This awful:
What we’re beginning to see here is how underdeveloped the arguments for Clinton were when separated from her aura of inevitability.
What arguments? The only sliver of policy difference is health care mandates. The rest is "experience", "dynasty," "inevitability", "competence." No wonder their only current argument is: cocaine.
I guess she wants to lose ugly.
If he’s nowhere in Iowa, struggling in New Hampshire, tied third in South Carolina, and now third in Florida, how on earth is he supposed to win the nomination?
"I’m confused. Exactly who is this ‘they’ that the Religious Right keep saying has hijacked the country?… And who are the consumers of the cultural products the Religious Right constantly criticizes? Who do they think is watching Desperate Housewives, going to see Maid in Manhattan, buying Cosmopolitan, and downloading Janet Jackson’s half-second nipple?…They have gotten the government and media to support them as defenders of America’s wholesomeness against some mythical, incredibly powerful ’them’… But the Right is like the kid who kills his parents and asks for mercy because he’s an orphan. Somehow, they neglect to mention that it’s the consumer choices and other preferences of their own constituents that are the so-called problem," – Marty Klein, in his book, America’s War On Sex, reviewed here by David Farthing.
Well, he’d have to call the fax in his living room, but you get the idea. There’s an exhibition in Los Angeles called "Merry Titmas." Dan has more. It’s pretty pathetic, I have to say. The Virgin Mary in a Hooters t-shirt? You really can’t do better than that? My general rule with "brave" outsider anti-religious art is to ask if they’d do to Islam what they do routinely to Catholicism. Most don’t. Poseurs are often cowards.
A reader notices something:
I know he’s not your favorite pundit, but he is a good measuring stick.
Lately, he’s been going after Huckabee and propping up Romney. Yesterday, Taranto stated that, "Huckabee put his foot in his mouth in 1992, and he is still trying to extract it." He later went on to prop up Romney against an editorial in the NYT against "an utterly mindless statement" but refused to mention the mindlessness of "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."
Methinks the Rudy Right is really, really scared of Huckabee and has Romney as their firewall in case Rudy isn’t viable after Iowa and New Hampshire.
Every complacent secular Republican who has scorned those of us worried about the fundie right is beginning to squirm in the face of Huckabee’s surge.
A Hillary precinct captain in Iowa explains why she’s now caucusing for Obama:
Many readers have responded to the money moment in yesterday’s Democratic debate:
I was undecided up to now, but forty seconds of YouTube has decided me: There’s a sword at Obama’s throat. Hillary grabs the sword and brandishes it, gloating. Obama reaches out, takes the sword from her hand, and runs her through. What an aphoristic moment. Or as the YouTube commenters put it, PWNED.
In the larger context, this was a grievous unforced error on Hillary’s part. In my eyes, her crowing reaction damages her as much as Obama’s comeback benefits him. All she needed to do was listen politely as Obama squirmed, and the moment was hers. Instead, she reacted like a comic book supervillain and handed a superhero moment to Obama. I don’t know who’s got an exact count, but I suspect her team this season has racked up the most errors, both forced and unforced. In sport, that has a lot of significance. In politics, I think it’s about to.
Then this:
I saw the clip you link to on TV this morning, with Obama being asked about all the old Clinton people advising him. You would hear Hillary’s laugh rising loud and fake about the rest of the people there. It was stunningly typical of her, and the only way she’ll get my vote now is if she’s the nominee and McCain isn’t.
Well: I think that says more about the awfulness of the GOP choice than the virtues of Senator Clinton.
The online community’s word of year. Apparently a synonym for "yay!" When will Colbert come back?
Street art meets silly anti-corporatism in the work of Parisian artist, Zevs. I love logos myself, the good ones anyway. Some context here. Perhaps it’s not so preachy:
Zevs’s work primarily plays with and explores visual effects. Re-painting the logos in their own colours, the artist pours paint over them, liquidating one logo after another. Through the parallel lines of the drips, the logos dissolve in front of the viewers eyes, drawing attention to, and visually disturbing the recognizable and omnipresent trademark as illustrated above. By doing so, Zevs investigates the logo’s visual power.
