Too true

More and more priests are being done for messing with kids-girls and boys! Oh yeah! No one cares! Oh yeah! And the crazy Christian Evangelists are earsing US presidents out of the curriculum in Texas!!

All RIGHT MUTHA F*CKER!

You RULE nice guys!!

xoxo

Be there or be…square.

“Was it a personal missive from the new RNC chairman, walking back his disastrous interview with GQ published the night before? In the interview, Steele sounded pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. That came after he declared his love for the “Pack Rats from the 1950s.” (A bungled shout out to the crooners may not have been Steele’s savviest cultural move, as he previously stated he wanted to bring Republican principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”) Then again, maybe Steele was asking forgiveness of Republicans in Congress, whom he had compared to “mice scurrying around because they no longer have access to the cheese.” Or maybe the RNC head was offering an apology to Rush Limbaugh for saying the talk-radio gasbag doesn’t run the Republican Party. Oh, wait, he had already issued one of those.”

March 13, 2009 | WASHINGTON — Around the middle of Thursday afternoon, people on the Republican National Committee’s e-mail lists started getting copies of a message from Michael Steele. “It’s time to set the record straight,” the subject line read.

Dear god. NO.

but how cynical of them!!

In July 1989 I graduated from university, and then, shortly afterwards, during that unusually warm and settled summer, set off to travel across Europe by train. The plan was to head east; something was stirring behind the Iron Curtain and I wanted to find out more about what was going on. On one journey I got as far as the Czechoslovakian border, only to be hauled off a train for not having a visa or any other official right of entry. I was kept in detention for a couple of hours in an austere and desolate room – as austere and desolate as the nation states the communists had created – before being bundled back on a train and returned to Vienna.

That year – the year of the crowd, as we call it in this special issue – there was a profound sense, for the first time in my lifetime, that the Cold War was coming to an end; that communist totalitarianism was collapsing. Also obvious was the imminent demise of entire political eras, with Europe’s ageing dictators being toppled from within: Honecker, Zhivkov, Ceausescu and, eventually, Jaruzelski.

Worldwide, it was the year of the restless crowd. There were the rebellious crowds massing in the great cities of central and eastern Europe, their collective and heroic agitation for change precipitating the breach in November of the Berlin Wall. There were the crowds of courageous students, workers’ groups and democracy campaigners in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, their aspirations so murderously suppressed by state dictatorship. (Here, the Chinese Communist Party responded with extreme violence; on 4 June tanks smashed into the square and many thousands of people died.) There were the crowds of frenzied mourners at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral in Tehran. There were the smaller crowds of marchers and book burners in Bradford, Yorkshire, inflamed by Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, their outrage a portent of a new kind of conflict between political Islam and liberal western imperialism (or

Jihad v McWorld, as it would later be caricatured). There was, too, the crowd at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, where, on a warm spring day in April, 96 people were crushed to death on the terraces as they gathered for an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Towards the end of 1989 the American policy thinker and teleological historian Francis Fukuyama published his celebrated essay in which he declared that we in the west had reached the end of history, and were entering a period of rest as we worked together towards the universal goal of progress and world peace. For Fukuyama, history (by which he meant history as a battle between rival, world-transforming ideologies, not the innumerable small details and events of the everyday) had ended because the universal movement towards the realisation of human potential had found its ultimate expression in liberal democracy and

free-market capitalism as the only legitimate models for government. The essay was an exercise in wishful utopianism, but it was also characteristic of the more general mood of western triumphalism.

And yet nothing was certain; this feeling of being in suspension, of not knowing what would happen next, of living at the end of one world-historic era while waiting for another to begin – this sense, more personally, of having graduated and now to be on the cusp of adulthood at just this moment of quickening change: the feeling was heady. It felt as if the world was indeed in motion, not quite spinning out of control but in new and strange ways; a world turning, breaking apart and re-forming, a world in flux. “

Jason Cowley’s memoir about the end of the Eighties, “The Last Game: Love, Death and Football”, is published next month by Simon & Schuster (£14.99)
Link

Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship. Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama’s first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)

Oh yeah Camille??

“First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration’s weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don’t they read the “Iliad” anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.

President Obama — in whom I still have great hope and confidence — has been ill-served by his advisors and staff. Yes, they have all been blindsided and overwhelmed by the crushing demands of the presidency. But I continue to believe in citizen presidents, who must learn by doing, even in a perilous age of terrorism. Though every novice administration makes blunders and bloopers, its modus operandi should not be a conspiratorial reflex cynicism.

Case in point: The orchestrated attack on radio host Rush Limbaugh, which has made the White House look like an oafish bunch of drunken frat boys. I returned from carnival in Brazil (more on that shortly) to find the Limbaugh affair in full flower. Has the administration gone mad? This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name. Limbaugh had every right to counterattack, which he did with gusto. Why have so many Democrats abandoned the hallowed principle of free speech? Limbaugh, like our own liberal culture hero Lenny Bruce, is a professional commentator who can be as rude and crude as he wants.”

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