this week's new yorker cover

ok, so i wish i'd thought of this one....

alaskans for truth rally

ok, so i enjoyed the sign that read 'sarah- from my house i can see the end of your political career'

the debate

ok, so i liked this part especially

OBAMA: But understand, that was a tactic designed to contain the damage of the previous four years of mismanagement of this war. And so John likes…John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge, the war started in 2003. And at the time, when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were, you were wrong. You said that we would be greeted as liberators, you were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni and you were wrong. And so the question is the judgment of whether or not…

MCCAIN: Senator Obama…Senator Obama…Senator Obama doesn’t….

OBAMA: …whether or not the question is who is best equipped as the next president to make good decisions about how we use our military, how we make sure that we are prepared and ready for the next conflict and I think we can take a look at our judgment.

conservative columnist urges palin to drop out...

ok, so this is an excerpt from kathleen parker, who writes for a conservative blog...at the end of the full piece she urges palin to drop out, as a patriotic gesture to the land she loves.....ouch!

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

ok, so this from the huffington post.....Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."

ok, so this from gawker....AP: Sorry, Sarah Palin, That's Just Wack

The Associated Press took the prize today for the most dryly contemptuous lead sentence I've read in a political news story in a while:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Less than a week after balking at the Alaska Legislature's investigation into her alleged abuse of power, Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday indicated she will cooperate with a separate probe run by people she can fire.

In the Poynter Institute's online media forum, Jay Rosen asked, "At what point does an extreme attempt to de-legitimate the press actually de-legitimate the candidate ... in the eyes of the press?" Perhaps this is that point.

75 books every woman should read

ok, so this from jezebel after an open-internet call....for the record, i have read 35 out of the 75...must get busy with the rest...

* The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
* To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
* The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
* White Teeth, Zadie Smith
* The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
* Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
* Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
* The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
* Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
* The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
* Beloved, Toni Morrison
* Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
* Like Life, Lorrie Moore
* Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
* Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
* The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
* A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
* A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
* The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
* You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
* Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
* To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
* Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
* Earthly Paradise, Colette
* Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
* Property, Valerie Martin
* Middlemarch, George Eliot
* Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
* The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
* Runaway, Alice Munro
* The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
* The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
* Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
* You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
* Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
* Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
* The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
* I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
* A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
* And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
* Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
* The Secret History, Donna Tartt
* The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
* The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
* The Group, Mary McCarthy
* Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
* The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
* The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
* Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
* Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
* In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
* The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
* Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
* Three Junes, Julia Glass
* A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
* Sophie's Choice, William Styron
* Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
* Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
* Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
* The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
* The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
* The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
* My Antonia, Willa Cather
* Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
* Spending, Mary Gordon
* The Lover, Marguerite Duras
* The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
* Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
* Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
* Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
* Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
* I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
* Possession, A.S. Byatt

george will turns on mccain

ok, so this from wonkette....Jesus, a weekend or two ago George Will was on one of them Sunday talk shows defending McCain’s “Obama wants to teach your babies how to have sex” ad. He was possibly the one American pundit who actually thought it was a good, true ad. And now even that guy wonders if John McCain is fit for office, because of his “temperament.”

It seems that the last week of utter financial fuckery has really brought out the worst in McCain. Why is this? Because he finds the economy endlessly dull, so he throws a tantrum every couple of days just to look like he’s sort of interested. This novel approach to domestic policy has, to his credit, gotten him through 26 years in the Senate or whatever! But what’s our point? Oh yes GEORGE WILL SAID THESE NASTY THINGS ABOUT JOHN McCAIN:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated.

[...] Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Now John McCain will call an angry press conference and demand that George Will be replaced by, let’s see, Andrew Cuomo or whoever.

ok, so.....

josh groban signs tv theme songs...

ok, so i knew almost all the words...

fancy fork...

ok, so those few of you who have followed this blog over the years know of my digging fork story.....the short version is this: i have successfully worn out 3 cheaply made digging forks....with each poorly designed replacement justified by poverty during times when it seemed like such an expense was frivolous......realistically, had i gone ahead and bought a good fork to replace the first dud....i'd still be using it today...i have spent more on the replacements than a single good fork would have cost.....the latest fork died yesterday as i planted my pinky-winky hydrangeas....and just moments ago i ordered this fine fork.....i am so very excited to know this finely-crafted english digging tool is on its way to my garden......

abdication by palin?

ok so this from the anchorage daily news...When did the McCain campaign take over the governor's office?

Published: September 20th, 2008 12:53 AM

Gov. Sarah Palin has surrendered important gubernatorial duties to the Republican presidential campaign. McCain staff are handling public and press questions about actions she has taken as governor. The governor who said, "Hold me accountable," is hiding behind the hired guns of the McCain campaign to avoid accountability.

Is it too much to ask that Alaska's governor speak for herself, directly to Alaskans, about her actions as Alaska's governor?

A press conference Thursday showed how skewed Alaska's relationship with its own governor has become.

McCain-Palin campaign spokesman Ed O'Callaghan announced that Todd Palin will not comply with a subpoena to testify about his role in Troopergate, the Legislature's investigation into whether Palin abused her power in forcing out former public safety commissioner Walt Monegan.

O'Callaghan also announced that Alaska's governor is "unlikely" to cooperate with the investigation by the Alaska Legislature about questionable conduct by Alaska's chief executive.

Monday, he and campaign sidekick Meg Stapleton stood before Alaskans and defended the official personnel decision by Alaska's governor to fire Alaska's public safety commissioner. ABC News reported that Gov. Palin's official press secretary, Bill McAllister, paid by the state of Alaska, didn't even know the McCain staffers were meeting the press to defend his boss.


Is the McCain campaign telling Alaskans that Alaska's governor can't handle her own defense in front of her own Alaska constituents?

franken writes snl opening skit....

ok, so....

from the dailykos....

ok, so this from steven katz.... John McCain has put himself and the nation on a strict diet of political junk food by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate.

While the national media and Internet are freely dispensing all the political junk food about Sarah Palin as fast as they can, many voters including those who were considering voting for John McCain can't stomach it. Can you?

Here it is in one large spoonful.

Small-town white-female mayor who bullies librarians and museum directors, lobbies Washington to obtain federal funds and claims that she is against "pork barrel politics," is elected governor of the state with one of the smallest populations in the country, so small that she can afford to work from home for most of the year and charge the taxpayers for working from home as a "duty-station," lives closer to the melting Arctic ice caps than any other governor in the country but does not believe in global warming, cracks the whip in dog-sled races and in retaliation towards state officials who she thinks have wronged her family, and turns otherwise right-wing fundamentalist social vices into Republican political virtues.

robert f. kennedy, jr

ok, so r.f. kennedy, jr. response to governor palin's book banning notions is currently on the huffington post....

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.

woo-worthy

ok, so....i drove up to the horsepark with my daughter, arriving at 1:00 for a 1:30 speech....yeah, right....at 3:00 we were still packed inside an enclosed tent suitable for a wedding reception....but without the nice chairs and tables a bride would have requested......we were about 4 people back from the stage....behind several tall men.....happily, the trio from manchester who drove 2 hours to see hillary were amusing enough to make the time go quickly.....hard to say how many were there....easily 500....including the governor, bruce lunsford the candidate who will 'ditch mitch'....and even john y brown and his wife the ex-miss america whose name escapes me.....hillary is as amazing in person as she is on the television screen...ro she was yesterday in her nytimes op-ed piece about the proposed hhs rule that will restrict men and women from many services.....my daughter was humiliated that i chose to shriek....woo.....which i thought was much more appropriate than amen....woo works for me.....

public comment...

ok, so.....i took the time to make my position known on an issue that coincidentally hillary clinton took up in a nytimes opinion piece....a hhs proposed rule that would allow any person working in a setting that accepted federal funding, to refuse to give any service that conflicted with that person's morals or ethics....the intent appears to be birth control, emergency contraception, or abortions...but this line is vague enough that i, as a nutrition/diabetes educator could refuse to serve someone i found morally offensive- we could have rampant discrimination cloaked as provider conscience.....here is the link

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND
HUMAN SERVICES
45 CFR Part 88
RIN 0991–AB48
Ensuring That Department of Health
and Human Services Funds Do Not
Support Coercive or Discriminatory
Policies or Practices In Violation of
Federal Law
AGENCY: Office of the Secretary, HHS.
ACTION: Proposed rule.
SUMMARY: The Department of Health and
Human Services proposes to promulgate
regulations to ensure that Department
funds do not support morally coercive
or discriminatory practices or policies
in violation of federal law, pursuant to
the Church Amendments (42 U.S.C.
300a–7), Public Health Service (PHS)
Act § 245 (42 U.S.C. 238n), and the
Weldon Amendment (Consolidated
Appropriations Act, 2008, Pub. L. 110–
161, § 508(d), 121 Stat. 1844, 2209). This
notice of proposed rulemaking proposes
to define certain key terms.
Furthermore, in order to ensure that
recipients of Department funds know
about their legal obligations under these
nondiscrimination provisions, the
Department proposes to require written
certification by certain recipients that
they will comply with all three statutes,
as applicable.
DATES: Submit written or electronic
comment on the regulations proposed
by this document by September 25,
2008.
ADDRESSES: In commenting, please refer
to ‘‘Provider Conscience Regulation’’.
Electronically. You may submit
electronic comments on this regulation
to http://www.Regulations.gov or via email
to consciencecomment@hhs.gov.
To submit electronic comments to
http://www.Regulations.gov, go to the
Web site and click on the link
‘‘Comment or Submission’’ and enter
the keywords ‘‘provider conscience’’.

hacked email.....

ok, so....i am so very amused by the hacked yahoo account....mostly because i once wasted an entire afternoon on the phone with my insurance carrier.....i had forgotten my login password...and i could not remember the secret question/answer.... my original hometown street address.....i had the first part correct....but i could not remember if it were a street, a drive, an avenue, a boulevard....you get my drift.....and the patient lady on the line would not divulge this critical information until i guessed it.....and all for no good reason...the urgent message on my insurance account was to inform me that one of my covered folks had recently used their covered benefits....i knew that tidbit of information because i had driven her to the appointment......but i feel no sorrow for sarah palin, who clearly invented neither the internet nor the blackberry....thinking that her personal email was untouchable....and that she was clever to use a free public service email carrier rather than a public-record system.....but then, she can see russia from her living room.....and we are to give her special leeway because of that spectacular view......

hillary

ok, so i am driving up to the horsepark to see hillary on saturday....she is campaigning for bruce lunsford in his bid to unseat the vile mitch mcconnel.....a wrothy cause.....so worthy i got out my checkbook.....and while i was at it i gave a chunk to obama.....

mean mamma waits by the phone...

ok, so....in searching for cartoons to enhance my lecture powerpoint presentation, i came across this old ny cover.......it speaks to me.....