I linked you to an article discussing what this would mean the other day, but yesterday the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office requested an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The charges include genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Here’s the press release, summary of the case (a really fascinating and disturbing read), and the prosecutor’s statement on the application for an arrest warrant.
The cover clearly shows the Muslim candidate and his America-hating terrorist wife doing what is now known as a “terrorist fist bump.” And I’m not even talking about the American flag burning in the fireplace. It shows all that. It is also clearly poking fun at each and every element of itself. Every image is carefully culled from one or more of the ridiculous rumors that have swirled around Obama for his entire campaign.
Why this cover should upset the Obama campaign is beyond me. The image comes on the front of a magazine that has one of the most liberal readerships of any in the nation. Is there anyone that thinks The New Yorker’s sympathies lie with the McCain campaign? Really? If The New Yorker magazine had a vote it would be cast for Obama and everyone in the country knows it.
The problem here is a campaign that has shifted from inspirational to calculating, from historic to pedestrian, from in-on-the-joke to out-of-the-loop. That’s why you haven’t spotted a black supporter standing behind Obama since… well, since ever. That’s why, in the midst of a riff about Obama’s trotting out a faux presidential seal, Jon Stewart had to re-assure his audience that it was alright to laugh at Obama also. The candidate who stepped onto the national stage as the most invigorating voice in modern electoral history is quickly losing the ability to laugh at himself.
In his general election incarnation, Obama is working to prove his seriousness, his gravitas, his resolve. Instead he is proving to be wooden, dull, and uninspiring. What do you do with an inspirational leader who has lost the ability to move a crowd? The mistake here is that no one ever expected him to be the heavy-lifting guy. He was supposed to be the ideas guy, the masterful salesman that was going to move us in the direction we should go and convince us that it was the right thing to do.
But that guy has left the building. Instead, general election Obama is seemingly trying to out-boring his formidably boring GOP counterpart. He has bogged down in the details of campaigning, controlling the pictures, staying on message. The Obama that doesn’t get the joke of The New Yorker cover is not the guy we fell in love with. I’m getting a feeling that guy isn’t coming back. And that’s too bad, because that’s the guy I wanted to vote for.
From Lacey Peterson, to the pregnant Marine, to this new lady who got burned up in her apartment… murdered pregnant ladies are being murdered at an astounding rate. According to all appearances in the news media, the easiest way for a woman to become a murder victim is to get knocked up. Police spend thousands of man hours on these cases, when as we’ve all seen over the past few years, everyone always knows exactly who did it. Below, please find an easy to follow guide to who is killing all the murdered pregnant ladies of the world:
1) If a murdered pregnant lady was single then the baby’s daddy did it 99.9999998% of the time
2) except in cases where the baby’s daddy was married himself in which case he or his wife have an equal chance of being the crazed pregnant lady killer.
3) If a murdered pregnant lady was married at the time of her brutal demise, then her husband did it 99.999997% of the time, regardless of whether or not the baby was actually his.
4) But if the murdered pregnant lady was married and her husband didn’t do it AND she was a minority AND she was involved in an interracial relationship, then her father-in-law did it 99.695% of the time
5) and her mother-in-law did it the rest.
6) If a murdered pregnant lady was in a hospital when she disappeared/was found cut open sans baby/etc., then a crazy barren nurse did it 95.436% of the time
7) and the aforementioned crazy barren nurse is caught on camera leaving the hospital with the baby in her purse 100% of the time.
*Source: “What the Hell is with all the Murdered Pregnant Ladies”: a joint FBI/Justice Department study commissioned in June 2008
**unless they see this in which case I made it all up
***and please don’t be mad and/or arrest, deport, or water-board me. It was all Nat’s idea.
Here’s a few things I read this week that I think are worth passing on. Enjoy:
1) What if John McCain and Barack Obama spent less time pandering to ill-informed and unemployed Rust Belt voters and instead based their economic appeals on the things that would get economists excited about their candidacy? What would their economic policies look like then? A New York Times article explored just that question.
Television is all about ratings. You have no idea how true that statement is until you work inside the industry for long enough to reach a certain level. I read ratings because they are the most important measure of how my show is doing. In my perusal of ratings this week I ran into something that made me happy even though it didn’t relate to my program at all.
This news comes in the same week that I sat at a restaurant and silently railed against the closed captions of Lou Dobbs’ program. He was taking Barack Obama to task for suggesting that it might be a good idea for English-speaking children to learn Spanish at the same time our schools are working to teach Spanish-speaking children English. He cited some statistic that said 80+% of Americans support English being named the country’s official language. I say that makes 80% of Americans morons.
So hats off to the folks at Univision who own and operate the stations that got the ratings win. And Lou Dobbs… suck it.
***For all my black and brown folks, this particular post is going to be concerned with making fun of white women. So either skip it or laugh along.***
So I’m reading through my morning papers (yeah, I do that, I’m getting old… but I do it on the computer, so maybe I’m still young) and I see an article in the Washington Post that says skin cancer rates are up 50 percent in young women since 1980. Now I don’t want to kick a lady when she’s down and dying from melanoma, but come on! Dying from skin cancer brought on by tanning is the equivalent of becoming a crackhead.
I’m not saying that everyone who gets skin cancer is an idiot. Just the ones who bring it on by laying out in the sun with cooking oil spread all over their bodies. I mean really, didn’t all those old ladies with skin like leather handbags teach you anything? I learned not to smoke crack after Pookie got blown up in “New Jack City” and Larenz Tate shot the crackhead in “Menace to Society”. Simple lessons, simple takeaway. So why aren’t women learning that tanning will kill you?
Let me break this down for you. Increased exposure to the sun leads to an increase in your risk of skin cancer. Skin cancer in even the smallest doses can prove fatal to humans. Therefore, increasing your exposure to the sun can kill you. So, by extension, tanning is a bad thing.
I can hear all my white sisters screaming now, “But we look better when we have a tan”, “I like to have a little color”, or “How am I going to compete as a pale skin girl in a world with an ethnic fetish?” I’ll take these concerns one-by-one:
1) No you don’t look better with a tan. You look exactly the same, only browner. If you are at all attractive, every man in your general neighborhood will still want to sleep with you. If you aren’t, then all the tanning in the world isn’t going to help and you’d be better served working on your sense of humor. Any man who didn’t want you before the tan and does after is a freak and you should steer well clear.
2) If you simply must be a darker shade, try that spray-on stuff. All the color, none of the dead. If you’re extra desperate then head for one of those Mystic Tan places. (Why in the world do I know what that is? I’m so disappointed in myself.)
3) You can’t compete. Guys with Asian fetishes will still chase tiny Asian girls. Guys with black girl fetishes will still go that way. But just like light-skinned R&B singers, these things go in phases. You’ll make a comeback, just wait and see.
So to conclude, tanning equals crack. Both bad, both will make you very dead. In the meantime, you will itch a lot, develop an extremely dry mouth, suck a lot of dick, and rob a convenience store. Maybe not so much the last couple, but who knows. I’d hate to limit your possibilities.
This is my first time writing anything in the “I’m Just Sayin’” category. Mostly that’s because it’s Nat’s thing. But it’s also the first thing that really fits. So enjoy and let’s hope Nat likes it enough not to object.
I remember writing a high-school term paper in pencil, on lined paper. Once I had it how I wanted it, I got out my mom’s type-writer and white-out and went through hours typing at 25 words per minute and correcting every third word. A couple years later, my first computer crashed as I typed the last paragraph of an English literature term paper for my senior year AP class at about 40 words per minute. The very next year, I got my first e-mail account and really got on the internet for the first time. With more frequent typing I got faster and faster. Now I work on a computer (laptop, desktop, both Mac and PC) all day, every day. I type somewhere north of 100 words a minute and I haven’t touched a pencil in I can’t tell you how long.
What’s the point of all this biography? Things change. You have to deal.
Imagine if I were unable to evolve with the technologies of my time. Imagine that I were unable or unwilling to figure out the computer. Imagine if I were still trying to write using pencil, paper, and my mom’s typewriter. Imagine if I were still typing 25 words per minute. Do you think I could get by as a full-time television producer and on-again, off-again writer? For that matter, could I get by as anything? Of course not, I would have become an anachronism.
Let’s extend what I’m talking about here so I can get to my point. Imagine a person who was making shirts in a textile plant in the late ’80s at the same time I was writing that term paper in pencil. Imagine another person working in one of Detroit’s auto plants at the same time. If I had to adapt over the past 15-20 years, why are they not expected to do the same? Why do politicians keep promising them that their jobs are coming back? Why do they keep expecting politicians to bring their jobs back?
Maybe I’m a snob. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been accused of it. But for me, it doesn’t make one bit of difference where my t-shirt or car is made. I want a good product for a good price. If that means that my Chinese brothers get to make it, then so be it. Hopefully they kick back at the end of a long day and watch the television I produce and we call it even. I’m not willing to come off more of the money I spend 40 hours a week away from my son to earn, so that Jimmy Cargill in Detroit can make my car out of U.S. steel transported by a Teamster wearing a Made in the USA bomber jacket.
Is it heartless to expect people to keep up with the world as it changes around them? Why should we be expected to subsidize the ones who refuse? Right now, many of the industries that Barack Obama and John McCain are promising to revive if you put your “X” next to their names are doomed and have been for decades. For our analogy’s sake, they’re pencils in the internet age.
So what do I want? What’s the point? I want people to stop pining for the past and get on with it already. I want a politician to swing through the “Rust Belt” and tell them they better get with the program or they’re all going to starve. It’s called the “Rust Belt” people. What part of that sounds like a good idea? Read a book, pick up a magazine, realize that what you used to do is useless now. You think I can’t relate? I work in television. How long do you think it will be before that doesn’t exist anymore? Based on the success of YouTube, I’m betting not very long now.
Please stop the whining already. I’m with John McCain’s adviser Phil Gramm on this one. Quit crying about the economy, grab your nuts, and do something already. If you’ve been an auto-worker for 30 years and you’re out of a job, why would you sit around hoping for another job in a rapidly shrinking field. Drag your ass west and figure out how to get down with Google’s cloud computing projects. Why would you sit around crying into your beer about how tough things are. Do you really think anyone wants to hear that? People have got their own stuff to worry about. Get off your barstool, teach yourself something new, something useful, and do that. Stop moaning and get on with it already.
I posted a response to one of Nat’s pieces a little while ago that said accurate research is very rarely a negative. Then I read an article in The Atlantic this month about what is behind the rising crime rates in mid-sized urban areas that tested my theory. Check it out and see what you think. I still think the research isn’t negative, but this piece gave me pause. Especially since any part of it taken out of context could be used to fuel a “minorities cause crime” thesis.
Jesse Jackson is an idiot. I’m not going to argue that. But come on! So what if he said he “wants to cut [Obama's] nuts off”? He is a Civil Rights era black leader who has listened to the first viable black presidential candidate make a series of speeches to black audiences that could very easily be seen as telling off black folks for the benefit of white folks watching at home on their televisions.
After all, the only group of people Obama isn’t winning handily is white males. Is it such a stretch to imagine that an old conspiracy-minded black man like Jackson might see some of what he’s doing now as pandering to white men by selling out black people? Again, I’m not saying that’s what Obama’s doing, but I’m not saying it’s not either.
So yeah, saying what Jesse Jackson said while fully mic’ed up in the Fox News studios is not an intelligent decision. But can you imagine that what he said in the wrong place has been said many times in other settings. Around city barber shops, in the stands at sports events, on black college campuses? Jackson is a long way away from speaking for the collective “black people”, but I think this particular candid remark is a lot more representative than most of the polished commentary he provides for the national media.
Just to wrap this all up. I’m not saying Jesse Jackson is right for what he said. But it’s his opinion. I think he clearly feels like Barack Obama is pandering to white voters at the expense of black people. I think that’s an honest opinion that leads him not to think highly of Obama on a personal level. I can’t say I’ve never said something roughly equivalent to what Jackson said about a person I disliked. Fortunately I wasn’t mic’ed up in a television studio when I said it.
Barack Obama has every right to talk to black audiences about problems he perceives in black America. He’s right about most everything he says when he talks to these audiences. But he has to know that his message that black people should do better is likely to be received at least as well by old white men (the primary demographic of the national news media) as it will be by the black people sitting in the crowds.
So I’ll leave you with a quote from Chris Rock that I think sums up this Jesse Jackson flap perfectly. “I’m not saying what he did was right, but I understand.”
** since posting this originally, I read a really good piece at The Root that may have changed my opinion on this thing slightly. Either way I think it’s worth your time to read.
It’s July 2nd which means we’re half-way through the year. Perfect time for a look back at our most popular posts of the year. The musings that you our loyal fans (mostly just you Marina) thought merited the most attention. Here’s the top 5 for those of you who might have missed them:
1) Lunatics Running the Asylum: a post about an English soccer team that’s allowing its fans to make all the decisions. No idea why this was the most popular post, but it was by a huge margin.
2) Adventures in Housing: This wasn’t even my favorite of Natalie’s posts in February (that title would go to “My Gay Girlfriend“), but you loved it. Something about shit in a sink I guess.
3) It’s Good to Have Friends: Nat’s discourse on the culture shock that can ensue over confusion about just what is meant by the phrase “a buck fifty.”
4) Vulnerable is Good: Me on my soapbox about why torture is never ok and why occasionally a lot of innocent people have to die because of the nature of an open society.
5) Cock Flavored Soup, hmmmm?: The picture is the post. Leave it to Kathleen to make the top 5 with a penis reference.
I linked you to an article discussing what this would mean the other day, but yesterday the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office requested an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The charges include genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Here’s the press release, summary of the case (a really fascinating and disturbing read), and the prosecutor’s statement on the application for an arrest warrant.
