Numero Korea December 2009
"Show Me"
Love the shiny pants!
Image source: modelcouture
More likely, I think, is the possibility that this is just another Big Hollywood movie that stereotypes soldiers or Marines as angry (because the military is where people go when they can't get into prison!), humorless men (which is why they don't go to college!) who scream a lot, beat up on family members, hate hippies (because they hate their own latent homosexuality!), throw dishes for no good reason at all, and beat up on women and little brothers.It's not that all of the good coming home movies were "pro-war", but rather the characters in them seemed a lot less phony in movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and Born on the 4th of July. I mean, seriously, Tobey Maguire's character is looking like he's auditioning to be the third Bushwhacker in Wrestlemania V.
The most obvious pattern, however, is the media's tendency to get overwrought about almost anything. Why, for example, is the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall demolition so crucial that it requires a President's presence?So that's sort of the level of cognitive dissonance we're at in the media and how far they are willing to revise history: Berlin wall coming down - not a big deal, but the President pardoning a turkey - that's huge!
In fact, the couple — Michaele Salahi and her husband, Tareq — are Virginians who have been auditioning for a possible role in a different housewives TV franchise: “The Real Housewives of Washington.”This type of nonsense might be common in LA, but in DC these theatrics threaten national security and cost the taxpayers money. It goes to show that DC is becoming the new home of the glamorous and self-indulgent as they mooch off the wealth of the rest of the country. What a shame.
They swept past the camera crews and followed the trail of other bigwigs attending the dinner.
But neither Mr. nor Mrs. Salahi, best known in the Washington area for promoting wine and polo in Virginia, were on the guest list for the event, a fact first reported Wednesday morning on the Washington Post Web site.
A White House official confirmed Wednesday that the Salahis had not been invited nor seated for dinner.
It was not clear Wednesday night how close the Salahis got to Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, or to the guests of honor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur.
The mood in Obama's foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The "first Pacific president," as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.No word yet on whether or not MSNBC is going to condescendingly criticize our German allies like they usually do for Obama's detractors. But, in defense of President Obama, there's really not much he could do to influence the Chinese on anything, since they are effectively financing our over-consumption and we the people will not elect politicians who will get our fiscal house in order. Perhaps Der Spiegel is just saying welcome to the club of nation-states that are burdened with a massive entitlement complex and a geezerly population. At least we'll ride out the Decline of Western Civilization in solidarity.
The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast. Modernity can be wrenching, as indeed can capitalism, and there will always be "out" groups who feel themselves disrespected or left behind. The task and duty of a serious politician, as Edmund Burke emphasized so well, is to reason with such people and not to act as their megaphone or ventriloquist.It's not a bad thing that there are well-educated people on the East Coast. What's a bad thing is the same boneheads that fucked up the economy are the ones trying to establish new policies that will benefit a group of our "betters" in Wall Street and Washington. That and a dollar falling into post-Soviet Union ruble status is enough to create a large group of pissed-off Americans.
Through all its own difficulties, the military has kept its stride. That sense of balance comes partly from the fact that soldiers are anchored to the American bedrock. This includes the stereotypical small towns in the South and Midwest that have military service in their DNA. But it also counts plenty of hardworking, upwardly mobile Hispanic and African-American families in urban America who produce some of the best soldiers I know.Great. All the military folks David Ignatius "knows" are probably the people he called the cops on when they drove by his country club. As long as the nation's elite continue to see military service as something only poor, desperate rubes would take part in, we're going to have a pretty fucked up republic.
New York's health department confirmed that vaccines had been shipped to banks - Citigroup, which asked for 7,200 doses, received 1,200 while Goldman Sachs, which applied for 5,400, was given 200. A spokeswoman said distributing vaccines in workplaces would "alleviate stress and pressure from community healthcare settings and hospitals"The NYC health commissioner tries to defend this egregious blunder by saying the boobs on Wall Street are going to distribute it to at-risk employees. After the events of the last few years, I would place Wall Street execs that took bailout money somewhere in line between the surviving cast of Three's Company and the Fluffers' Union on the scale of national priorities. Not even Robert Gibbs would defend this ridiculous policy.
A senior aide to a Republican senator said that a public insurance plan could easily end up covering sex-change procedures if that’s not specifically banned in the bill.The obvious libertarian take on this issue is that people can live their life however they want, just don't expect me to pay for it. But as government increasingly gets mixed up in every facet of human existence, it puts the libertarian in an ethical dilemma where you are forced to side with either progressives (who want to spend everybody's money, as they see fit) or social conservatives (who want to tell everybody how to live, as they see fit). There isn't really a viable position one can take in this case, and a true libertarian alternative isn't going to come around in this lifetime or the next the way things are going.
“It's not that hard to imagine that a new federal health plan crafted and implemented by this administration would cover sex-change surgeries. Anything not explicitly prohibited in the bill is effectively on the table. Most Americans probably would prefer that their tax dollars not pay for or subsidize transgender surgery,” the aide said.