Month: June 2010

Betty Cracker imagines a conversation in which the president calls the half-term former governor for help.

A word about the Queen’s English:

I really could care less about “couldn’t care less.” But titbit? I’d die for that one. (His teeth are great, don’t you think?)

Joe Klein, in an elegant riposte to Dorothy Rabinowitz's strangely empty attack on the Americanness of Barack Obama, reminds us of something:

We are waging savage war–nightly attacks, I am told–on the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan (a process that might yield some success on the ground if the Karzai government weren't so titanically dreadful and corrupt). Afghanistan has been called Obama's war; it certainly wasn't George W. Bush's, who left the job unfinished to fight a war of choice in Iraq. We are also mounting regular Predator attacks that are decimating the leadership of Al Qaeda on the Af/Pak border, and chasing down–and killing–Al Qaeda operators in Somalia and Yemen. This effort has been made more effective by the enhanced human intelligence capabilities ordered by George W. Bush, but it has taken place on Obama's watch, at his behest. 

"Am I pretty?" – a North Korean woman, to a Western journalist.

The BBC documentary above is a must-watch. The more we discover in recent months, the more the revaluation of the currency last year may prove a death-blow to the regime.

"Real men don't need experts to tell them whose asses to kick," – Bill Kristol, via Chait.

Don't you miss the Cheney years?

An AP investigation finds that the company's contingency plans for both the Gulf and the Deepwater Horizon rig are "riddled with omissions and glaring errors":

Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005. Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf. The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

(Obama's contingency plan via Dead Dog.)

Sasha Frere-Jones peers into the future of music:

“Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” [Pandora founder] Tim Westergren told me.

Pew has a new report finding that interracial marriages now account for one in seven new unions. Paul Waldman digs into the details:

The most common type of interracial union, making up 41 percent of the total, is Hispanic/white (black/white marriages are only 11 percent of all interracial marriages). 30.8 percent of Asians who married in 2008 married someone of another ethnicity — but it was heavily skewed toward women. While 39.5 percent of Asian women married non-Asian men, only 19.5 percent of Asian men married non-Asian women.

There are also some geographical differences (there's an interactive graphic here). While 21.4 percent of marriages in 2008 in the West were interracial, only 10.8 percent of those in the Midwest were. The highest proportion — 28 percent — was in Nevada. The lowest? Mississippi, at 5 percent.

Yglesias chimes in:

I think the upshot of this is that the country will be “whiter” in 2050 than naive demographic projections suggest and that will largely be because a very substantial portion of the descendants of today’s Hispanics and Asians will be considered white.

Ken Silverstein fumes:

Yes, the overwhelming majority of congress is going to be re-elected, because the rules are so heavily rigged in favor of incumbents–unless the member of congress is stupid enough to get caught in bed with a hooker or taking bribes, he or she is almost certainly going to win reelection. But concluding that this means that voters aren’t angry and frustrated misses the point by a million miles.

A reader writes:

You really should check out the album that the Shonen Knife track comes from: If I Were a Carpenter, a pretty successful revisionist tribute that helped take the guilty out of the pleasure for me. These alt versions help reveal that while Richard's production is soft and very much of its time (though excellent for what it was), no one can really match Karen's amazing voice. Two of my faves from the album are Grant Lee Buffalo's "We've Only Just Begun" and Sonic Youth's incredible version of "Superstar" (above).

Another writes:

I am enjoying your posts on alternate takes on songs by the Carpenters.  The indie gay romantic comedy, “The Broken Hearts Club” (2000) features a soundtrack filled with the Carpenters songs performed by a variety of artists.  It’s very entertaining.  While the idea of soundtracks composed of the work of one pop group has become a cliché in “gay” movies (see “I Think I Do” – 1997 – with its full complement of soundtrack songs by the Partridge Family) the use of Carpenters music in “Broken Hearts Club” really complements the film’s mood.   On the commentary track of the DVD, the director (Greg Berlanti) mentions that the one song they had the hardest time getting the rights to use was, oddly, “Sing A Song”.  They had to go to Richard Carpenter himself for that one.

Another:

While on the subject of the Carpenters, please don't miss Superstar, Todd Haynes' beautiful experimental film using Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter's anorexic dissent.  The film was banned from public viewing over licensing issues, but resourceful people might find it on Google.  Watching it gives one a new understanding of anorexia and appreciation for the beauty of Karen's voice.

Oh, I won't forget seeing that. Part one is here (and you can find the others in the YouTube sidebar).