Apparently the fact that car bombs almost went off in London rather than the US is proof that George Bush was right all along about the war on terror and all Democrats should simply slink away in shame.
Of course, if the US is ever attacked again, that too will be proof that George Bush was right all along about the war on terror and all Democrats should simply slink away in shame.
But all these people are so much better than the non-sequitor dribbling absurdists on the Republican side that every time I see them I feel a little bit better about the future. If any of the Dem contenders make it, we will have a president who speaks normal English, in complete sentences and responds to questions fluently and with real meaning. I can’t tell you what a relief that will be after these last six years of alien gibberish and bizarre, robotic responses that everyone has been pretending are normal ways of speaking.
They’re filming some scenes for the new Indiana Jones movie in New Haven this week, and they’ve completely redressed one block next to the campus to look like 1957.
The shops have all taken on new identities, their windows transformed into an eBay junkie’s wet dream.
A staple of my midwestern boyhood brought back to life.
The redressed window of a newsstand. I wish they had a stock like this.
Starbucks has become an Irish tavern.
The design of the Stratocaster has changed very little in fifty years; you have to have a somewhat knowledgable eye to spot the difference between a 1957 Strat and a 2007 version. And the chances that the any of the details in the window below are going to register on film as they shoot a chase scene down the street are next to nil; nonetheless that’s a genuine late fifties Strat, probably worth tens of thousands of dollars.
On campus, a mysterious headless statue. What does it mean? Only Indiana Jones knows for sure.
Extras relaxing between shots. Since it was their job to sit in the parked cars, they only wore period clothing from the waist up. They’re marked with pink gaffers tape, presumably to indicate what should not show on camera; it also kind of delinates their status on the set as, essentially, props.
And, saving the best for last … an exclusive, world premiere flashing siren first look at … well, Harrison Ford’s stunt double riding on the back of a motorcycle.
And that was about as much excitement as I could handle for one day …
Joan Walsh, on the more infamous moment from that Coulter appearance mentioned below:
Think Progress has the video and transcript: During Chris Matthews’ one-hour sit down with Ann Coulter on Hardball today (hey, she sells books!), Elizabeth Edwards phoned in to confront the woman who called her husband a “faggot” earlier this year and who yesterday said that, in the future, she’ll “wish he got killed in a terrorist assassination plot” instead. Matthews was in the middle of confronting Coulter on her Edwards comments (recall that in 2003, she made fun of his 16-year-old son Wade’s death by suggesting his car sported the bumper sticker. “Ask me about my son’s death in a horrific car accident”) when Edwards herself called in. “I’m the mother of that boy who died,” she said, and she said she was calling “to ask her to politely stop the personal attacks.” A sputtering Coulter repeatedly insisted Edwards was trying to stop her from writing books. The young people in the audience applauded Edwards. Maybe there’s hope.
… adding, I still think Matthews is wrong to give any airtime at all to this vile excuse for a human being, but to his credit, he does call her on her crap, at least in that particular clip.
BAGHDAD — Marwa Hussein watched as gunmen stormed into her home and executed her parents. Afterward, her uncle brought her to the Alwiya Orphanage, a high-walled compound nestled in central Baghdad with a concrete yard for a playground. That was more than two years ago, and for 13-year-old Marwa, shy and thin with walnut-colored eyes and long brown hair, the memory of her parents’ last moments is always with her.
“They were killed,” she said, her voice trailing away as she sat on her narrow bed with pink sheets. Tears started to slide down her face. As social worker Maysoon Tahsin comforted her, other orphans in the room, where 12 girls sleep, watched solemnly.
Iraq’s conflict is exacting an immense and largely unnoticed psychological toll on children and youth that will have long-term consequences, said social workers, psychiatrists, teachers and aid workers in interviews across Baghdad and in neighboring Jordan.
“With our limited resources, the societal impact is going to be very bad,” said Haider Abdul Muhsin, one of the country’s few child psychiatrists. “This generation will become a very violent generation, much worse than during Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Full story. And for the sake of jarring contrast, here’s the latest outraaageous sound bite from everyone’s favorite zany sociopath, Ann Coulter:
“We need to be less concerned about civilian casualties…we bombed more people in Hamburg in two days … I’d rather have their civilians die than our civilians… we should kill their people.”
… which leads to the inevitable question: is Chris Matthews fucked in the head? I ask this in all seriousness. What the fuck is wrong with media gatekeepers like Matthews, that they continue to give a raving sociopath like Coulter airtime long after her raving sociopathy has been established beyond reasonable dispute?
According to this op-ed in this morning’s Times, imprisonment at Guantanamo really is the vacation wonderland of Rush Limbaugh’s imagination.
Glenn Greenwald provides a useful reality check, here.
Speaking of Greenwald, there’s probably no blogger writing today who’s been as tireless and perceptive in countering the incessant flow of right wing bullshit to which we’ve all been subjected over the past few years. He’s got a new book out, and buying it would be a pretty good way to repay the favor.
Whatever details may be gleaned from those documents regarding long-known secrets about long-ago events exposed in nine volumes by the [Senator Frank] Church Committee in 1975, what most of us would really like to know is what the CIA and other intelligence agencies are doing illegally now that will provide for an “embarrassing” document release a quarter- or half-century from now.
The past is always used to absolve the present. Revealing the truth about illegalities long past is a way of implicitly stating that “thing are different now!” But of course they’re not, and in another thirty years the same scenario will be replayed. “THEY were kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons to be tortured–but things are different NOW!”
I’ve been swamped with work lately, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel in the coming weeks, and I want to take some time to revamp the store. If you’ve got any requests for t-shirt designs you’d like to see, or other items you’d like to see more of (posters, etc.) let me know: tomtomorrow(at)ix(dot)netcom(dot)com.
I’m also probably going to hold one of my increasingly rare ebay auctions for some original (pre-digital) art sometime after the Fourth, so keep an eye out for that.
