Thursday, March 13, 2008

Odds and Sods - "Say WHAT?" edition

Rachel (at Rachel's Tavern) asks the pertinent question:
So far [Obama] is the candidate who is leading in the most number of pledged delegates and states, but we’ve gone from him waiting his turn to taking second place? What is it with Hillary Clinton Feminists who rationalize their vote by employing racist narrative?
Rachel refers to Huffington Post columnist Roseanne Barr, who wrote the following directive to Senator Obama (titled, if you can believe it, "Bow to the Woman"--with no sense of how, um, unpleasant that might sound):
Premiere Hillary represents the soul of the Democratic Party: the women who support her, Latinas, Latinos, 30 percent of the black voters, the blue collar worker, male and female, as just proven in Ohio, and the Baby Boomers...quit bitching and moaning and whining now! Be a man and take vice, bow to the woman who is the last vestige of the New Deal which represents universal health care. You can't win without the votes of the people who support Clinton. You do not have the working class vote; you do not have the majority on your side even with independents. The states you win are not swing states or even Democratic states. You are a spoiler and your campaign is alienating the Clinton vote. Many of Clinton's backers are turned off due to the shrillness of the attacks your campaign has let loose on your opponent.
This is directed to the person who is ahead, mind you. You know, the person who is WINNING?!?

Why is HE expected to back out, while he's winning? Why doesn't SHE back out, since she is the one behind?

And why does anyone take such a dopey statement seriously enough to enlist a TV star to write it on a top-ten blog?

The sheer sense of entitlement of the Clinton gang, never ceases to amaze me.

~*~

Left: Bob Marley, photo from Swingin the Blues.

Iriegal writes that Rita Marley will produce Bob Marley's life story -- can't wait for this one:
Rita Marley is executive producing the first-ever biopic of her late husband Bob Marley, and if she has it her way, the reggae icon's daughter-in-law R&B singer Lauryn Hill will play her on screen.

"No Woman No Cry: My Life With Bob Marley," a chronicle of the musician's childhood and their tumultuous 15-year marriage through his death from cancer in 1981.
~*~

If you've been keeping up with the whole sordid Eliot Spitzer scandal, please check out Amanda's excellent posts at Bound, Not Gagged, for some much-needed balance and perspective on the prostitution angle:
A pen-pal wrote me: “They keep saying things along the lines of “He wasn’t a guy who had issues with women”, as if any man who spends time with a call-girl (which seems to be the preferred word on NPR) must.” I hope NPR got a hold of some sex workers who could tell them that just because a man sees a female sex worker does not mean he has “women issues.” In fact, it takes a measure of self-honesty to respect a woman enough to pay her for her time/services, instead of assuming it’s her God-ordained female role to do it all for free.

I heartily dislike the use of the phrase “prostitution ring.” It was an agency and a very well-managed one at that. No “ring” about it. It was a business, people. Kind of like saying Congress is a “governmental ring” or police stations are “authoritarian rings.”
She also has a great round-up of Spitzer-oriented links, for those interested in expanding their consciousness around this particular witch-hunt.

~*~

Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time comments on something scary called "Coplink" (even the name is a trifle unnerving, no?):
[The commercial data-mining system] Coplink, now used by over 1500 jurisdictions, [puts] connections among the mass of data inputted by police and gathered from other records by Knowledge Computing, Coplink's makers and marketers, into the hands of cops everywhere - and, of necessity, into the hands of Knowledge Computing.
Apparently, after running your name through the invaluable Coplink, any inquiring party will know everything about you, forever and ever, amen.
[We] are forgetting all the lessons painfully learned about what happens when you turn cops, prone to think every non-cop person is a suspect and every non-cop thing is a threat, loose with virtually unsupervised abilities to collect and collate personal data. And we are apparently not only supposed to embrace this amnesia, we are supposed to do it with a "Wow! Way cool stuff!" grin.

Yes, I find that very "unsettling."
I'm with you, dude.

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Listening to: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Two Trains Running
via FoxyTunes