One word:

Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

Snazzy Picture of the Day

This rather handsome critter is a bomb-sniffing dog in Afghanistan, and he received a medal for  for bravery and commitment in wartime, Feb. 24.

My critter is still sleeping and farting next to me in the bed…

This is too funny:

From The Guardian, PEI’s paper:

The statement does not include details of the incident but sources to The Guardian say Guergis was rude and insulting toward staff and the province.

After spending the afternoon in Prince Edward Island for a funding announcement for local women’s groups (see story on page A4), she arrived for her flight out of Charlottetown just five minutes before it was scheduled to depart.

She became testy with staff almost immediately, accusing them of ruining her birthday.

In a detailed breakdown of events written in a letter to The Guardian, a staff person at the airport characterized the behaviour of Guergis’ and her aide Emily Goucher as “so difficult and rude (the Air Canada counter representative) almost refused to allow them to board despite their ‘V.I.P.’ status.”

“They berated him loudly and treated him in a most condescending manner after he told them some of their excessive bags were too large to be carry-on and should be checked,” the employee stated.

Guergis then became even more belligerent in the security screening area. She refused to remove her coat and shoes, and when ordered to do so, threw her boots across the floor. She complained she was going to get stuck on P.E.I., referring to the province as a “hell hole.”

She then tried to force her way through a locked security door. When a security officer stopped her and told her she would have to wait, she shot back at him.

“I don’t need to be lectured by you. I’ve been down here working my ass off for you people.”

She then began banging on the window of the preboarding area in an attempt to get the attention of a flight attendant outside.

Now, I have, once or twice, probably referred to PEI as a hellhole. But have I ever thrown a tantrum at the Charlottetown airport? Nope. In fact, the people who work at the Charlottetown airport are the NICEST airport staff I have ever come across. This bitch should be fired.

Thanks Josh!

Re: Newsweek and terrorism- Check this out.

More Garrison Keillor love…

Unreality remains pretty much the same, and its appeal in politics is as strong as ever. Look at the recent powwow of the conservative choir in Washington. Their goal is to reduce government to where it was in Coolidge’s time. They are sticking to this, though their presidents, Reagan and Bush II, only succeeded in enlarging government. As for their foreign policy, it’s the old Flag In Your Face, Nuke The Whales, Talk Loud, Walk Tall, Proud To Be Dumb & Who Gives A Rip Anyway, Republican bravado that’s all for domestic consumption and makes perfect sense if you’re a shut-in and your TV is locked on Fox News but not if you are ambulatory and able to read English.

Meanwhile, our president, who is more or less forced to live in the real world, has seen his numbers drop alarmingly because unreality is so beautiful to so many people, such as the tea baggers. The conservatives should, in all decency, lie low for a few years. When you’ve driven the car into the swamp — up to our eyeballs in debt, fighting two wars on behalf of shaky regimes, trying to keep a lid on Iran, Congress in a frozen stupor — and then you throw mudballs at the tow-truck driver, you are betting on the electorate having the memory of a guppy.

I’ve finally decided…

that the U.S. deserves everything it gets…

The geniuses at Newsweek:

Dan Stone, Reporter
Yep, comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement – albeit a crazy one – whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth the outrage. These are professional journalists, this isn’t Fox News, it’s not Hannity.

Hell in a handbasket, anyone?

“The chattering creative classes…”

Joseph Huff-Hannon at Salon on the TED conference:

That discussion abruptly over, Andy and I get back to deconstructing some of what we’ve seen so far, and return to brainstorming about our upcoming talk — and the challenge of selling a provocative brand of anti-corporate activism at a conference heavily sponsored by a laundry list of major corporations (Dow Chemical, GE, Walmart, Shell, etc). The challenge also being how to pitch our idea (the creation of a “Yes Laboratory for Creative Activism” which will, hopefully, train subsequent cadres of aspiring provocateurs and culture jammers) to an audience that, from what we had seen so far, seemed dedicated to a utopian, fairly apolitical form of magical thinking in which change is synonymous with invention, or sometimes just better branding, and where politics is nowhere to be found.

“What the world needs now is — mindshift,” conference MC and TED curator Chris Anderson says to wild applause, as he kicked off the conference. At TED, mindshift is best delivered in a huge luxurious ballroom, with crystal chandeliers, and rows of red bean bag chairs and comfy lounge chairs. Here in Palm Springs the experience is totally mediated, mind you, 500 “TEDsters” who paid almost $4000 a pop are here to watch the thematically grouped talks and presentations beamed in on massive TV screens all over the room. One man lies horizontally on a bed set up that resembles a sort of Bedouin encampment in the desert. Only instead of gazing up at the stars, he’s looking up at an LCD monitor above him broadcasting the talks from the main venue in Long Beach, which is invitation-only and costs $6000.

In the world according to TED, where high-powered über-networking between very smart people and their very big ideas is the best way to address the various social, political and economic crises facing the world, would our entreaties for more organizing, more rebellion, more creative activism to change the rules of the game fall on deaf ears? Mindshift sounded nice, whatever it meant, but could we get anybody here interested in policy shift, in economic shift, in power shift? We knew this was a conference of designers, inventors, venture capitalists and management consultants — not a hot bed of radicals — but we also figured given the much vaunted influence of the “TED community, “if we could interest even a few of these people in our scheme, we’d be in good shape.

This is the most annoying thing I’ve read all week…

A writer on Slate has been doing a series this winter on Vancouver called Notes from a Native Daughter. Native daughter, as in from Vancouver, not Native as in Native American, of course, which you will be able to see by the following few paragraphs:

After snowboarding, we return to Kristin’s house in North Vancouver, a sloping suburb wedged between Burrard Inlet and the Coast Mountains. Short story writer Alice Munro lived here in the 1950s and loathed it. In an interview with the Paris Review, she makes her years of North Vancouver housewifery sound like her own personal gulag, the suffering that made her a writer. “There was a lot of competitive talk about vacuuming and washing the woolies, and I got quite frantic,” she said. It was forbidden for a woman to take anything seriously, she observed, among “the wives of the climbing men,” by which she meant those ascending corporate ladders.

Vancouver’s suburbs are not as stifling as they were in the 1950s. Now “climbing” in the context of North Vancouver can only mean climbing forest trails or rock faces, and both women’s and men’s competitive talk centers on these things. The possibility of becoming frantic in the face of parochialism, though, still resonates. It’s perhaps this sort of fear that led me to settle in New York. There, my bedroom is a closet, medicine and education are luxury goods, and on sultry summer nights the streets can smell like a Third World slum. In some way, it keeps me alive. Call it love, perhaps, because it’s just as hard to explain.

I’ve returned now to see my hometown exactly 12 months before the Winter Olympics, in anticipation of which a city of ongoing renewal is stepping up the pace. Evenings at Cypress Bowl will be less peaceful in February 2010, when it hosts the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events. Tonight, though, Vancouver is looking pretty good. Kristin, my high-school friend, shows me around the house she has just bought with her fiancé. It has five bedrooms and a deck overlooking the inlet and the city. They each have a car and take elaborate vacations—to Patagonia and Northern Italy in recent years. She laments that her four weeks of annual holiday are not enough. Through the window, down the hill and across the water, the city lights wink on and off while we eat our ordered-in Thai food with Okanagan wine. I am forced to concede that the best-city list-makers might be onto something.

I’m not from Vancouver, so I don’t want to offend anyone. I’ve only been there once, but this woman has GOT to be fucking kidding me. Does she not realize, as a writer living in a box in NYC, making presumably not that much money because most writers aren’t these days, that upon moving back to Vancouver, she would also HAVE TO LIVE IN A CLOSET-SIZED APARTMENT????!!! She would not just magically live in a five-bedroom house with a water view in North Vancouver (I shudder to even think about how much this house costs).  The thing that has always put me off Vancouver (and NYC for that matter, and very nearly Toronto), is the EXTREMELY high cost of living. And yet, with all of this glowing Olympic coverage, I have yet to see this subject come up. Yes, the Economist calls Vancouver one of the world’s most “livable” cities, but it should call it “most livable if you are a neurosurgeon or CEO or multimillionaire-whatever-it-is-this-Kristin-person-does-to-be-able-to-afford-a-million-dollar+home.” The vast majority of people in this country cannot afford to own property in Vancouver. To me, that’s not a very livable city. To me, it sounds like quite a hostile place to live.  Give me Hamilton any day of the week.

If it wasn’t disgusting before, it really is now…

A teabagger responds to Ta-nehisi, threatens him, and TNC responds with all class:

I received the following comment from Tim Sumner, who runs the website 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America:

The race card. Who’d of thunk this leftist author would ever play one?

Did the thousand-plus 12/5 crowd chant “Lynch Holder” in unison? Where’s the video?

Did Ta-Nehisis “Tee-hee-hee” Coates ever object when it was suggested President GW Bush be strung up or as his likenesses were hung in effigy hundreds of times during his Presidency? Is it always okay to suggest hanging a white Republican? Wasn’t that what they were suggesting, Tee-hee-hee? Or was it is effigy? You being a person of color, obviously makes you the world’s foremost expert on peering into a person’s heart and mind-reading so you know. Discern for us their intent, please, Tee-hee-hee.

I am currently hanging in effigy a printed off picture of you, Tee-hee-hee, over my computer with the words ‘Lynch Coates’ written on the photo. Discern that.

I did some googling around and found that Tim Sumner, evidently, lost a relative on 9/11. My condolences.

I’m not quite sure what my reaction would be, or who I’d become, if I lost a loved one like that. One thing I hope would not happen–whatever my politics, whatever my feelings about torture, whatever my feelings about terrorism–is that I’d be compelled to threaten other people with lynching.

When I read Jane Mayer’s description of that rally, I was somewhat in disbelief. Had she been another reporter, writing for another magazine, I might have even doubted her account. Turns out she was more right than I knew.

I don’t know what manner of blindness makes people pillory the race card, and then turn around and threaten a lynching. I don’t know what makes them seethe with this kind of hate. I don’t know what America they want to keep safe, or strong. It isn’t mine. Likely, that’s the point.

Wow, huh? One of his commenters had this to say, and it really distilled for me what these people are after…

Well, there’s a quite a bit to unpack here. Race and personal vitriol appear to be the primary issues but I leave those to others.
What strikes me as most ironic is knee-jerk reaction towards visceral lawlessness. Holder is perceived as a hindrance to revenge, not justice, revenge. So what should Holder’s fate be? Lawless vengeance (with undeniable racial overtones).
TNC conveys dismay and he should be subjected to lawless vengeance as well.
Lawless vengeance (in conjunction with even more freighting motivations) seems to be seen as an appropriate justification for so many these days.

They don’t want justice (which is why they don’t want to use the justice system). They want vengeance.

Here’s my daily tribute to Alec Baldwin

At some point in every day I thank the gods for Jack Donaghey.

Sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I’m shot, sometimes I don’t know how much more I got… Maybe I’m heading over the hill, maybe I set myself up for the kill…

How true is that, Alec? From one sweaty old alcoholic New Yorker to another:

These guys… Part 1

This is by necessity going to be a two-parter because no one needs to hear me ramble this long.

This guy is Andrew Sullivan. He blogs at The Atlantic, among other things. I love him the way I love a crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner – he’s always worked up about something, not always right, and not always easy to get along with. He’s a contradiction in terms: a gay HIV-positive British conservative intellectual who supported Bush and then went all in gung-ho for Obama. Despite his many contradictions, he is unfailingly honest in his writing and in his beliefs. He’s not spinning anything to us, he is not policing anything, and he certainly isn’t pushing us to believe anything. He is not a “flip-flopper”, that inane term that pundits and politicians lob back and forth at each other, just because he supported the war in Afghanistan in 2002 and now, in 2010, does not.

Maybe you’ve noticed on this blog that I’m far too cynical. That’s probably true. The trouble is, we get lied to a lot on a day to day basis – whether it’s by the media, the government, the corporations, etc. So it is only on rare occasions that a voice comes out of the din, a strong voice that says I will not lie to you.

These are the voices that I want to hear.

Andrew Sullivan is one of these voices, one of the strongest in fact. Not long ago he was accused by the editor of The New Republic, a publication he used to edit, of being an anti-semite. The accusation was part of a rather nasty article that consisted of a series of personal attacks against Sullivan. Sullivan responded to it with grace, intelligence, and just plain great writing:

To ask that Israel freeze all its settlement construction as a way to help facilitate peace is not declaring war on Netanyahu’s government. It is simply assuming the US is capable of determining its own foreign policy in the region without a foreign government’s advance permission. And notice that Wieseltier, in a convoluted fashion, does not exactly disagree on Netanyahu’s intransigence. But all of this is always Obama’s failure because it can never be Israel’s fault because to say that anything is Israel’s fault is anti-Semitic. Lovely piece of circular logic there, innit? Unless and until the president of the US recognizes that policy toward the Middle East must always be subject to Israel’s interests and sensitivities before anything else, it is the American president’s failure. Israel can never be blamed. I’m sorry but I disagree. I think Israel can be blamed and its intransigence should be exposed and criticized forthrightly – or, of course, defended – in Washington without this looming threat of the anti-Semite card being hauled out.

And this, it seems to me, must be the occasion for this rather sad attempt at character assassination. All those who dissent one iota from whatever excruciatingly arcane position Wieseltier carves out for himself at any given moment must be set up for character assassination. The first card to be used is the anti-Semitic card. It is, apparently, the responsibility of every non-Jewish or even Jewish writer who is not Leon Wieseltier to tread an extremely careful linguistic path, to walk delicately through a minefield of traps, to remain permanently fearful of being tarred as a bigot if he or she dares question the line that alone Wieseltier polices.

Look, I am not one to dismiss any notion of anti-Semitism in me or anyone else. I believe it is such a toxic theme in human history and such a grave strain in the human soul that no one should be sublimely confident that he or she is free of it entirely. I take the moral demand to guard against it very seriously. And I have indeed searched my conscience these past few years to take stock if anything like this is unconsciously entering my soul, as I try to guard against my many other sins. I certainly think I have written and thought some things about Muslims and Arabs over the years that are not always carefully parsed, conditioned or measured. I’m not immune to homophobia either. Our psyches are complex. As I said, Irish blood and a Catholic conscience are not easy bedfellows. And I can parry a little hard in the cut and thrust of debate sometimes.

At his most generous, Wieseltier accuses me of moronic insensitivity. Well, I do not think Leon thinks I am a moron. Am I insensitive? At times, I’m sure I am. I’m a writer who doesn’t much care for political correctness, of policing discourse for every single possible trope or code that someone somewhere will pounce on as evidence of bigotry. I’ve gone out of my way as an editor and writer to stir things up – on race and gender and culture and sex – and I have never been one to worry excessively about the sensitivity of others. I think I have offended and enraged far far more gay men and evangelicals than I ever have Jewish-Americans, for example. I’m a South Park devotee, for Pete’s sake.

I appreciate this post to no end, because it’s a higher level of discourse than we’re currently seeing anywhere else. Now, you guys all know about my love for Ta-nehisi Coates, another writer I came to through The Atlantic. He elevates the discourse with his excellent commentary and high-level feature length journalism. He is a master at looking at images, language and memes and pulling out what other people do not want to see, hear or acknowledge. He is also nothing but honest with us at all times. An example from right before the election in 2008:

There is some language that I’ve intentionally avoided when talking about Sarah Palin. You won’t ever hear me say “I feel sorry for her.” You won’t hear me say “I have sympathy for her.” and you won’t won’t hear me say “I feel bad for her.” I don’t feel sorry for her and I don’t feel bad for her. I do have sympathy for her–the same sympathy that’s required whenever you try to write honestly and engagingly about people you don’t know.

I want to be clear–please don’t ever confuse my quest to understand those whose core beliefs are different from mine with a wavering of my own. Do not think that because I am attempting to look at the world from someone else’s perspective that I believe that that invalidates my own perspective. Writing is fighting, as the great Ishmael Reed once said. Any serious combatant in this piece better be doing his homework, and trying to get a thorough understanding of his opponents. On one level, he may have to concede that his opponents are right–but even in that there are tactics; the combatant coops his opponents moves and makes them his own. But on the straight-up pugilist level, there is simply the point of knowing your opponent. When you ridicule them and are dismissive of them, when you condescend to them and offer them your pity, you underestimate them.

I, on some level, relate to Sarah Palin. On another level, I relate to McCain. But I’m not interested in the false choice of either you hate them, or your coddling them. There are plenty of places on the web where we can go to unleash our rage and vent at the opposition.

Ta-nehisi Coates does not play into anyone’s hands. He rises above the fray and maintains his integrity as a writer, which isn’t easy to do in the big leagues. Everybody wants you to be Wolf Blitzer or Maureen Dowd or Sean Hannity and it seems to be harder than ever to resist.

TBC… Coming up David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer… and trust me, I know that it’s deeply unpopular to like Norman Mailer, but I do.

Maritimes throwdown…

Throwin’ middle fingers up in the legislature, asking to take this outside… I LOVE IT.

Joan Walsh on self-hating liberals…

At Salon:

Klein hailed “the brilliance of Sarah Palin,” and suggested that “real Americans” can relate to “a woman who goes to war against the 19-year-old boy who knocked up her daughter and then posed for Playgirl,” and who calls national policy “current events … the high school term of art for the hour each week when students are forced to study the state of the world.” Klein compared Palin to the folksy hound dog Bill Clinton and suggested they had the same kind of populist appeal. (I know it’s just a coincidence Clinton wound up hospitalized for chest pains later that day.) The worst line of the piece? “One might even argue that you betcha is American for ‘Yes, we can.'”Et tu, Joe? You’re going to suggest Barack Obama doesn’t speak American? Really?

I had a lovely conversation with Klein a few weeks ago, about Clinton and Obama and American liberalism. He’s not stupid, he just writes stupid things sometimes. I have to say, though, I’m tired of self-hating liberal elites lecturing other liberals about how out of touch we are with real America. Lots of real American voters may well like Sarah Palin, admire her moxie or her mothering, and still know she’d be a terrible president.

In fact it’s the Beltway anointed who underestimate the American people. Does Joe Klein honestly think “real Americans” admire the way Palin’s gone after 19-year-old Levi Johnston? I don’t see that, unless you think real Americans are petty and stupid and believe it’s a good idea to pick public fights with the teenage father of their grandchild.  Then there’s Pat Buchanan: We were set to debate Palin’s appeal on “Hardball” Thursday (until we got bumped by the Clinton news). Pat loves her. Apparently it doesn’t bother him that, in her charming interview with Chris Wallace, she confused the anti-interventionist Buchanan with the neocon world conquerer Daniel Pipes. Palin cited a Buchanan column as suggesting Obama could get out of his current political fix if he decided to “declare war on Iran or decided to do whatever he can to support Israel, which I would like him to do.” In fact, that was Pipes’ point of view, which Buchanan was criticizing in the column.

But I guess our next president doesn’t need to know the difference between neocons and anti-interventionists. Buchanan told Talking Points Memo that critics were misunderstanding Palin’s misunderstanding him, but his answer made no sense. On “Hardball” I wanted to ask Buchanan, one of the nation’s foremost Israel critics, what he thought of Palin’s blind support for Israel, or her wearing the Israeli flag on her lapel Saturday night. Maybe issues like that don’t really matter. Boy, conservatives must  be desperate.

Is it Friday yet???

Anyone out there other than me get voice crushes on people? Like, I could take or leave Corb Lund or Glen Hansard looks-wise, but I want to eff their voices.

True story.

Although, I wouldn’t throw Corb’s guitar player out of bed for eating crackers. Or playing guitar.

I’m a bit of an old fogey

George Packer blogs at the New Yorker about books. He wonders why journalists aren’t reading books or newspapers anymore, and takes a lot of heat for it:

Instead, the response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions. If a Luddite is someone who fears and hates all technological change, a Biltonite is someone who celebrates all technological change: because we can, we must. I’d like to think that in 1860 I would have been an early train passenger, but I’d also like to think that in 1960 I’d have urged my wife to go off Thalidomide.

I agree with the “intolerant cult” side of things…  “Because we can, we must” has gotten us into a lot of trouble before.

This is me…

… totally pooping my pants over this website… devoted entirely to bookshelves.

Hmmm…

So between this, Leah McLaren’s Saturday Globe and Mail column about how current twentysomethings are the hardest hit by the recession, (yeah, I won’t be getting a real job until I’m 40, even if I want one), and this, Dani Shapiro’s column in the LA Times about how much harder it is for young writers now than it was 20 years ago when she came out of school (yeah, I know, part of it is because I have a bad attitude), and THIS I pretty much have enough reaons to cry myself to sleep every night of the week.

If I was KATE FUCKING GOSSELIN (or Sarah Fucking Palin for that matter), I could get my book published tomorrow with a million dollar advance. Someone talk me down from taking fertility drugs and getting TLC on the phone right this effing second.

More invaluable life lessons gleaned from an inane pop song…

Beauty is where you find it; not just where you bump and grind it.

Madonna looked good back in the day. I forgot how hot she used to be.

What Obama should be saying to the GOP:

In the immortal words of En Vogue:

I can’t change your mind; you can’t change my colour.

Sometimes we forget…

where it all comes from. Tell me if you can find a riff in this number that DIDN’T show up again in the 90s? Not everyone would think 90s right away, but that’s all I kept hearing – Soundgarden, early-Smashing Pumpkins, even some of those Pearl Jam riffs, and a little bit of Rage Against the Machine.