Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I’ve been drawn in by the Hallelujah track of the blog. To me, much of the attraction to the song lyrics comes from the versatility of the word "Hallelujah":

Praise the lord …  I found it!
What an intense experience!
Thank god that is over. (Gratefully)
Thank god that is over. (Resignedly)

Take the versatility of the word and the variety of images in the rest of the lyrics and you have a song to fit many moods. The chorus can evoke a different feeling with each repetition of Hallelujah.

The song is a wire frame (in the CGI sense) that can be used to create many faces and expressions. Or, in the sense of my youth, it is a four legged frame of chicken wire upon which you can apply paper mache to create a pony, or a horse, or a dog, or a wolf, or a Cheshire cat grinning at the variety of human emotional experiences.

For me – surprise! – it’s spiritual.

Cohen evokes faith through doubt and pain – or, rather, faith reborn in an acceptance of doubt and pain:

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Or one of Cohen’s other unforgettable lyrics:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

There is a tragedy even in salvation.

Over the past week, I’ve aired a number of possible Obama veeps. Here’s a livelier short list. Lex Luthor? For Kansas?
 

Is there a correlation?

Jenna blurts out her real feelings:

Observes DeGeneres: "So, the ranch was a great place to get married – it looked like nobody could fly over and get pictures or bother you, really."

"Yeah," concurs Hager, "that was really nice" – which prompts DeGeneres to ask, "So, can we borrow it for our wedding, can we get the ranch?"

"Sure," replies an obliging Hager.

"Okay, great," says DeGeneres.

When the president’s own daughter backs marriage equality, you know what the future is.

The Connecticut Senator jumps the shark.

Jim Lindgren summarizes the findings of two recent reports:

Under the UN system of carbon trading, it seems that most of the projects that receive money for reducing carbon emissions would have been built anyway. Thus, most payments do not actually reduce emissions.

But there’s a problem with your Michigan and Florida "compromise":

Now, everyone knows that there were 55 uncommitted delegates in Michigan.  But what few seem to realize is that on April 19 in Michigan, the district conventions were held and Obama claimed 31 of the 36 uncommitted district-level delegates.  He already has them.

Read this whole post and the links and you begin to see the massive fraudulent bluff the Clintons are trying to pull.

A reader makes an excellent point:

The Clintons repeatedly say, when making their "count Florida and Michigan" argument that 2.3 million voters cast ballots in these States, and Hillary often adds that the 1.7 million turnout in Florida was the highest ever for a Democratic primary. Sounds impressive.  But guess what?  I compared the number of persons who cast ballots this year in each of the other top ten States to the number of persons who voted for John Kerry in the 2004 general election. In every single State where both candidates campaigned — meaning every State but New York, which Obama ceded to Hillary and Illinois, which Hillary ceded to Obama — the turnout was at least 75% of the Kerry vote.  (CA: 75%; TX: 103%; PA: 79%; OH: 85%; NC: 107%; GA: 79%; as for IL and NY, IL: 70%; NY: 44%).

In contrast, in Michigan, the percentage was a paltry 24% and in Florida the percentage was 44%.

That tells me that counting Michigan and Florida would disenfranchise a large number of voters who did not vote, because there was no campaigning and/or the voters there thought the contest would not count and so did not bother to vote.

The fundamental point is that a contest should be governed by the rules agreed to in advance. Period. If the primary campaign were about the popular vote, as the Clintons now want to argue, then the strategies of both campaigns would have been different, and Obama’s radically different. To change the rules of the contest retroactively because one candidate lost is an outrageous attack on fairness, civility and sanity. It would turn all future primary races into complete mayhem, as candidates would vie to make any number of different factors count at any point in the race.

A sixteen-year-old decomposes a plastic bag in three months.

Rising popcorn prices may make movie tickets more expensive.