There's Something About Hillary...

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I am no fan of Hillary Clinton. I find her to be too much of a cold and calculated politician, too entrenched in a broken system, and too polarizing a figure to be a good president. But what is it about her that brings out this level of wingnuttery? ROCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN) -- Police took into custody a man they say walked into Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign office in Rochester, New Hampshire, and took several people hostage Friday. The man, Lee Eisenberg, claimed to have a bomb strapped to his chest, but it turned out to be road flares held with duct tape, police said. First of all, isn't it about time they started making road flares that look a bit less like sticks of dynamite? Sure, just a glimpse of anything that might look like a bomb strapped to you is going to cause panic. Bart Simpson did it once with hot dogs. Armour hot dogs. What kind of kid wears Armour hot dogs? But seriously, maybe they should start making dynamite that doesn't look like flares or hot dogs or anything else besides sticks of dynamite. Secondly, while this story is still too fresh to know whether this was politically motivated wingnuttery or just run of the mill crazy wingnuttery, I'm taking bets that this guy has a Free Republic account. And lastly, Taxi Driver is a great movie, but crazy people really shouldn't be allowed to see it anymore.

Sometimes Life Just isn't Fair

The singer from Quiet Riot dies, yet Dick Cheney is still alive and kicking after his Frankenstein heart gets another jump start. Say what you want about metalheads being into Satan, the fact that Dick Cheney continues to stay one step ahead of the reaper so he can keep pushing his agenda of evil from the Old Executive Office Building is hard evidence that he has made a deal with the dark lord. And this time the devil sure got his money's worth!

Thanksgiving is Over and You Know What That Means...

Call me a traditionalist. It bothers me that the Christmas consumerist hype starts earlier and earlier every year. I refuse to even think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving, as it should be. So now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, it's time for this secular progressive blog to begin taking my part in The War Against Christmas! I know I'm a little bit late because as with the consumer hype, the religious right nutjobs and their buddies on Fox News have started early in their game of holiday victimhood. Now I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do to destroy Christmas, but apparently it's my job as a liberal. So could one of the leaders of the vast left wing conspiracy against Christmas give me my marching orders? I personally love Christmas. While I'm an atheist and pretty much just ignore the whole Jesus mythology aspect of it all, I loves me some Santa and sitting around with family, giving gifts and eating food and all the great fun secular things about the holiday. And let's face it, this holiday and many of its traditions have been around for thousands of years before Christianity. The pagans celebrated the Winter Solstice with feasts and the lighting of trees and kissing under the mistletoe. The Jews have Hanukkah, like an 8 night Christmaspalooza tour. And more recently, African Americans wanted their own holiday too, so they invented Kwanzaa so they wouldn't have to share any of the other holidays with Whitey. So what's the big deal with trying to be inclusive of others, and why is Bill O'Reilly so victimized by this inclusion? I don't know, but what I do know is that anything that pisses off the lunatic fringe of the right is something that I can get behind! So how can I help? Should I string a banner across the top of this blog that says "Happy Holidays?"

Giving Thanks

I'm off for a long Thanksgiving visit with my inlaws, but before I left I wanted to give thanks for a great family and for the few bones that this life manages to throw us from time to time. But this wouldn't be a political blog if I didn't also give thanks to Harry Reid who has kept the Senate technically in session over what would ordinarily be a recess just so that President Dipshit can't sneak in a few extremist appointees in like he'd been planning. DENIED, BEEYOTCH! Oh, that's gotta hurt! I hope they do this every time there's supposed to be a recess until the nation wakes up from this nightmare administration.

Rocking Out With Dad

I don't get to see my dad very often, but he was able to come visit us this weekend. We had a great time and he got to spend some quality time with Stella. She's only met her grandfather twice before but she enjoyed his company like it was a playdate with one of her little friends. As we had her rattling off the various animal sounds she knows, he taught her a few new ones including a walrus (and just what does a walrus say? Goo Goo Ga Joob, of course). While she was napping, we busted out the instruments and attempted to play this Radiohead tune. While I'm about 5 years out of practice on bass and never really been much of a singer, my dad is spending his retirement as a professional singer/songwriter and music teacher in Florida, so you could say it's a tad uneven, but regardless it was really fun. Check out my dad's blog. He's got a new album coming out soon and even the rough mixes sound great.

TV Without Writers?

The Writers Guild of America is on strike. As the landscape of media changes, huge revenues are being made by producers, studios and networks through downloads, DVDs and other new forms of media that were unforeseen the last time that the writers renegotiated. It seems that everyone is getting a piece of that pie except for the writers, and they are trying to get what should be coming to them. So what would TV be like without writers? You know all of those horrible reality shows? That's TV without writers. Even the most contrived and predictable episode of Desperate Housewives takes more talent to create than any given reality show. Shows where the entirety of the creative process involves putting together a mixture of attractive young people with a volatile combination of personality flaws, gallons of booze, sexual tension and possibly a washed up celebrity, turning on the cameras and seeing what happens (with a bit of manipulation and creative editing, of course) certainly can be just as much of a guilty pleasure as some campy dramas or sitcoms about fat guys and their incredibly hot wives. While we take the good with the bad with the so bad it's good, the casualties of a writers strike (besides the actual striking writers who are putting their lives on the line and the crews of these shows who are in turn being put out of work) are those of us who enjoy well written shows. Instead of new episodes of The Office, there will be heaping helpings of lowest common denominator trainwrecks. Just as long as washed up and broke people who once had a career in entertainment, rich kids with nothing better to do than act like idiots on TV, and other spotlight-hungry rubes looking for a shortcut to fame don't all decide to go on strike too, there will be plenty of crap to watch on TV. So as an independent filmmaker, what am I doing about this? I'm writing a script, of course! No, I'm not trying to be a scab writer. But I am inspired by this strike to make a short film that might make people appreciate good screenwriting by showing them another possible worst case scenario than just replacing all scripted shows with reality drivel. That's all I'm going to say about it now. In the meantime, if you're on the fence about whether to support the striking writers, here's what TV looks like without them:

Where Have I Been?

Wow, it's been a whole week since I've blogged. Today we brought my wife home from the hospital. She went in on Tuesday for what should have been basic hernia repair, about two hours in the OR. Five hours of zero communication later and her surgeon came out to tell me that it took extra long because they had to remove some scar tissue while they were in there, as well as her appendix. We were expected to bring her home on Wednesday, but the pain medication they had her on had worse side effects than her recovery and she spent a total of 5 nights in the hospital. After they switched pain meds her condition improved overnight. One of those nights she had roommates, a mother and daughter who never ever shut their mouths and gabbed like a couple of annoying teenagers nonstop. Finally a nurse came in and realized that these two needed to be kept far away from everybody else. Besides these annoyances, I cannot quite wrap my mind around the idea that there would be absolutely zero fresh air in a hospital. You'd think that with all sorts of germs floating around that it might be better to have a good flow of fresh air, but instead this place had staler air than a transatlantic flight. There was a lot going on in the outside world this past week that I only caught snippets of. It looks like the shit is hitting the fan in Pakistan. And this oil spill in the Bay is going to wreak havoc on the local ecosystem for decades to come. Gas prices are quickly rising while this year becomes the deadliest so far in Iraq. Thanks George! And we've got a new attorney general who is going to continue our legacy as a nation of torturers but who supposedly won't be quite as bad as the last guy which is about the best thing we could expect out of this criminal White House. And the cherry on top of the whole shit sundae is that Demonoid is down again thanks to the Canadian recording industry. Take off, you hosers! Of course, this lousy week did have it's share of comic relief. Dog the Bounty Hunter has lost his show because he apparently thought he was cool enough with African American community to use the N-word, quickly realized that nobody with a mullet like that will ever convince people that they're not a racist, but still tried to make amends by crying to Sean Hannity and offering to be buried with George Washington's slaves (about 2 minutes in).

It Didn't Take Rocket Science to Predict that Riot

This weekend I found something neat. At a yard sale in Berkeley, sitting right on top of a box of old magazines, was this issue of Life from Aug 23, 1968, predicting that some serious shit was going to be going down at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I'm posting this completely free of political commentary. Forty years have passed and each side has politicized this event enough. This posting is about showing a piece of history, not commenting on it. Just click the cover to go back in time. For more info on what went down at the convention, click here. And for more fun scans from the past including the Newsweek article about Patty Hearst and the SLA and some scary recipe cards from the '70s, check out my Odds n' Ends page.

With Friends Like These...

Did you hear the one about the Saudi prince who says they could have helped prevent 9/11 but they didn't? Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision." "If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," he said. [full story] I smell a whole new 9/11 conspiracy theory coming out of this, so let me be the first to blog that 9/11 obviously happened because George Bush wouldn't take one for the team (let alone risk angering the republican base) and let an obviously horny and frustrated Bandar even get to first base. Prince Bandar clearly wished that he could be the plane crashing into Bush's pentagon if you know what I mean, but Bush wouldn't even let him get past hand holding.

Who Won Ben Stein's Mind?

Ben Stein is a game show host, monotone teacher from Ferris Bueler and the Wonder Years, Nixon speechwriter and until recently at least a somewhat respected conservative intellectual. But old Ben has gone off the deep end. His new movie is all about how unfairly the scientific community has been treating intelligent design "scientists." Apparently these big bad science nazis are keeping a tight grip on what can be considered science. And what is their criteria for what constitutes science? These satanic science nazis have been indoctrinating school children with this ridiculous thing called the Scientific Method that teaches kids that there is a scientific method for proving the way things work in our world. Why is the concept of a method for proving things such a problem? Because there are millions of people in the world who have based a great deal of their lives on mythology which when held up to the light of science have more holes than the plot of a typical episode of Desperate Housewives. So what we have are people who have no respect for real science, trying to call themselves scientists to prove a mythology, much of which has already been disproven by real science and even more of which is simply impossible to prove. And they are simply outraged that the scientific community is in agreement that what they are trying to do is simply NOT SCIENCE. And the thing is, even most mainstream religion does not consider intelligent design to be science. This is the wingnuttery of extremists. The best thing these "scientists" have come up with was a video of Mike Seaver from Growing Pains waving a banana around as "proof." So when a supposed intellectual like Ben Stein to come out in favor of the most anti-intellectual idea since the concept of dropping out of school, it reflects rather poorly on the entire conservative intellectual community. While it's an entertaining concept to paint Ben Stein as a rebel to the tune of Bad to the Bone, in reality he is now as laughable as email intern asshat turned pseudo-intellectual evangelical bozo Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr.