll bet it haz a flavor.

In case you weren't worried enough about the integrity of the machines people will use to vote in November.... (And on a related note, PhysioProf shows why, if you're more concerned about so-called "voter fraud" than about this, you're an asshole.)

Ornery Bastard cautions against too much Obamoptimism about Oregon today.

Labels: bloggers

I found this curious paragraph in Joel West's Engineering Entrepreneurship blog post "Japan's Engineering Shortage" (in response to a similar "crisis" in the US):

But I have to remind myself there are still engineers (or CS types) that just want a job. These are people paid not in founder’s shares, or qualified options, but in salary. The problem is that (as with nurses and teachers), the economy needs a lot of engineers, so raising salaries across the board is a lot more expensive than paying high wages to a handful of NYSE traders or MLB players.

It's amazing how Silicon Valley loves the free market when it comes to allowing their beloved entrepreneurial startups to do all of their wheelin' and dealin', but hates the free market when it comes to paying high enough salaries to attract desired workers.

I know! How about if we just get rid of wages and salaries altogether in our country and replace them with stock options? That way we'll be begging for the next bubble industry to emerge instead of demanding that Bernanke do something to stop the bubbles before they start.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation)

Labels: employment, skills shortage

As late as the beginning of this year, Hillary Clinton was presumed to be the Democratic nominee for president; assumed by most Democrats, assumed even by the media that have treated her so shabbily. Now it seems clear that the nomination will instead go to the upstart Senator from Illinois.

So what went wrong? Is it, as many feminists are saying, because she's a woman?

It's no secret that I don't share the focus on the minutiae of language that many feminists do. My view is that for three generations now, while women have been parsing the meaning of words and looking only at the corporate glass ceiling, the Democrats have been rubber-stamping Supreme Court nominees like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, more women than ever are working without benefits and without job security, women are still trapped in abusive relationships from which they have difficulty escaping because they have no skills, or being raped on the street and by their dates, or sexually harassed by their bosses. And it's not because Barack Obama called a reporter "sweetie." While you can make the argument that comments deemed dismissive of women are part of the same continuum that leads to rape and discrimination, they aren't the same, and to equate them is to make the mistake that Andrea Dworkin made when she opined that penetrative sex is, by definition, violent. It's hyperbole in the service of a cause that negates the worthiness of that cause.

It's the politics of victimization that have been the most troubling part of this election campaign, a contest of Who's Suffered More that does little to advance the cause of any aggrieved group making claims of comparative suffering, and a great deal to make very real issues seem trivial. You can't be empowered if you frame yourself solely in the context of being a rape survivor. You can't be empowered if you take to your fainting couch every time a man says something you think is dismissive or cruel.

I tend to suffer from a great deal of free-floating anxiety, and I also tend to be hypersensitive to people's moods. If someone had a bad day, it's my fault. If someone is curt because she didn't get enough sleep last night, it must be something I did. For decades I framed myself solely in terms of what people thought and what they said. And believe me, there is nothing LESS empowering than giving other people this kind of power over you. If I learned nothing else from the excellent-but-tough therapists I've had in my life, it's that you cannot control what other people do, you can only control what you do. And to put your life, your definition of yourself in the hands of those who because of their own psychological baggage, hate women, can't accept women in a powerful role, have issues with their mothers, whatever -- you perpetuate the idea that women just can't handle the stresses of life, that we really ARE fragile creatures who can't play on the same field.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't point out when Chris Matthews opines on national television that the only reason Hillary Clinton is a Senator is because her husband cheated on her. It doesn't mean we shouldn't point out what Hillary nutcrackers really mean, or the comparisons to the Alex Forrest character in Fatal Attraction. But I think there's a way to do this, and it isn't to have the vapors every time a man on television says something mind-bogglingly stupid, but to amass a group of them into a pattern, and THEN say, "See? THIS is what I'm talking about." You must amass evidence if you want to make a case.

I'll give Hillary Clinton credit for this: For the most part, it hasn't been Clinton herself who's played the poor-me-victim-of-sexism card. She isn't entirely blameless, but it's largely been grievance feminists who have chosen to blame the failure of Clinton's campaign solely at the feet of sexist males and hapless dupes like me who've managed to be able to earn a living, yes, even once being fired from a retail job after rebuffing my supervisor in the stockroom, who don't see male oppression around every corner and haven't let sexism define me or my life.

If there's a message that we HAVEN'T heard from the polls during this primary race, it hasn't been a great deal of concern about having a woman president. There's been concern about dynasty, and there's been a fair amount of lynching metaphor used from people who have said they just couldn't vote for a black man, but I haven't heard concern that Hillary isn't "tough enough to be a wartime president." For one thing, it's hard to make that argument when you're talking about a woman who refuses to say that her Iraq war vote was wrong, who voted for Kyl-Lieberman, and who has blithely talked about her intention to obliterate Iran during her presidency. So those who want to chalk up Hillary Clinton's apparent (at this point) failure to win the nomination to sexism don't want to look at:

1) Her crappy campaign organization and refusal to realize that the nature of campaigning has changed. Howard Dean may not have succeeded with a 50-state strategy in his own run, and the DLC of which Hillary is a member has fought it tooth and nail, preferring the old model of pouring money into "sure-win" races. But if the Obama campaign is anything, it's a triumph of the 50-state, campaign-by-the-people strategy. Hillary Clinton put together a conventional top-down, big-donor, big-state apparatus, led by Mark Penn -- a man of dubious connections who didn't even know how Democratic delegates were apportioned. Her campaign burned through money early, assuming inevitability and a bottomless pit of big-money donors. Her campaign focused on traditional Democratic constituencies, which have been insufficient to create a victory for anyone but her husband, who was a far more talented pure politician than she is. Meanwhile, the Obama camp went after expanding the pool of voters and reaching out to the $25 donor, realizing that if you can tap a million donors for ten $25 donations spread out over time, you have a more consistent cash flow and you have more people with actual skin in the game.

2) She ran up against a more charismatic candidate. If we should have learned anything from the Democratic races in the last 28 years, it's that television image matters. Charisma matters. In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004, the Democratic Party nominated intelligent, capable, competent men -- men whose campaigns made them as dull as dishwater. These men were also highly conventional candidates who underestimated the power of the televised image and the impact of media narrative, hence Jimmy Carter's sweater, Walter Mondale pledging to raise taxes, Michael Dukakis in the tank, Al Gore's sighs, and John Kerry's windsurfing. That all of these men would have been better national stewards than the men who occupied the White House instead is immaterial. The media are going to Go For the Story. And if the candidate can't create his or her own story or narrative, the media will create one. Perhaps if this primary race had been Hillary against a bunch of white men, the fact that she was the first viable woman candidate would have been a bigger story. Perhaps if she had not been the wife of a former president, her presence would have been more compelling. But frankly, she never had a chance against a rock star like Obama, who also happened to have a more compelling backstory and represent even MORE of a harbinger of change.

3) She wasn't prepared for a long campaign, and it showed. The worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton's campaign was a long hard slog. In 2000, there were voters who voted for George W. Bush either because they were confused and thought they were voting for his father, or who assumed that the old man would be the one actually running things so it wouldn't be so bad. Hillary Clinton ran on "It'll be Bill all over again." And at one time, that idea didn't seem like a bad one, until things started to go wrong and the Clinton campaign sent Bill out on the campaign trail, hoping to remind voters of that old Clinton magic. Instead, his presence reminded us less of the Clinton magic than the Clinton narcissism. And that made many of us question what it was we ever saw in him in the first place. Once that particular door opened, it was an easy step to "Now I understand why they hated him." And if you weren't inclined to vote for Hillary on gender grounds, and you were no longer looking at a return to the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, but instead, a return to the Clinton drama and uproar of the 1990's, the case for Hillary became far less compelling.

4) The shifting message. Last year at Yearly Kos, Hillary Clinton stood up in front of around 2500 assembled people in response to John Edwards' challenge of a pledge to kick out the lobbyists, and made an impassioned statement that lobbyists are Americans too. The rest of America may not carry the loathing of K Street the way the netroots does, but they have a sense that their government no longer belongs to them, that it belongs to the money interests. I don't think Clinton realized back then, and I don't think she realized until it was too late, that there is a real hunger in this country for Something Different; that the change for which Democrats thirsted wasn't a restoration, but a leap into something unknown. Because when the last seven years had been spent being led by fear and corruption and incompetence, a leap into the unknown seemed somehow better than anything that smacks of more of the same -- no matter what that "same" might be. And so we started to see Populist Hillary, Good Old Boy Hillary, drop-yer-g's Hillary. And as soon as she became Leonard Zelig, the strong lioness, stalwart in the face of adversity, began to seem panicky and desperate -- and inauthentic.

Of course it's still possible, though increasingly unlikely every day, that something may yet happen to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination. But if it doesn't, and Barack Obama ends up giving the acceptance speech in Denver this summer, it won't be because a sexist society conspired against her. It will be because she and her campaign misread the mood of the nation, and that this party realized that change doesn't mean going back in time.

Labels: feminism, Hillary Clinton

Because it isn't just for Fridays anymore.

Only Marc Maron could use his cats to make you feel guilty for watching them:

Labels: cat blogging, health care, Marc Maron

The garden gnome at Eating Liberally. Just go and check out his name.

But on a more serious note, there are clearly starting to be some benefits to growing some of your own food these days, as I realized yesterday while making a lovely Greek village salad and wondering where the cucumbers had originated. The problem is that when you live in a neighborhood dominated by oak trees that are over 100 years old and over 40 feet tall, it's hard to find a place that gets enough sunshine to actually grow anything. My backyard gets ample sun in the morning, largely thanks to the removal three years ago of a hazardous split oak that was rotting inside, but by noon the sun is over the roofline and gone. My front yard gets sunshine in high summer, but I have a gorgeous, huge blue spruce in my yard that I'm spending a fortune paying an arborist to try to save from the fungal infection that is probably going to kill it anyway. It'll kill me when I have to cut it down, I don't want to speed that up.

Then of course there are the bunnies, the squirrels, and other fauna that already feast on my tulips, there have been deer sightings two blocks away, and recently, not three miles from my neighborhood of 75 x 100 lots, a bear was found in a schoolyard. My supervisor at work is an avid gardener, with huge property that gets hours of glorious afternoon sun. But having heard his tales of vegetative woe and his ongoing war against deer, woodchucks, and other beasts determined to ruin his Jeffersonian splendor over the last seven years, it strikes me that trying to grow food and having to be someplace other than your garden for eight hours or more every day seems somewhat incompatible.

That leaves farmer's markets, of which there are precious few in Bergen County during times when working people can go -- and half the stuff available there is trucked in from Pennsylvania anyway. There are a few farm stands left, but most of those truck in a good amount of their produce as well.

Still....every time I see one of those blogs where someone is holding up a lovely bunch of home-grown Swiss Chard, I wonder if there's any possibility of even managing a couple of porch tomatoes...

Labels: food