Jabba's out
Far too late, the Clinton campaign have reportedly iced their chief strategist, Mark Penn, a man Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi described as the Democratic version of Karl Rove, only fatter and more disgusting. Penn's list of liabilities was and is extensive, most of them stemming from his position atop the anti-worker consulting group Burson Marsteller, but from the Clintons' standpoint, he didn't cross the line until he met with Columbia's ambassador to the U.S. last week about a proposed bilateral free trade agreement between the two countries, a pact Hillary says she opposes. The lobbyist's involvement in the issue-- and the campaign-- underscores Clinton's lies on the campaign stump about her support for NAFTA. Don't shed any tears for Penn. He and his firm have billed the campaign for more than $13 billion.---
Here's a handy guide to political phrases and buzzwords to help you translate when politicians are serving up bullshit and the mainstream news media is busy gobbling it down:
superdelegate means party boss
recession means depression
death tax means estate tax
military surge means military escalation
earmarks means pork projects
war on terror means war on the U.S. Constitution
fighting for democracy means empire-building
Democrat means Republican
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Seventy-five years ago today, a catastrophic national law called Prohibition came to an end. Now if we could only we could put an end to the equally disastrous and socially-expensive bans on narcotics, gambling, and prostitution.
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If the Cardinals continue to get the performances they've been getting from their contingency pitching rotation, this division race will be over before it even gets started.
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In the new issue of Esquire, Chuck Klosterman points out that the incorporation of flash-forwards (to go along with the traditional flashbacks) in the narrative of the ABC series "Lost" is a dangerous move on behalf of the show's producers. The central cast members, he argues, now have the strongest negotiation leverage in TV history.
Let's say the actor who plays Sayid (Naveen Andrews) suddenly decides to ignore his current contract. Let's say he demands twice as much money as he's scheduled to receive and won't show up for work without it. What could ABC possibly do? They can't just feed him to the smoke monster and write him out of the show; we already know he definitely exists in an abstract tomorrow. By actively showing the future, the screenwriters have relinquished their ability to control the present. An even greater (and admittedly morbid) problem would be accidental death: What if Michael Emerson (the actor who portrays Ben) died in a car accident? Would the show simply have to end? How could his absence be reconciled?
There is no "Newsradio" option for "Lost." Not anymore.
All true, but I enjoy the flash-forwards. I've been looking for clues about whether or not gas prices will go down.
posted by CM @ 2:58 PM
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