Check The Diagonal

Me all 2.0 and ish

After about 6 months of mostly talking to myself on here and enjoying it, I’m going to stick around.  Some of the good folks at Typepad are doing some redecorating for me so I feel more at home.  In the meanwhile I’m testing some of my new connections to Facebook and Twitter.  Interesting live flow going on tonight for the President’s SOTU at Postbourgie.

I’ll be back.

Fucking Progressives

The entire country was able to see the Brown win coming a mile away.  Coakley was without game, period.  The people of Massachusetts, the American public and even the winning Republican Senator Elect Brown all confirm what we also already knew; this was NOT a referendum on President Obama or his agenda. 

The big story of the week isn’t Brown and his big win, it is the collective collapse of the Democratic spine spurred on by Progressives who seem capable of only thinking in terms of Utopia and cannot tell the difference between what is best and what can be accomplished. In the absence of Utopia they simply throw up their hands and quit.  Weak.

Here is Krugman from yesterday making me ill.

But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

And your alternative is what?  Get a backbone and do your job as a leading Progressive voice in America.  Present alternatives.  You are a Nobel Prize winner, get out there and explain to Joe Democrat what the angles are.  There are countless angles.  Prescribe don’t whine and cry.  If you can’t do that, get out of the way and STFU.

Brown is not really important.

My head is full from the pundits and experts and palm readers on the MSM and the blogosphere selling the American people conflict.  Our MSM is the greatest reality TV show.  People need to go back to thinking about Haiti because this story doesn’t really have legs. Brown does not have to be important and here’s why:

· It is easy for a candidate to pull a Sarah Palin by pretending to be something he is not, say he drives a truck and co-op Obama’s message of change to get elected by a wave of populist anger when the person he is campaigning against forgets to campaign and takes a Caribbean vacation with the fam. He basically ran uncontested. But now he has to show up for work and vote and his record says he is to the left of the other New England Republicans.

· The Democrats didn’t have a supermajority when Obama was elected and frankly it has been used as a curtain for Republicans to hide their obstructionism behind or obstructionist behinds or both. Message to Democrats: Call them on their bullshit. The average American doesn’t even know what a filibuster is and has never seen one. Make Republicans filibuster everything live on CNN; climate change, Wall Street reform, healthcare. Create more shit for them to stand up and filibuster. The key is not to run away but to run ahead faster. Force them to reconcile the misleading untruths of their populist messages with the truth of governing.

· For the record Obama’s agenda polls at a 60% approval rating in Massachusetts. This was a referendum on Coakley, and frankly she earned every bit of the ass-kicking she got last night. Chokeley should stick, it fits.

We all know the Republicans are unfit to lead America but now we are going to find out if Democrats have the balls to.

Happy Birthday Dr. King

Help Haiti

My father-in-law felt tremors and was cleaning up broken dishes in his kitchen 300 miles away from Port-au-Prince in La Isabella.   Port-au-Prince is destroyed.

Postbourgie posted this via Ackerman.  It’s only $5, go do it now.

I don't feel terrorized con't

David Rothkopf thinks Obama might be the only person in the United States that got the tenor just right on Captain Underpants, Al-Qaeda and terrorism this holiday season.  Good thing he’s President huh?

“Obama's reaction to the junkbomber incident was precisely right and just what you want from a leader: Dispassionate, thoughtful, and calculated. He gave his team the time to assess the threat, the breaches and the right next steps to take. At least one person in the United States, Barack Obama, seemed to recognize that the objective of terrorism is to promote terror and sought to defuse that effort by handling the threat with the proportionality and common sense that has long been missing from U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”

He goes on to echo what I think was right about Fareed’s commentary on Sunday and how I generally feel about terrorism.  They can’t win unless I’m terrorized and I’m NOT terrorized.

“Fourth, terrorism by definition is only successful if it produces "terror" -- the kind of hysterical over-reaction we are once again seeing -- yet this fact does not seem to have resulted in very many critics toning down their hysteria or shrillness. (The Republican Party has the collective cool on these matters of Prissy helping to birth Melanie's baby in Gone With the Wind.”

It is worth an entire read.  He goes on to talk about what these petty distractions and petulant arm waving really cost our country.  It is significant.  For every moment the GOP and the MSM waste on the semantics of the word War or Terror is one moment that cannot be spent on fixing the real problems that face America.

I don't feel terrorized

I think this is exactly right.  Either the GOP doesn’t get this simple truth regarding terrorism as a tactic or they prefer the America people be terrorized by events, like the one on Christmas Day, because it makes us more malleable to GOP religious and violent extremism.

After 8 long years, this.

"Ultimately, the buck stops with me,"

-President Obama

Colbert brilliance

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Ideal or No Deal
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

War

I’ve seen some real things in my life.   Death, murder, drug addiction, violence, crime.  Growing up when and where I’m from was like watching a never-ending clip of Miami Vice and New Jack City.  We used to affectionately call our hood “Vietnam.” I’m not naïve, pampered or sheltered but looking back now, we had no fucking idea what we were talking about because none of that ghetto nonsense prepared me for the picture I saw out of Iraq, forwarded by Juan Cole on Facebook, from Chris Hedges' TruthDig column, yesterday.  Don’t click on the link to Chris’ article-which is a must read if you can handle it, or the fold below unless you are mentally prepared for a very haunting image.

That same ol schtick

I know Vanity Fair has a long history of this shit but this is just beyond craven in its racial exploitation.  Whether he likes it or not, Tiger is definitely black now.

hip-hop pop?

Found Postbourgie recently and really like it.  One of the writers there, shani-o asks a question that depresses me often if I think too long on it; Where is hip-hop?

I’m not sure jazz and hip hop are perfectly analogous, but I wrote all of this to ask a question: I wonder where hip hop is on its trajectory to becoming America’s second great musical art form?

In their comments I wrote:

I don’t know.  I think there was a time in the late 80s, when we could have made a fair comparison of the evolution and greatness of hip hop to jazz.  Can those same comparisons be honestly considered today based on what seems like very little interesting evolution?   As someone with a very old school NYC bias and a deep dislike of Jay-Z I think both the honesty of the art and the trajectory compared to jazz has been hijacked and corrupted by money and corporate America in a way jazz never was.   There are bright spots in today’s hip-hop of honesty, raw expression, artistic talent and freedom, but they are so few and far between that I am left lamenting Q-tip, Hammer won, rap is just pop.

Thinking about what I wrote after the fact…the answer could also be that I am just an out of touch, middle aged, old school hater who doesn’t like where the genre has gone and so won’t embrace it.  I’m from the place and time hip-hop originated and so I tend to be more opinionated than some when it comes to hip-hop.  I do know that there are a few that are still laying down classics for the ages.  Maybe the answer is that there are very few hip-hop artists buried under all that pop struggling to save the art from commercialism and suburbia.  Boy I tell you, I miss her.

There will be good news

Juan Cole does one of the few positive look backs on 2009 that I’ve read.  In general, I think we are taking this “if it bleeds, it leads” axiom a little too far lately.  There is such a thing as good news, even in the Middle East.

“Top Ten Good News Stories from the Muslim World in 2009 that You Never Heard About” which include:

10. Saudi Arabia opened its first coeducational college campus

4. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world at about 230 mn., had successful parliamentary elections in 2009, further consolidating the country's decade-old democracy.

2. Stability returned to Lebanon.

Click through for #1.  It is, in my opinion, the top story to watch in the Middle East in 2010.

Poem for the New Year.

From a Facebook friend:

We will open the book. Its pages are blank.

We are going to put words on them ourselves.

The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.

 

-Edith Lovejoy Pierce