Carnival of the Liberals #72

Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up. There's no height requirement to get on these rides, but they're going to be long and bouncy. This isn't just any old carnival, it's a blog carnival, and a liberal one at that. And being smack dab in the middle of the Democratic convention in the last months of what many are saying could be the most important and historic election of our lifetime, that means it's going to be a thrill ride of left-leaning political bloggy goodness. The first stop on the carnival express is the crazy house! In here, Holly from Menstrual Poetry will tell you about how a military court has sentenced a guy who is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for resisting war! That's crazy on so many levels. And if you think that's crazy, just wait until you read what Alan at the Whited Sepulchre has to tell you about this congressional candidate from Memphis. He isn't too fond of the gays or medical marijuana, but it's those Jews that really seem to get him the most riled up. There's a wrestling match going on in the sports arena! In one corner we've got Doctor Biobrain, and in the other corner are libertarians who want to privatize everything. We're all grown ups here and we know that the winners and losers are determined beforehand in these wrestling matches, so you should know that the good doctor will be thoroughly laying the smackdown on those silly libertarians. Before your next stop, it is required that all carnival visitors sit through a presentation by our corporate sponsors. Phil from Phil for Humanity wants to prepare you for the inevitable corporate takeover of everything. I don't know about all of you, but I sure need a drink after hearing about our corporate sponsors. Over in the beer tent, there are a lot of drunken rubes discussing the upcoming election. The drunkest and dumbest of them are making excuses for why they're not voting for Obama and claiming that his race has nothing to do with it, and Red Sonja from The Sword of Freedom is in there calling bullshit on them. But that doesn't stop the drunken rubes from bashing immigrants, so Liesl at Clotted Cognition takes them to task for it. After visiting the beer tent, some of our carnival goers have snuck out behind the hay bales at the livestock exhibit to engage in thrill rides of a more private nature. Birds do it, bees do it, and as Andrew from The Evolving Mind reminds us, even educated trees do it, and the church seems to be more OK with the trees than the birds and the bees. And since sometimes accidents do happen, Ames at A Candid World discusses Obama's stance on abortion. Back on the midway, we've got a large ferris wheel. In one basket is Mudge from Left Handed Compliment, talking about what the democrats need to take America into the future. In the next basket up we've got Madeline of Mad Kane's Political Madness with a limerick about John McCain. And because this is a liberal blog carnival, the main attraction is the political tent. Your carnival host is telling stories about his own experiences at the 2000 Democratic Convention. Jeffrey at Disillusioned Words discusses Obama's choice in running mates. And Alberto at Youth Politics discusses America's role as world police. And that's all folks! The carnival is closed and the carnies are tearing down the rides. Please be sure to catch the next carnival on another blog in two weeks. All the details are here.

Finally: Madonna Weighs in on the Election!

I'm sure that there are a great many undecided voters out there who have been waiting for Madonna to tell them how to vote this fall. Well their wait is over! She started her new tour which features a couple of video montages. One of them has Obama with images of John Lennon and Gandhi, while another shows John McCain with Hitler and Mugabe. I don't think that either of these comparisons are particularly fair. While Obama has been building a movement, it's nothing like nonviolently overthrowing the British Empire. And while he gives good speech, I highly doubt that he would be willing to spend weeks in a hotel bed for world peace, let alone being able to write a song like "Happiness is a Warm Gun." As for McCain, he's no dictator. He's a soldier. He doesn't have the creativity to come up with any of his own evil schemes. Don't get me wrong, McCain is on the wrong side of just about every issue, and he's got some serious anger management problems. But dictators are leaders. They're evil leaders, but leaders nonetheless. McCain is a soldier. He follows orders, whether they come from his party elite or his corporate sponsors. So Madonna, please leave the politics to celebrities who can put together their message a little better, like Paris Hilton.

Blue Delaware

Obama has selected his running mate, all but guaranteeing him all 3 electoral votes from our second smallest state! But seriously, I think I like Biden. I don't know a whole lot about him, but I seem to recall liking what he was saying when he was still in the primaries. Or maybe that was Chris Dodd. I'm not sure. I look forward to hearing more about him. The last couple of democratic VP choices managed to disappoint a bit. I liked what Edwards had to say, but when it was time for the Grisham-esque lawyer to take on Vice President Evil in a debate, he didn't deliver the crushing bitchslap that he could have and should have delivered. Before that, we had Lieberman. Yeah, the same Lieberman who is speaking at the republican convention this year. You should have heard the groans throughout the DNC building when Gore announced that his running mate was the republicans' favorite democrat. So right now it's so far so good with Biden. This ticket has a couple of months to say or do something that's going to make me bitter about having to vote for them.

Quick Updates

Dear readers, I've been cheating on you. Yeah, I've been neglecting this blog to write on my Open Salon blog. I know, you've all been very good to me and all of a sudden some flashy new readers show up somewhere else and I start paying attention to them and it's not fair fair to you. But I promise to be a better blogger over here. And I'm going to start making it up to you with a few little nuggets. First off, I'm undergoing a new treatment to help manage the ridiculous levels of stress that I get, and so far it's working quite well for me. You can read about it (gulp) on that other blog. And while you're at it, I've got a post over there about the veepstakes as a horrible reality show. Now enough about that other blog. You deserve original content, and dammit, I'm going to give it to you. I've been getting a deluge of entries for the upcoming Carnival of the Liberals which I will be hosting in a week. Now I know why I have been left out of so many of these. There's a lot of really great posts out there. There are also a lot of great posts that just don't exactly fit. And there was even one conservative blogger who is not known for any kind of critical thinking who submitted a 3 year old post that was politically neutral, which could be considered a triumph for him. There's still some time to submit, so keep them coming. And lastly, I've also fallen completely in love. I was with the family at a new Trader Joe's and I saw a music store next door. I walked in for a minute and that's where I saw her. She was standing tall with a slim body and a beautiful neck. I just had to touch her. I stood behind her, plugged her in, turned her on, ran my fingers up and down her and got the most beautiful sounds. Now I'm obsessed. I must have her! Just look at her and tell me she's not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

It'll Be a Fun Time in Denver!

I've got to admit, despite my extreme cynicism about the democratic party, I've been getting a bit excited the more I hear about their upcoming convention in Denver. I got to attend the 2000 convention in LA. I was working at the DNC as a web and graphics guy, and my main job at the convention was to shoot a couple seconds worth of footage when the balloons dropped at the end, and then quickly edit it into a web fundraising ad. At that point in the campaign I was growing rather disgruntled with the Gore campaign. We had an incredibly intelligent veep of an extremely popular president going against a less than bright guy who had fucked up every opportunity handed to him by his powerful daddy, and he was doing horribly in what should have been at least a minor landslide. While many are quick to blame Nader, I was of the position that the Gore campaign was working tirelessly to drive so much of the liberal base straight to Nader what with his choice in running mate to his embrace of pretty much everything that the grassroots leftist movement that had grown in the 90's was against. Had he just mentioned that trade agreements needed to take labor rights and environmental standards into consideration, it probably could have gone a long way toward him squeezing out a victory. Choosing anyone but Lieberman as his running mate would have gone even further. Making me even less enthusiastic was the fact that the potential first lady was responsible for making my mother hysterical about the music I listened to when I was a teenager. I wrote a letter to Jello Biafra about that when I was 13, but that's a whole other story. Weeks before we arrived at our mobile office in the LA Convention Center to find our work area without any internet access (remember, we were the DNC's WEB team!), I was between the rock of selling out what I believed in and the hard place of realizing that this shitty candidate wasn't as shitty as the really shitty candidate. Two weeks earlier, I was in Philly at the republican convention where we had set up a war room and had daily press conferences blasting the republicans on the particular theme of the day of their convention, and that was a blast. I always enjoyed my job when it was bashing Bush and the republicans (and doing it in the city that invented the cheese steak was like a high cholesterol heaven to me), but feigning excitement for our candidate was a struggle that I did not always win. So what's a disgruntled guy to do at the convention with full credentials, a video camera, and a great deal of free time on my hands? Document, of course! And you can watch that at the end of this post. Four years later, there was nothing all that exciting going on with the convention to make me even want to watch it on TV, but this year is a different story. We've got a historic candidate who has gotten people more excited than any candidate in my memory. And we've got major behind the scenes drama! Will John and Elizabeth Edwards be there together or at all? Will there be a controversial event, like in 2000 when Loretta Sanchez almost lost her DNC vice-chair status because she was going to have a fundraiser at the playboy mansion? What kind of outrage will Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton come up with in order to hustle up some money or power? And if that's not enough, Detroit's totally gangsta mayor will be attending, sans the court ordered ankle bracelet, a news item that an emergency damage control team team has probably been assembled to work hard to keep buried. A real and honest documentary of the nitty gritty inner workings of one of these events would make people's heads spin. What I wouldn't give to have a camera on the Clintons at all times during this one! And with all the talk of trying to make this a "green convention," something is bound to go wrong and hilarity will ensue. And of course, outside the convention will be the usual gang of protesters, up to their usual exercise in extremely fun futility, once again wanting to re-enact Chicago '68 without really thinking remembering how that protest splashed on the news terrified the electorate into electing Nixon. And I wish I could be there to experience every last bit of it! Now, as promised, here's the piece I put together from my convention footage:

Random Tidbits

Sometimes I wait a long time to come up with something interesting to blog about and then let it percolate until I've figured out my take on it and then lovingly craft it into something interesting for my dear readers (wow, how pretentious and full of myself does that sound?). And sometimes I get a backlog of things that I want to mention here that aren't really worthy of a post of their own. So here's a bit of hit and run blogging. There's amazing bird activity on the bay right outside of my office. There are a ton of white cranes, a pair of white pelicans, an assortment of ducks and one huge blue heron. We may have substandard ventilation here, but the view more than makes up for it. I've been on a Battle of the Blogs losing streak lately. I wonder if it's a fallout from my recent blog drama or just the fickle nature of the voters. In a couple of weeks, I will be hosting an edition of Carnival of the Liberals right here on this blog. If you are a liberal/ progressive/ leftist/ whatever you want to call yourself blogger, have a recent political post that you think might pass my incredibly high standards, and would like the 2 or 3 hits you might get from being included in something like that, please do use the handy dandy web submission form. I've found yet another social networking/blogging site. As if my recent addiction to facebook isn't enough of a time waster, now my favorite progressive news source has started another community for their readers. It's called Open Salon. Right now I'm just cross posting my posts from this blog to my blog over there in an attempt to gain some new readership, but at some point I might do some exclusive content over there. I think it could be a good place for progressive bloggers to network with each other. Sure, there are a multitude of places to do that, but since this one is new (only out of limited beta testing yesterday), it's a little less daunting than trying to get yourself noticed amongst the throngs of Daily Kos bloggers. So far my only complaint is the lack of spell checking in the posting boxes and the lack of RSS. Here's my Open Salon blog. And lastly, I'm really bummed about Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes deaths this weekend. I think I first saw Bernie in Friday and thought he was hysterical, and before I even knew about Shaft, I had seen Isaac in I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka. They were both incredibly talented men and the world is slightly less entertaining without them. And still Dick Cheney's robotic heart continues to beat. Life is not fair.

John Edwards Gets His Own Show...

...on the Who Gives a Shit Channel. Seriously people, with everything else going on right now, why do we care about a guy who is not holding or running for any office having an affair? A lawyer having an affair is a national headline? Mainstream media are beating themselves up over leaving tabloid fodder to the tabloids? WTF, people! Sure, the right wing bloggers are frothing over this one and I'm fine with that given that they really don't have much to get excited about these days and this is probably the best thing that's going to happen to them for a few years. But still, this should be sandwiched between reports of the Brangelina twins and Tropic Thunder being protested for using the word "retard," not between the Olympics and the Russia/Georgia conflict. But there's all this speculation of what it could mean for the election and really, what kind of insane world do we live in where it would mean anything for the election? It's not like he was a governor, or president, or senator or mayor or anything that might have any power or influence over anybody. He's an ex-senator who hasn't won an election in a rather long time. Nobody outside of his family and ex-mistress really have a legitimate beef with him for this. People have separate personal and professional lives. This incredibly sleazy act on his part does not take away from anything he did as a lawyer, a senator or a candidate. So can we focus on more important things now please?

Scenesters, Hoodrats and Townies

About 10 years ago I started writing a semi-autobiographical novel about some of the crazy things that went down in my post-college slacker years in the early 90's. Had I written more than just 60 or so pages, I think it could have been one of the great pieces of Gen X literature. There was a wild assortment of characters who played in bands, dealt drugs, lied pathologically, DJed, squatted, wrote zines, collected records, surfed an early net on incredibly slow dial-up, worked crappy service jobs and awkwardly fell into unrequited love. I hadn't given any thought to these stories in years as my life has moved significantly on, until recently. A few weeks ago I read a music review for a band called The Hold Steady. I was intrigued enough to start listening. The review called their latest album "the soundtrack to the great American road trip," great rock riffs with sweet guitar riffage and sweeping keyboards behind some of the most amazing lyrics I've heard in ages. To say that these lyrics tell a story is an understatement. These lyrics plunge the listener into a world of the underbelly of the rock and roll Gen X life. There's a recurring cast of characters spanning all 4 albums, and they go disjointedly through their lives as part of one scene or another, hooking up with each other, going on road trips and trying to find some kind of meaning out of all of it as they get older, all of which is fueled by enough drugs to make Hunter S. Thompson jealous. I went from just casually listening to some great rocking music to all of a sudden realizing that this was the soundtrack to the story of my early 20's. The Springsteen comparisons abound and I can't argue them. Bruce's early stuff was all about young people in New Jersey with no prospects and nothing to do but drive fast cars, and the Hold Steady just jump ahead 20 years with even more detailed stories. And they pay tribute to rock and roll storytellers like Springteen and Billy Joel with lyrical snippets about "tramps like us" and "Catholic girls" who start much too late, as well as name dropping everyone from Led Zeppelin to Youth of Today to the Bones Brigade. Now, I know whenever I post about music or movies I rarely can get so much as a comment, but I would really like it if any readers would take a few minutes, listen to the following two songs, and share their thoughts. This one is One for the Cutters (with no video) And this one is Your Little Hoodrat Friend