Michael Phelps has won yet another gold medal. He broke another world record. He and his team, by a virtual millisecond, pounced on the nasty French who had vowed to “smash” the Americans, and made away with the gold. Triumph. All American gold medalists on the dais with the national anthem blaring.

Cut to a half world away where a different kind of smashing was taking place. In Georgia –not the US state, for the geographically-impaired— a former Soviet republic a fierce air, ground and sea war was being waged at the hands of a fierce and angry bear, the Russians. Hey, wait, isn’t the purpose behind the Olympics to avoid armed conflict between nations? Let’s take our battles on to the soccer or track field, and all that. Well, that longstanding belief didn’t seem to faze Moscow. Nor Georgia, for that matter, because while all the hoopla in Beijing was getting underway last weekend, it was being pummeled mercilessly in what may be considered the opening salvo in the Second Cold War.

According to the latest developments, the 5-day conflict appears to have ended, with the typical uncertainty that surrounds these kinds of skirmishes. A diplomatic team composed of French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and EU officials have been in Georgia since last weekend and then in Moscow to try to bring about a diplomatic solution as soon as possible. Overnight, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made an emergency visit to Moscow to personally persuade Russian leaders to have a ceasefire and end what has been an attack that has killed probably 2000 people already –although even that figure is almost impossible to confirm. This morning, Moscow announced a Read the rest of this entry »

John Edwards’ announcement of a sexual affair with a campaign staffer on Friday is a whopper on a few levels. The former Senator from North Carolina, running mate of John Kerry in 2004, and more recently, populist Democratic candidate for President, deemed Friday to be a good day to bury this story amid all the Beijing Olympics hoopla. The hope, perhaps: get the story out quickly, make a brief “official” statement and hope few will notice. Yet this story is all the more significant for what it says about the betrayal of Edwards’ family and supporters while at the same time raising questions about how the mainstream media dropped the ball entirely.

The story is sordid, but not unfamiliar. A dapper, handsome politician finds carnal comfort with a younger woman and Read the rest of this entry »

I was going to write an open letter to Kathy Hilton, she being Paris’s mother, responding to her brief commentary she put up on Huffingtonpost.com over the weekend. She was somehow bothered that John McCain, in an idiotic ad last Friday, suggested that Barack Obama was being treated as a celebrity in the same way as her daughter Paris. (And Britney Spears.)

I was going to call her a hypocrite and that no Hilton would ever turn down any publicity, no matter how unsavory, and that she was just asking for more attention. I was going to challenge her to do the unthinkable: simply say or do nothing and thus not dignify what was, even among many Republican circles and pundits, a superficial ad. Reaching farther still, I was going to blame her for raising the one person who has perhaps singlehandedly glorified the meaning of celebrity and all of its vapidity. I was going to say that Paris, the talentless heiress who became superstar famous for a sex tape and for Read the rest of this entry »

The release last week of a scathing report from the Department of Justice claiming that there was widespread corruption in its hiring practices should not surprise anyone. The report, from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility portrayed an agency fraught with improper behavior inside former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office, and the actions of two bad seeds in particular, former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson and White House Liaison Monica Goodling. All testified last year in Congressional hearings and did so in what was a spectacle of ineptitude, but also of evasiveness and pointing fingers. All three resigned and are thus not subject to any internal rebuke.

While Gonzales is still looking for a real job, he still is able to command five figures for speeches to right-wing groups to deliver, what, speeches about what it was like to help politicize the DOJ and completely taint what had been one of the most independent agencies in the federal government. Gonzales, who went from White House Counsel to the President in the first Bush term to Attorney General, certainly has much to answer to still. His opaque answers and general incompetence belie his Harvard pedigree. But besides being Bush’s favorite Mexican, he was also Read the rest of this entry »

CNBC’s “Mad Money” host and financial gadfly Jim Cramer went on Joe Scarborough’s
”Morning Joe” on sister cable network MSNBC yesterday morning and for once, he didn’t yell and scream, in his usual deranged, unhinged and gimmicky way.

In fact, he was pretty subdued. Maybe he was catatonic or in a medicated stupor – of the type that Paula Abdul goes on sometimes on American Idol when she thinks she’s seen two performances instead of one (this happened earlier this year). Cramer was part of a panel that was discussing the stock market and whatnot; he is a regular guest, except that he really wasn’t well. Discussing economic policies of yesteryear, primarily during the late 1970s, he seemed to Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little fun with Adam West, and timely indeed given the recent media stir created by The Dark Knight.

Can you guess which of the following quotes — provided by Philadelphia sketch group, Secret Pants — belong to our president, George W. Bush, and which belong to Batman from his 1960s TV series?

It’s harder than you might imagine…

[Via ComedyCentral]

Eager to post missteps or flub-ups designed to embarrass the Obama campaign each day on his gossipy website, Matt Drudge of the Drudgereport managed to find a doozy yesterday. Apparently, rapper Ludacris, aka Chris Bridges, has released a new song called “Politics: Obama is Here”. It’s, not something the Obama people will be happy about, and this despite the fact that their man revealed once in an interview that Ludacris, one of his favorite rappers, was also on heavy rotation on his iPod. Take a quick listen to this uplifting, inspiring and certain future Grammy Award-winning track and don’t forget to follow along with the deep, socially responsible lyrics:

I’m back on it like I just signed my record deal

Yeah the best is here, the Bentley Coup paint is dripping wet, it got sex appeal

Never should have hated

Never should’ve doubted him Read the rest of this entry »

You would think that after a much-ballyhooed, mostly very successful swing through Afghanistan and Iraq, and a trip through some European capitals last week, Barack Obama would be rising even higher in the polls.

His speech in Berlin, in front of an estimated 200,000 people, was on the front page of every newspaper and on every newscast. The German press, for the most part, applauded the speech and saw in Obama a fresh new departure from what have been troubling years with the current Bush White House.

From the looks of it, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy found a new American friend in Paris, wildly shaking his hand and agreeing to a rare dual news conference after their meeting in the Elysee Palace. (When McCain visited Sarko recently, McCain was left to find his out and search for the cameras.)

In any case, the tour enjoyed extraordinary coverage and Obama himself seemed very pleased with the results of what had been, let’s face it, a very carefully scripted expedition from start to finish. Every single Kodak moment was deliberate and determined; this was a Read the rest of this entry »

You’re much too good to be true, John McCain. Can’t take my eyes off you. I want to hold you so much. No, really I do. Your campaign staff is so clever. They think that by releasing a video of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons intoning this old 60s chestnut (like the chestnut that you are yourself), with clips of big name reporters like Chris Matthews and Lee Cowan of NBC News saying loving things about Obama is a nifty dig at the media. You’re making the point that the media has fallen all over themselves, that they are “in the tank” for him, according to this somehow current expression.

Let’s use this video, cobbled together by your staff that actually does use the “Internets”, and send it out this very week that your opponent is on his World Tour 2008, visiting both Afghanistan and Iraq, plus conferring with our European allies. You actually want to divert this attention away from Obama. You want to steal a little thunder. He’s over there shaking hands with Malaki, and Malaki is actually saying the same things Obama is saying about a withdrawal of troops within 16 months of January 2009. Then Obama is at an elaborately-staged news conference in Read the rest of this entry »

Time to smash whatever it was –heat? humidity? exhaustion?—that allowed Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) to go on the Senate floor and propose an amendment that would rename a current $50 million appropriations bill to fight HIV/AIDS after her long-time friend, former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who had just passed away on July 4. With a straight face, Dole praised the strong moral convictions of Helms, making some empty remarks about how “you always knew where he stood” and other pleasantries, what he a hero he was and so on.

The problem is that he wasn’t a hero and any attempts by Dole and Fox News, for example, Read the rest of this entry »

The election year wouldn’t be complete without another JibJab short.

Their latest incarnation, Time for Some Campaignin’, involves the usual suspects in their loose-limbed, nonsensical (yet hilarious) fashion:

Read the rest of this entry »

You are David Remnick, editor of New Yorker magazine. You have just released a cover for the July 21 issue with a drawing of a happy Michelle and Barack Obama inside the White House, she with an Angela Davis-type Afro, he in camouflage gear and turban to show he is a Muslim terrorist, and they’re both giving each other their famous fist-greeting while the American flag burns in the fireplace.

That should get some attention, right? You and your staff at your otherwise prestigious magazine probably were sure this drawing would get some headlines somewhere, precious fodder for the water coolers across America. You all decided that you were being bold and out there, and feel that you needed an illustration to go along with an otherwise fine article inside by Ryan Lizza about Obama’s rise in Chicago politics. You placed this drawing for the world to see because ultimately the buck stops with you. Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently the folks at Panera Bread don’t want you to take advantage of their free Wi Fi policy. The St.Louis-based bakery café chain, with over 220 locations around the country, has a pretty sweet set-up. They serve up tasty, freshly-baked breads, pastries, bagels and make decent sandwiches and soups, all reasonably priced in clean, well-lit shops with tables and booths where people can talk —and use their computers at no charge. (I haven’t figured out why their coffee is so weak –or why Starbucks has lousy baked goods, but I will leave that for a later time.)

In any case, you can’t exactly go wherever you want into cyberspace from the comfort of your Panera table. You see, Panera has a filtering system, the Sonic WALL, that categorizes what sites are acceptable and which ones are not. If you happen to take a little nibble of your cherry Danish before you type in, say, www.perezhilton.com, or, in this case, tinyurl.com, you will be greeted with this cheery message:

Apparently you can’t get your daily fill of Ashley (or “Asslee”) Simpson or Avril Lavigne bashing, or worse, some video clip of Amy Winehouse once again slugging a photog whilst in a heroin-induced stupor at the Read the rest of this entry »

Before we all get into more of a tizzy about the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s stupid-ass words he uttered when he thought the mic was off on the O’Reilly Factor (of all the shows where this could happen!) last Sunday, let’s get a grip. First, here’s what he said to his fellow guest: “See Barack [has] been talking down to black people…I wanna cut his nuts out”.

The media salivates, creating a dust-up, makes Jesse appear on virtually every morning talk show to apologize and say that he was stupid and vulgar. Once he is past saying he’s sorry he is then asked if this is how he really feels, and whether his support for Obama is still genuine. He rails at everyone that we have far greater Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Leibovich’s cover piece in today’s New York Times proves one thing we all knew about John McCain even before he became the presumptive Republican nominee for President: he sucks at public speaking. So worried are his handlers –who are, by the way, new handlers as of this past week due to a shake-up–that they’re trying desperately to make him more camera-friendly. (Or just people-friendly!) They won’t officially confirm that, but they have to be troubled by his less-than-sparkling speaking performances of late. Leibovich describes at length an ambitious new economic proposal of McCain’s, the “Lexington” plan.

Maybe there was something of substance there. Except that in a few separate instances, McCain couldn’t actually pronounce the word Read the rest of this entry »

On this, the Fourth of July, both Barack Obama and John McCain give us their own meanings of patriotism, courtesy of Time magazine. For Obama, patriotism is celebrating this nation’s strong and varied convictions and beliefs” and that the “love and defense of these ideals” makes us a stronger country.

McCain believes patriotism is “a love and a duty, a love of country expressed in good citizenship.” We Americans, he says, are “heirs and caretakers of freedom” and it is our duty to always defend these liberties. You would hope that each candidate actually wrote these statements by hand, but you know for sure they have been penned by staff speechwriters, after the points have been cleared by some focus groups. But no matter. Yahoo! News made it a point to list each response as a separate news listing yesterday, amid all the Fourth of July BBQ tips and party ideas. Obama says this; McCain says this; you say “Tom-ah-to”, I say “Tom-a-to”. Meaning: who cares anyways?

Well, we should care because there are some core values that I’d think we as Americans could rally around on this day. It’s not about a simple flag pin that you put on to show your loyalty to this country, as this Administration has hammered us over the head with. It’s about recognizing that we all do have some responsibilities to make this country better and stronger. And it’s about coming together as a people, divided and diverse as we are. Here are my meanings of patriotism:

• Being an informed citizen, knowing what is happening locally, nationally and globally and always being vigilant of what is being told to you in the media.
• Never discriminating against anyone, no matter what race, creed, color, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
• Recognizing the privilege of voting
• Raising children responsibly and to be well-informed and inquisitive citizens that Read the rest of this entry »