Palin Implosion

No matter how hard the Republicans try to spin and shield the American public from the truth with ludicrous charges of sexism (I bet the people who hate her most are women), it looks that the more Palin is in the spotlight, the worse a candidate she seems.
Her performance at the convention was plucky and convincing. Yet by the time her interview with Charles Gibson came along, she looked like one of those Caribou she loves to kill, caught in the headlights. She seemed scared out of her wits and trying to hold on for dear life.
Unless the American people are truly a bunch of unredeemable retards (which given recent opinion polls is not inconceivable), my first gut instinct about Palin imploding in the public eye as election season plods on may hopefully be true. She was a brash, idiotic, cynical, and dangerously irresponsible choice and it shows.

Palin Comparison

The Republicans can bitch about liberal media bias all they want, but the proof is in the facts and yesterday's New York Times presented a pretty damning profile of the political modus operandi of the woman who could be the President of the US. Not a good picture. If anything, her methods are exactly like Dick Cheney's (aka Satan): secrecy, illegality, loyalty above all, cronyism, political impunity.
I never ever do this, but concerned citizen Katya sent me this and I'm posting it here because I too cannot believe the surreal amount of spin the farblondget citizens of the country seem to be willing to swallow from the Republican killing machine. So here goes (additions in caps are mine):

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight:

• If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.
EATING? KILLING AND "DRESSING" MOOSE AND CARIBOU ALMOST WITH YOUR BARE HANDS, AND PROUD OF IT.
• If your name is Barack (HUSSEIN OBAMA, WHY NOT?) you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick. LET'S NOT FORGET BRISTOL.
• Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.
Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.
• If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with
over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend almost 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive. AND GIVING TOP PAID STATE JOBS TO ALL YOUR HIGH SCHOOL PALS, WHILE FIRING YOUR ENEMIES WITH PERSONAL VENDETTAS STRAIGHT OUT OF A JERRY SPRINGER SHOW...
AND NOW THEY GIVE YOU CRAMMING SESSIONS BEFORE INTERVIEWS BECAUSE CLEARLY YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT FROM SHINOLA...
• If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured VERY SICK wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
• If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
• If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education BUT SITS IN GOVERNMENT MEETINGS EVEN THOUGH HE HAS NO OFFICIAL ROLE, who didn't register to vote until age 25 AND YOU DID NOT GET A PASSPORT UNTIL LAST YEAR, and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
FOR ONCE, I WISH THE SECESSION OF ALASKA WAS TRUE. SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA NOW.

OK, much clearer now.

Yuca Frita

I don't love yucca, but the yucca fries they serve at the Coyuco restaurant in Caracas ought to be considered the 8th Marvel of the World. They are crunchy on the outside and soft and mealy on the inside, salty but not too much. And you pour a green avocado and cilantro sauce unappetizingly called guasacaca over them and it's soooo good. Guasacaca tastes like green tomatillo sauce without the heat.
I could eat vats of yuca fries from El Coyuco. They may be the only reason I would consider spending more time in this city, which I loathe.
At a fancy Italian restaurant inside the ugliest mall anybody has ever seen I had the yucca gnocchi, and they were pretty good. The rest of the meal would not pass muster north of the Equator.
Venezuelans also have something called "golfeados", which is basically a cinnamon danish which has a slab of white salty cheese on top. It's pretty good, but I am flummoxed by the etymology. Why golfeados?
I learned today that Hugo Chavez expelled the American ambassador to Venezuela. He referred to us Americans as "gringos de mierda" in his speech several times. The Gringos then decided to freeze the assets (conveniently squirreled away at American banks) of two senior Venezuelan officials. Good move.
I also learned that people here like to steal orange traffic cones.
I'm just hoping a war between the two countries doesn't break out. But if I have to stay in Caracas, I'm having the yuca frita fries, every day.

Not so peachy

Because I almost never take anything but direct flights if I can help it, I had not yet been truly exposed to the frustrations and the humiliations of air travel in America. But yesterday in Atlanta, I experienced in the flesh this particular form of aggravation. The worst part is not the unfathomably rude and unhelpful Delta agent at the courtesy "help" line (being a novice I used the phone, as the gate agent unwisely, sadistically counseled. Don't ever do this. Talk to someone at the counter). The saddest, most depressing part is staying the night at a generic airport hotel on Desolation Highway, where looking for something as basic as dinner can be an ordeal if your only means of transportation happens to be your own two feet. Where else other than hell does a restaurant close at 8:30 pm? To add insult to injury, it was a Picadilly's, a buffet style cafeteria I know and love from my days in Killeen, TX (you better believe it, darlings).
So I walked towards the beckoning Waffle House, whose bright yellow sign was much more alluring than the place itself. The walk was close but rather forbidding, sidewalks in these parts being inconsiderate afterthoughts. The "streets" are dark and forlorn and it doesn't help to see young Black men loitering where there is clearly absolutely nothing worth loitering for. At first I thought they were dealing drugs, but then I saw the whores at the back of the gas station, or walking to and fro between the Motel 6 and my own hotel. It probably was a pimping and dealing combo.
In any case, the solitary waffle I ate was pretty good. I sat at the counter, the only white person around, and said I would have my dinner to stay. They gave it to me to go, I'm guessing not out of rudeness but out of custom. I ate it there anyway but I didn't feel very welcome.
The next day I decided that in order to avoid any suicidal thoughts from taking root, I would take the train to downtown Atlanta, to see the sights.
Now, people from Atlanta, please forgive me. Either I missed all the sights, or you don't really have any. Going to downtown Atlanta was even more depressing. And I'll tell you why. I know they have the Olympic green, which I didn't see (it was horribly hot and muggy and not the best weather to sightsee), and maybe the House of Coca-Cola, but a walk down famous Peachtree St yielded nothing but generic buildings, indigent black people and a heaviness of heart.
I was looking for a Sephora in order to shpritz myself with perfume, (since my toiletries were en route to Caracas) and give myself a free makeover. I was looking for an Old Navy to buy a cheap t-shirt and stop smelling like a hobo. I was looking for a basic Gap, a Nike store, any sign of retail civilization, not to shop, but to feel better. No such thing was to be found. Not at Peachtree Center (Brooks Brothers does not soothe me), not at a terrible place called Underground Atlanta which looks like a failed version of the generic malls they do when they try to rehabilitate murdered downtowns. I am no Jane Jacobs, but as I walked down the clean and ghostly streets I thought, why do you put stores inside a mall that nobody can see, when you could have them providing foot traffic and life on the street?
Then I hit a street, across the subway station, one of those half boarded up streets I've seen in places like downtown Memphis or Richmond, Virginia, that is the last crumbling badass bastion of what probably was a nice and healthy commercial strip back in the day. Now it looks like shit but at least it is authentic and alive and me, I was the only white person around.
Maybe it was just a bad astral conjunction of missed connections and overlooked sights, but I was looking forward to spending my remaining hours at the airport. It was that bad.

Baked Alaska

The more you know about her, the scarier she is.

An Appalling Speech

Finally, finally I mustered the stomach and the resolve to watch Sarah Palin's speech.

As an unfunny, mean spirited, petty, insincere, z-list comedy routine, it could pass muster, if you were stuck in podunk somewhere and there was nothing else to do on a Sunday night but watch the open mike local talent at the only bar in town. 

As the speech delivered by the person who may be the vice president, or even the president of this country (or of any country for that matter), it was one of the most undignified, unseemly, revolting, embarrassing things I've ever heard. It was the speech of a bully. Nasty, lowest common denominator, without charm nor grace, nor real intelligence. 

And the audience, just as boorish, lapped it up. 

Judith Warner in the New York Times makes a powerful case of the speech being a disgrace for women but I think it is a disgrace for men and women of all genders (!), for its own party and for this stupid ass country where such things happen as Sarah Palin for VP.  

Palin's poor son, who looked like a deer caught in the headlights, was paraded around for enlisting and deploying on, surprise, 9/11. He looked like he wanted to go AWOL from the entire thing.  And then the pregnant teenage daughter and the boyfriend... 

And we are supposed to applaud this as "real", as if real is only whatever resembles a soap opera or a reality show or what you see on the Maury Povich show.  

One thing I will say for Palin, she was a good girl and she learned her lines well. She performed like a trouper. She was clearly enjoying her moment in the spotlight. She was there to raise some heat for her big daddy John McCain and that was almost all she did. I kept expecting her to mention her antediluvian views on abortion and abstinence, but she was not forthcoming. Even the Republicans know this shit scares people off. It scares the bejesus out of women.

 

This country is truly batshit nuts. Totally schizophrenic. Like Sybill, but with two personalities. 

If it was up to me, it would be divided into 2 republics, one of red states and one of blue. 

Hey, let's actually have a referendum on this. It totally makes sense. 

This way, the reds could have their creationism and their theocracy, their firearms in every home, and their misbegotten wars, and the blues could finally live in a decent country with truly decent values. 

Why do we have to deal with the medieval mishegoss of the religious right and the nastiness of the Republicans? Why do they have to deal with our pinko ideals? It looks like never the twain shall meet so why don't we just call it a day and to each his own? I'm serious. 

The most confounding thing is that the Republicans, who would not piss on a poor person if it was on fire, or as it happened in actuality, would not rescue those from drowning (I strongly recommend you watch the Katrina documentary Trouble the Water), are now supposed to be the party of the people, and the Democrats are supposed to be the elitists. This is insane. 

I just hope that come November 4, (please come soon, I beg you) Americans will turn to the little common sense they may have left and save their country from its own disgrace. 

Vogue is worse than porn

I hate that magazine. It is bad for your health. It makes women think they are not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, accomplished enough. It is revolting.
But Vogue India just took the cake of clueless offensiveness by doing a fashion shoot with actual impoverished Indian citizens modeling expensive brands like Fendi and Alexander McQueen. The brands get mentioned in the credits, the names of the "models" do not.
Of course, there was a brouhaha in India about this; to which the inexcusable cunt who runs the magazine there replied: "lighten up".
Wow.
In countries where the disparities between the haves and the have-nots are abysmal, the haves typically behave towards the unfortunate majority with utter callousness and contempt. They simply refuse to acknowledge reality. For them, the poor don't even amount to individual people. They are servants or beggars or nuisances. They are somebody to try to differentiate yourself from with as much arrogance and ostentation as possible. In fact, the poorer your countrymen, the more obscene your display of wealth. Which is why it doesn't surprise me that someone at Vogue India could come up with such an insulting fashion spread. What is amazing is the sheer imbecility and the unrepentant gall of the response.

From the NYT: "A man modeled a Burberry umbrella in Vogue that costs about $200. Some 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day".

Religious absurdity

The extremes Orthodox Jews go through in order to keep the Sabbath have always seemed to me absolutely insane and ridiculous.
At the time when the Bible was written, turning on the light meant starting a fire, an activity which indeed was a lot of work. Every activity banned for the Sabbath was basically a pain in the ass.
3000 years later, not anymore.
But the Orthodox go through these insane lengths to keep the Sabbath. So now you have elevators that stop on every floor. You have people who tell you you can't steep a tea bag in boiling water, or your children cannot play Lego (it's building), or that toilet paper needs to be pre-cut, God forbid you exert yourself wiping your tuches on the Sabbath. In a Jerusalem hotel, an Orthodox woman can request that a non-Jew operate a blender so she could feed her baby lunch. Which is awful. Is mashing a banana considered taboo during the Sabbath? Haven't these people lost all sense of perspective?
They have taken the beautiful, meaningful, civilizing biblical concept of a day of rest and turned it into the most banal, impossible obsession. Instead of worrying about the toilet paper and the tea bag and the switch and the blender, why not really use the Sabbath to reflect on your moral behavior in the world? If God existed, I doubt It would be cheering the genius who decided that steeping a tea bag is a sin.
But since modern life is getting more modern by the minute, even the Orthodox have to come up with ways of cheating their own crazy rules. So now there are inventions like this:

...the Kosher Lamp, with a shade that can be twisted to block out the bulb’s light but that does not turn it off.
..Zomet created the metal detectors used to screen worshippers at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in a manner that uses electricity in a way not prohibited on the Sabbath (WHICH IS?). It also developed pens that use ink that disappears after a few days, based on a rabbinic interpretation that only forbids permanent writing,(!) and Sabbath phones, which are dialed in an indirect manner with special buttons and a microprocessor. (YOU HAVE TO BE JAMES BOND) According to Mr. Marans, the Israeli army bought 1,000 of these phones in 2007, so that Orthodox soldiers can take part in military operations on the Sabbath and holidays (!!!). Hospitals and medical personnel also use these technologies. “Obviously they are needed to protect the country, but we want to limit the desecration of Shabbat as much as possible,” Mr. Marans said.

What desecrates the Sabbath in my view is the perversion of the original intention of the Bible.
What, may I ask, is the difference in effort between twisting a shade and flicking off a switch? None. Moreover, leaving the light on for an entire night seems a bit irresponsible in these Global Warming times, no?

Rabbi Herschel Schachter, the head of the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University in New York... said... "if you make the burden slightly lighter, it’s O.K. The Torah doesn’t want to make life impossible.”

You don't say... It is not written anywhere in the Torah that thou shalt not steep a tea bag or use a cell phone or ride in an elevator. The whole point of the Sabbath is to make life easier for mankind.
So what the hell happened?

Look who's whining now

It is nothing short of amazing to hear Republican complaints of biased media coverage of Sarah Palin.
The nerve these people have is beyond.
Jilted Clinton Women: if you as much as vote for these Republican androids just because this throwback to the dark ages happens to be a woman, it should weigh in your conscience forever. You do not deserve to be women. You do not deserve to live in the 21st century. You deserve to live in a cave.
I will personally blame you if this country starts resembling Iran.

It's APPalin'

There is absolutely nothing to be proud of if you are the parent of a pregnant 17 year old girl. NOTHING.
As a parent, you should be ashamed of yourself for not having taught your child how to take care of herself.
As my mom used to say to me at that age (and this is the best abstinence speech, or at least the most effective one, I ever heard):
"And don't you come crying to me if you get pregnant, you hear me? If you do, I swear I will break your teeth."
What can I tell you? It worked.
Oh, but the Republicans, those freakish monstrosities of nature, those spawns of Satan, they spin this moronic disgrace around and all of a sudden a preggers 17 year old is seen as embracing "life". Give me a fucking break.
It is nauseating.
Nobody is even talking about abortion. Goddammit, if you are old enough to fuck, you are old enough to use a condom. Because at 17, you are not old enough to have a child.
But what about those rumors about Sarah Palin faking a pregnancy? If they are true, then surely she can't be VP. She lied! And how! And lying and cheating just do not happen among the political class in this farkakte ass country. If the rumors are not true, I commend whoever Democrat came up with them. We are finally baring our Rovian fangs.