When I first read this I thought, surely, somebody’s got to be joking. I mean, it’s good of the former vice-president to make an endorsement when it would actually make a difference.
I’m tired, busy, and, did I mention tired? I don’t have time for Al Gore’s nonsense. Whoopty damn do!
I don’t want to hear anything more about Gore possibly being on the ticket.
I don’t care who wants it. Not gonna happen.
1. NBA. I’m thinking beyond the hurt and pain to ninja-like revenge for the absolute extension of corporate corruption to (no surprise) the anti-trust-exempted NBA.
I’ve been trying to think back, through my well-known cynicism, to all the unexpected extensions of conference and final playoffs.
Back then, during slow moments in the action, my twisted mind would think about the irony of the best interest of the league’s front office (in terms of the extra gorge of TV exposure and revenue) for each series to run six or seven games.
My pre-lawyer mind even imagined the TV contract clauses paying out less for shorter series, and Lawrence O’Brien and David Stern and their lackeys sweating bullets (as in Baltimore) over the lost millions in sweeps and 4-1 series, and conspiring tpo “fix” the problem.”
Apparently, they tried (and succeeded, til now).
To think I once had (completely unrealistic and misplaced) dreams of playing for this bunch.
2. NASCAR: the Good Ole Boys take a page out of the Sista v. Knicks playbook.
Did you hear that a black woman sued NASCAR for racial and gender discrimination? She says when she complained, NASCAR brass told her to “get over it.”
I hope she does get over (it), to the tune of the $225 million she’s suing them for.
It’s the yellow flag for them, and the checkered flag for her!
King
Va. governor could help fill gap for Obama: Centrist seen as dark horse among VP possibilities By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff, June 12, 2008
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – He is the popular governor of a critical swing state. He has working-class roots and a Harvard degree, and strong support from both business and labor. He is a devout Catholic and speaks fluent Spanish, and was the first governor outside Illinois to endorse Barack Obama for president.
Governor Tim Kaine is probably the least well known of the trio of rising Democratic stars from Virginia. The others – US Senator Jim Webb, the flame-throwing author and former Navy secretary, and former governor Mark Warner, the wealthy venture capitalist who briefly flirted with a presidential run – are regularly listed as vice presidential possibilities.
But Kaine’s biography and political resume fill many of the perceived gaps in Obama’s profile, making him for some analysts a dark horse in veepstakes 2008.
“The case for him is Virginia is a competitive state this time around, and he is kind of a centrist,” said Dan Palazzolo, a political scientist at the University of Richmond. “He’s prolife, basically, and he’s got this probusiness background. He’s also a big supporter of Obama.”
But, as Palazzolo notes, Kaine has no military or foreign policy experience, credentials Obama also lacks and that could prove a detriment for Republican John McCain, a Navy veteran and former prisoner of war who has traveled extensively around the world during his 22 years in the US Senate. “I think they’re substantial downsides,” Palazzolo said.
Obama, though, clearly has warm feelings for Kaine, who befriended the Illinois senator when he came to Virginia to stump for Kaine in 2005. (They discovered that their mothers came from the same small town in Kansas.) Campaigning in Virginia last week, Obama appeared with all three of Virginia’s Democratic notables, but he reserved special affection for Kaine.
“When you’re in the political business, there are a lot of people who are your allies, there are a lot of people who you’ve got to do business with, but you don’t always have a lot of friends,” Obama said at a rally, according to the Washington Post’s Virginia Politics blog. “The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia is my friend.”
You can’t get much happier than a pig in muck, or so we are told.
But when this little piggy arrived in the farmyard she showed a marked reluctance to get her trotters dirty.
While her six brothers and sisters messed around in the mire, she stayed on the edge shaking. It is thought she might have mysophobia – a fear of dirt.
Owners Debbie and Andrew Keeble were at a loss, until they remembered the four miniature wellies used as pen and pencil holders in their office. They slipped them on the piglet’s feet – and into the mud she happily ploughed.
Now she runs over to Mr Keeble so he can put them on for her in the morning.
The couple, who run the award-winning Debbie and Andrew’s sausage company in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, named the young saddleback Cinders after Cinderella and her magical glass slippers.
They are using her to front a campaign to give a better deal to pig farmers.
Fortunately for five-week-old Cinders, she will not end up in one of their sausages. Although they were pig farmers for 20 years, the Keebles keep them only as pets nowadays.
‘I don’t know what will happen as she gets bigger,’ said Mr Keeble.
‘Hopefully she will grow out of her phobia of mud before she needs a new set of boots.’
by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Tuesday, July 26, 1994
GOMA, Zaire – The skies here were darkened by aircraft yesterday bearing desperately needed food and medical supplies to Rwandan refugees dying at a rate of one per minute in the squalid camps below.
But the water purifiers needed to combat the raging cholera epidemic did not arrive until nightfall.
So with no way to cleanse the filthy water of disease, 1,400 refugees died yesterday on day six of an epidemic that has cut through the crowded camps like a scythe.
By nightfall the death tally from the epidemic had risen to 14,000, and relief workers had started burning bodies because there was nowhere to bury them.
A mass grave the size of a football field dug into the soft earth on the outskirts of Goma was full. French troops farther down the road were using explosives to blow holes in volcanic rock while hundreds of rotting corpses piled up nearby.
United Nations officials, fearing the death toll could reach 80,000, yesterday asked the United States to launch a military-type operation to distribute aid.
“It is out of control,” said Peter Hansen, a top UN relief official. “We don’t have the capacity to deal With thiS.”
Last night, on the muddy road that leads from the Goma airport to the refugee camp at Katali, the dead were wrapped in mats and stacked like logs.
Bodies are so dense by the roadside that some bear tire marks. Dogs and people could be seen scavenging among the corpses.
“We are all dying,” said one refugee who gathered up his children yesterday and started to walk home. “It is better to be killed in Rwanda.”
From the Daily Mail in London, UK:
The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind, By SHARON CHURCHER, June 08, 2008
McCain with Carol as he arrives back in the US in 1973 after his five years as a PoW in North Vietnam
Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.
While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the American dream – a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future – McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.
But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.
And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.
When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeonshad been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.
Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.
Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.
For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.
Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’
she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.
‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens…it just does.’
by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Wednesday, July 27, 1994
GOMA. ZAIRE – Her tiny torso was wrapped in dirty rags. No one knew her name, where she came from or what became of her parents. She could not have been more than 6 months old.
Last week French soldiers at Goma airport handed the baby to Florence Nirere, a 15-year old Rwandan refugee whose parents were killed fleeing tribal warfare in their homeland.
Nirere had no food, but she struggled to keep the child alive by giving her water.
Yesterday, Nirere frantically shook the tot limb-by-limb as I rode with them in a truck to a refugee orphanage at Camp Carea. She checked her mouth and eyes, looking for any sign of life.
“The baby is dead,” Nirere finally announced, as she dropped the infant’s lifeless arm.
I stared at Nirere’s skirt, which was caked with dirt from a three-month trek.
The dirt was mixing with a sickening yellow fluid that oozed from the baby as its short life expired.
Nirere and the dead baby were among 24 orphans crammed into the truck yesterday as it bounced along the dirt road.
Clad in filthy rags and weakened from hunger, heartbreak and illness, the children stared listlessly. Most seemed oblivious to the shroud of death around them.
Thousands of Rwanda’s children will die anonymous deaths, nameless victims of illness and civil war.
‘Just Do It’: Couple have sex for 101 days straight
One couple gave their marriage a jolt … by having lots and lots of sex
These guys on the radio are basically reading the New York Times story on the books:
LET’S say you and your spouse haven’t had sex in so long that you can’t remember the last time you did. Not the day. Not the month. Maybe not even the season. Would you look for gratification elsewhere? Would you file for divorce? Or would you turn to your mate and say, “Honey, you know, I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we do it for the next 365 days in a row?”
That’s more or less what happened to Charla and Brad Muller. And in another example of an erotic adventure supplanting married ennui, a second couple, Annie and Douglas Brown, embarked on a similar, if abbreviated journey: 101 straight days of post-nuptial sex.
Both couples document their exploits in books published this month, the latest entries in what is almost a mini-genre of books offering advice about the “sex-starved marriage.” The couples, though, are hardly similar. The Mullers are Bible-studying steak-eating Republicans from Charlotte, N.C. The Browns are backpacking multigrain northerners who moved to Boulder, Colo. The Mullers’ book, “365 Nights,” is rather modest and circumspect in its details. The Browns’ book, “Just Do It,” almost makes the reader feel part of a threesome, sharing everything they used to stimulate sexual desire (it’s hard to visualize and even harder to explain).
by GENE MUSTAIN in New York and MICHAEL O. ALLEN in Goma, Zaire, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday July 27, 1994
Aid workers battling death, famine and pestilence of the Rwanda refugee crisis faced a new problem yesterday–a shortage of graves.
The raging cholera epidemic in the squalid camps near the border backwater town of Goma, Zaire, continued to claim lives faster than mass graves could be dynamited out of the volcanic rock blanketing the area.
As planeloads of international relief supplies began arriving, burial teams — including a Zairian boy scout troop — collected 2,000 bodies. And aid workers feared that 20,000 may have died since 1.2 million Rwandans fled to Zaire a week ago.
But gravesites were full, and hundreds of rotting bodies were left in foul-smelling piles along the roads. Aid workers held back on announced plans to burn corpes because cremation runs counter to African traditions.
“The burning issue, as it were, is a last resort,” said Ray Wilkinson, a United Nations spokesman. “One problem, as you may guess, is that it’s hard to find anyone willing to undertake the grisly task.”
About 75 American soldiers and a number of civilian experts began operating water purification equipment yesterday, but relief workers fear that thousands more refugees will die before enough equipment is on hand.
“Our top priority is clean water, because without it more people are going to die in droves,” Brig. Gen. Jack Nix said after landing at Goma’s airport.
I always tell myself that.
But it does not stop me from doing it year after year. I need a new sport that could keep me fit without the physical devastation that soccer (football for non-Americans) wreaks on my body.
Sunday. 9 a.m. It is already sweltering. My team, Santa Fe S.C., will play Clarkstown S.C. in a match.
I have a sick feeling in my stomach, a premonition that we are about to take a beating.
Although we’re in first place and Clarkstown, in a down year, is mid-table, it is going to be a fierce match because Clarkstown needs to make up ground and every game between us is a civil war. It does not help that we have just 11 players, no subtitutes, while they have four on their sideline.
The match starts and is tense but even until late in the first half when Clarkstown breaks down our midfield and scores a magnificent goal. We respond by arguing among ourselves, yelling at each other, and criticizing. Second half begins. We have the better of play for a spell. We grow desperate, pushing forward.
I challenge for a ball in the attacking third but the other player beats me to it and, in the ensuing tussle, I lose my balance and I get a kick flush on the mouth as I’m on the way to the ground.
I lay there on the ground holding my mouth as I feel a warm gush, my own blood, go down my throat and spill out through my fingers, which I’m clasping tight over my my mouth. Worse, I hear crackling sounds in my jaw.
Refree stops game. A multitute of voices comes at me:
“Do you know where you are?”
“Michael, how many fingers am I holding up?”
“Can you stand?”
“Can you sit up?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Shut up!” someone finally yells.
Someone shoves a bag of ice in my hand, which I put tight over my mouth.
I get up and go to the sideline, washing blood out of my mouth. Game resumes and Clarkstown scores two quick goals.
I go back into the game when refree determines I’m no longer bleeding. I make no difference in the game. The game ends.
Ignominous defeat for us.
Wracking pain in my jaw. My teammates are angry with and at everyone, including the referee, who is quite good, and the other team for their fierce display.
Simply put, anything that could be kicked, or punched, the Clarkstown players kicked and punched. Besides my jaw, there’s a lump the size of a golf ball on my left shin and my right ankle is throbbing. The immediate problems are my lips, which feels like they’re in 10 different pieces, and my jaw, which feels like it’s broken but isn’t. I drive home and quickly swallow Ibuprofen.
I’m a lot better today than I’ve been. I guess, in the end, it looked a lot worse than it actually was.
On the field, I bled a lot. The pain defied the ibuprofen. My jaw still crackles now when I move it but that too is better than it’s been. Each and every tooth seems to be sore. I have not been able to eat anything without using a straw.
More importantly, I did not lift weights or do any running yesterday or today. But, in the morning, I will lift and run a little. On Thursday, I will lift more and run a little longer. On Friday, I will do my hardest work. I will do some light work on Saturday.
On Sunday, we play the Teaneck Masters.
I may have said this before but I used to love reading Paul Krugman and I certainly hope to get around to loving to read him again.
Right about now, he’s lost all credibility with me.
His column today is a prime example of how he lost me. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran a, as Sen. Barack Obama said, valiant race. She lost and conceded and threw her support behind Sen. Obama. Krugman was one of Mrs. Clinton’s most fervent supporters.
Deploying column after column to bludgeon Sen. Obama’s policy positions and extol the wisdom and virtues of HRC, Mr. Krugman seemed blinded to any good points Obama may have made during the course of the campaign, or to any good qualities he may have.
I don’t mind partisanship, or even disingenousness. I subscribe to the adage that all is fair in love and war. But what I do mind dishonesty.
And the best face you could put on most of the arguments Mr. Krugman has marshalled in support of Mrs. Clinton and against Mr. Obama is to say that they are dishonest. Even when the examples he’s using are right on the money. Or, should I say especially when . . .
Anyway, in “It’s a different Country,” Mr. Krugman was at it again.
Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.
Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.
And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.
Mr. Krugman’s examples are these:
Big Government: Americans don’t dislike big government. They actually support Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, government programs that dominate domestic spending.
If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.
But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?
Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.
There’s nothing wrong with this argument. On its own, it is right.
Mr. Krugman goes on to talk about other examples, including the decline in urban violence.
As the historian Rick Perlstein documents in his terrific new book “Nixonland,” America’s hard right turn really began in 1966, when the Democrats suffered a severe setback in Congress — and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.
Krugman acknowledged that none of these examples mean that Obama would win the presidency. He then concluded this way:
But if Mr. Obama does win, it will symbolize the great change that has taken place in America. Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics — but we’re now a different, and better, country.
First of all, let me say that, if the country Paul Krugman is talking about is these United States of America, it is not that different a country.
I questioned the country Krugman is talking about because he wondered in his column why “racial division” has “become so much less important in American politics.” America remains and will be for a long time a deeply racist and racialized nation. I take no pleasure in saying that but it is the truth.
The genius of the Obama campaign is in figuring out a way to navigate the virulent currents of our public life. He is a singular figure (Just as Sen. Clinton, for an entirely different reason, has been a singular figure in convincing us a female could be a commander-in-chief) who has come along with a promise of leading us to a better place.
Because the Democratic Party establishment was already committed to HRC, Obama fashioned his own brand new constituency so that his message could eventually resonate with people who might otherwise not listen to an African American candidate.
Obama had to do that in order to get anyone to listen to him. And, as it is, both candidates brought record number of people out to vote during the primary and caucus season.
Jesse Jackson made a couple of exhilarating runs at the presidency, crafting a “rainbow coalition” of minorities, women, and the poor and working classes but it was never going to be enough because, ultimately, you needed white voters, which the Rev. Jackson did not get in the requisite numbers.
Obama signaled this time was going to be different when he won the overwhelmingly white Iowa and came a scintillating second in just as white New Hampshire.
It was indeed Obama’s transformative campaign and not a de-racialized nation that led to those early triumphs and the ones that followed.
For Krugman to come out with his column Monday denying that and offering other reasons, as valid as they may be, strikes me as sour grapes bordering on churlishness.