But it’s really just a test to see what embedded video will look like on the site.
Please do not panic.
Plus, Benny Golson, too. Sweet!
Seriously. From the comments section of a Washington Post story about Obama getting attacked on three sides now that Nader is in the race:
Obama would never have gotten to this point if there hadn’t been a writers strike because they would have pointed out how full of hot air he is and the fact that his entire campaign has been based on Clinton bashing and vague rhetoric.
Who knew that Hollywood writers had complete control over the race for the most powerful office on the planet? (Besides every God-fearing, New York Times-hating Republican, of course).
Well, now that the strike is over, I guess we’ll really see what Barack Obama’s made of.
Looking back over the past twenty years or so, it’s easy to draw parallels between Barack Obama’s history-making presidential campaign with that of another well-known African American politician: Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago. Beyond sharing a political strategist–David Axelrod, who worked on Harold’s 1987 re-election campaign and now serves as Obama’s campaign manager—Washington, like Obama, called for the building of a new progressive coalition to effect change, astutely read the political zeitgeist better than his rivals and ran an effective, crusade-like campaign that captured the imagination of once-apathetic voters.
For many of us today, it’s tempting to view both campaigns primarily through the lens of race, and to see in Obama the same political courage to break down barriers Washington once displayed. However, peel away the media narrative and political shorthand that frames each campaign—once-obscure African America politician comes from nowhere to claim higher office—and another, hidden storyline emerges: In 2008, just like in 1983, Obama’s campaign represents nothing less than the hostile takeover of an established, once seemingly insurmountable Democratic political machine.
And, just like in Chicago in 1983, the 2008 presidential campaign is shaped in large part by one overriding political dynamic: Fierce, even irrational, efforts to stop the political tidal wave. The only difference is that instead of Washington, it’s Obama. And instead of a collection of ward heelers and party committeemen, it’s the political organization built by Bill and Hillary Clinton that currently controls the institutional Democratic Party that finds itself resisting the calls for change. (Continued)
When, one evening not too far off, the dark suited president looks somber-eyed into the camera,
and interrupts America’s consumption of National Idol and 24 Hours in the Life of an Anti-Terrorist Avenger with talk of necessity and honor;
the TV screens will flicker in the darkening night and computer screens will glow in the face of the information-laden age,
and the traffic on the 405 will slow to a crawl, and the subways of Chicago and New York and Philadelphia will carry home after-work drinkers before the fast food takeaway,
and the offices blocks will close, with security men asleep and taxis hailed,
and video games played and cell phones talked on and tomorrow’s plans made;
while suburban streets settle into an evening’s stupor, framed against the halogen silhouette of the corner convenience,
and the nation slumbers ever forward,
elsewhere,
across Iran, in the suburbs of Tehran, in the mountains of Natanz and near the Persian Gulf coast at Bushehr, where the “bunker buster” bombs will be launched from the F-15s and B2 Stealth bombers,
there will be yet another war. (Continued)
Imagine if Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria gave a press conference. What would it sound like?
Beria, as you may remember, was head of Stalin’s secret police during one of the most infamous periods in Soviet history, the Great Purge of 1938. As head of the NKVD, or Soviet secret police, he was responsible for carrying out a massive political repression that was nominally focused on a series of “enemies of the people,” such as the intelligentsia, professionals and rich peasants. In reality, however, the bloody purge - and others Beria oversaw for Stalin in later years - were simply a means for Stalin to ruthlessly consolidate his power by vanquishing his political enemies through show trials, forced labor camps, torture and, when all else failed, murder.
It has been estimated that millions of people died in Stalin’s purges, most of which were run by Beria. Several hundreds of thousands were executed by firing squad and millions more were forcibly resettled or sent to gulags, where many of them died due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork. As head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Beria oversaw the larger and larger network of secret camps, detention centers, prison cells and execution sites needed to terrorize anyone even slightly suspected of political disloyalty.
So what would it sound like if in, say, 1938, Beria gave a press conference to detail how the Great Purge was going? Well, it would probably sound a lot like the press conference President Bush gave in the Oval Office of the White House, today, December 6th, 2005.
Remember back in 1998, when Republicans, particularly Tennesee senator-turned-crime fighter Fred Thompson, CIA officer-turned-politician-turned-CIA-chief Porter J. Goss and one-time Strom Thurmond fan Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) were all up in arms over reports that President Clinton sold military technology to the Chinese in exchange for campaign contributions? It’s true. At the time, Thompson called the matter a “big, ugly mess,” and for a while, there was talk of a Justice Department investigation. For his part, Goss, then a representative from Florida, said:
Just wondering if you remembered.
Late update: Okay, so I was wrong with the headline. Apparently, President El Hadj Omar Bongo is one of the wealthiest heads of state in the world, a status acquired through the traditional means available to many a sub-Sahara African strongman: oil revenue and corruption. Apparently, I don’t spend enough time on K Street to be able to recognize a big spender when I see one.
Back in August of 2002 - a mere three years ago but seemingly in another lifetime - I started The American Sentimentalist with little more than an overabundant belief in my own abilities and boatloads of naivete. At the time, the site existed on the upswing of the blogger revolution: I hardly knew what a blog was when the site began, and, judging from some slightly overheated attempts at defining the new medium’s role a few months later, I quickly grew to misunderestimate my ability to grasp the obvious: If I had a blog, that meant within a short while everyone else would, too.
Back then, however, I liked to think my particular slice of the Internets was a bit different than the usual run-of-the-mill cant one found when surfing the blogosphere. After all, I reasoned, it wasn’t like I was simply linking to mainstream news media sites and adding a few words of opinion or a hopefully funny observation, like some were. Instead, I was writing, putting in three or four hours a day, lovingly crafting 1,200-word (or longer) posts filled with meaning, logic and inescapable insights into the human condition that had to–just had to–gain me recognition as a writer and thinker, and perhaps even make a difference in someone’s life.
What a fool I was.
Programmes of violence,
As entertainment,
Brings the disease into your room.
We know the germ,
Which is man-made in metal,
Is really a key to your own tomb.
Prevention is better than cure,
Bad apples affecting the pure,
You’ll gather your senses I’m sure
Then agree to,
Melt the guns.
“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out to solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even.”
Neslon Algren, Nonconformity, 1952/1996.
