And then there’s the journalist from the LA Times who mentions a theater filled with “directors, producers, and actors”. I guess since his paper likes to shill for the moguls in the writers’ strike, he didn’t think he should mention the writers.
Archive for January, 2008
So in tonight’s CNN debate, someone finally posed the dynasty question to Hillary (thank you to the 38-year-old woman from South Carolina who did so). While, from a purely political standpoint, the end of her response (it took a Clinton to clean up after the first Bush, etc.) was brilliant, I still await an answer to the substantive question of whether or not it’s healthy for the republic to be ruled by two competing aristocratic dynasties for an uninterrupted generation or more.
I believe now that I’ve solved the mystery of the item purchased by an unknown person off my Amazon wishlist but which I never received. For some asinine reason, Amazon allows a purchaser to use a shipping address other than the one you specify for your wishlist. In other words, someone can click “add to cart” on your wishlist and then simply purchase the item for themselves instead by using their own shipping address. But when they enter in their own address, Amazon stupidly nonetheless marks the item on your wishlist as having been “purchased” for you, and so it comes off your wishlist. In other words, someone, instead of purchasing this item for themselves in the normal way, did so off of my wishlist, causing my wishlist to be incorrectly altered. At least now I can stop wondering why in the world this item never arrived. Note to anyone viewing my wishlist: Don’t do this again.
It’s asinine, of course, that in response to the controversy over the company’s Vaginal Bullseye advertisement, Target refused to answer bloggers’ questions about it because the company “does not participate with nontraditional media outlets”. But it’s more asinine that the company defends the ad as simply depicting “a fully-clothed woman making a snow angel”. In advertising, as in politics, these sorts of things do not occur by accident. Even if they did, they would not go entirely unnoticed during the process of creating an ad. While the company’s public relations flacks might not have had anything to do with it, it’s ludicrous for anyone to believe that the company’s advertising people didn’t know precisely what the ad depicted.
“This latest move by Kennedy,” says the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, “is so telling about the status of and respect for … our ability — indeed, our obligation — to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a president that is the first woman after centuries of men who ‘know what’s best for us.’” Let’s all remind them this is their position in the event we ever have a liberal male Democratic candidate versus a conservative female Republican candidate, and see how they try to weasel out of this sort of gender absolutism.
I have no idea who might have recently purchased a DVD set for me off my Amazon wishlist. So this is the only potential way for me to let them know that if they chose any sort of speedy shipping option, they might want to check into tracking the package, since it hasn’t arrived. If it was sent via some normal and slower shipping method, then disregard this message.
Did anyone else just notice that the GOPresident just tricked the Democrats into applauding the premise that the President of the United States has the authority to order his agencies to ignore Congressional law? Earmarks, to be sure, are something of an onerous poison. But to applaud the GOPresident for declaring that he’d sign an executive order barring his agencies from following anything that came from an earmark, in the end, is to applaud exactly the same dangerous and wrongful expansion of executive power they’re supposed to be against.
Here’s what I’m stuck on: If the so-called elder statesman of the Democratic Party simply was trying to make a point about how winning South Carolina doesn’t necessarily mean anything, why not just mention that John Edwards once won South Carolina but didn’t go on to win the nomination, let alone the presidency? Why instead go out of his way specifically to mention a prior black presidential candidate? If that isn’t meant to be saying that the black candidate won’t — or can’t — win, then just what is it meant to be saying?