Deadman's picture

    Merrill saw the light ... Now maybe we can too

    I just wanted to offer my immediate, quick, bullet-point take on the flurry of GIGANTIC market-related news today, which i

    briefly referenced last night.

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    Michael Wolraich's picture

    (What a) Wonderful Veep...

    with apologies to Sam Cooke

    She don't know much about history
    She don't believe in biology
    She wants to change the science books
    She wants to fire the White House cooks
    But she does know how to speak on cue
    And she knows if she makes fools of you
    What a wonderful veep she would be

    She don't know much about geography
    She don't know much foreign policy
    Don't know much about George Bush's war
    Don't know what a VP is for
    But she knows that one and one is two
    And if McCain just tells her what to do

    Michael Wolraich's picture

    Governor, you're no Hillary Clinton (or Dumb and Dumber)

    Those who know my writing here are aware that I have little love for Hillary Clinton. Had she won the nomination, I would have voted for her but not happily. But whatever her flaws, Clinton is extremely intelligent. She has a better command of public and foreign policy than any other candidate who participated in the primaries. Barack Obama, of course, is brilliant in his own right, as is Joe Biden.

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    Deadman's picture

    McCain may be the lipstick ... and the pig

    A struggling economy. Rising unemployment. A crumbling housing market. Ballooning national debt. Disappearing social security and Medicare funds. Surging energy and food prices. Failing financial institutions. A looming environmental catastrophe. Increasing anti-Americanism. Burgeoning terrorist threats.

    This is the reality.

    No matter your political party or ideology, these are the issues that matter.

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    Deadman's picture

    Please fire Linehan ...

    I understand few of my few regular readers will appreciate this particular post, but this is a matter of grave import: I really need the owners of the St. Louis Rams football team to fire their head coach.

    The guy totally ruined my day, which is an impressive feat given how much I was looking forward to it. Today, after all, was the opening game in the touch football league I help organize, as well as the first Sunday of the NFL season.

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    Deadman's picture

    The ties that bind ...

    I didn't want to let go.

    My brother and I were dropping off mom and dad at the airport, appreciating our last moments together after a wonderful week celebrating our cousin's wedding with a lot of other family members.

    It was while I was hugging my parents, saying my goodbyes, that I felt a sudden, powerful twinge of sadness. And I realized I didn't want to let go.

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    Michael Wolraich's picture

    About Face!

    Sometimes I feel as if we're all participating in some kind of psychology experiment and that any minute now, an old guy in a white coat will peer down from the heavens and tell us that we can remove our armbands and go home. Recent political events seem designed to expose our rational failings and prove that in the end, we're all just rats in a maze.

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    Deadman's picture

    Bullet points ...

    Been away and not able to update the blog, but a lot has gone on in the past week. i won't have the time to do a full posting for a few days, so i thought i'd throw out a bunch of quick hits, in chronological order since I began my trip.

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    Deadman's picture

    The world as it should be ...

    On the same night I wrote about the idealistic Sixties and how the eventual disillusionment that followed has continued to hold its grip on the American psyche,  Michelle Obama gave a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention about not accepting the 'world as it is" but striving to create the 'world as it should be.'

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    Deadman's picture

    'Hair' yesterday, gone today ...

    Saw the play 'Hair' in Central Park this past weekend.

    Damn, it's a shame I missed the Sixties.

    The outfits were funky and colorful and sexy. The music was danceable and uplifting. The drugs were mostly harmless, more about expanding the mind than escaping reality. And the whole free love thing, well, that seemed pretty groovy too.

    Deadman's picture

    The immigrants can stay, Dobbs must go ...

    This will be a very short post, but I don't understand how Lou Dobbs still has a job. Are his ratings really that good? He's turned a major primetime show on a mainstream news channel into not much more than a mouthpiece for his own personal jihad against illegal immigrants.

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    Deadman's picture

    Change in slow motion ...

    Man* is an unbelievably resilient creature.

    He can go from riches to rags and be OK, as long as he didn't lose his fortunes overnight. He can go from being happily married to bitterly divorced and manage, as long as his love wasn't betrayed in an instant.

    I believe life can throw anything at us, and we will find a way to deal... as long as we have time to adapt.

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    Deadman's picture

    Crying over a stranger ...

    It's amazing the ways a life can touch another.

    Leroy Sievers was a respected and accomplished journalist, covering wars and conflicts all over the globe for CBS News and Nightline, winning a bunch of Emmys and a couple of Peabodys in the process, and yet I think it's fair to say that none of his work likely had as much of an impact as did his very public battle with cancer.

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    Deadman's picture

    Googling 'laziness' ...

    Is Google making us intellectually lazy?

    That was the gist of a question financial wildman Jim Cramer asked Google's CEO Eric Schmidt on a CNBC interview this week. Cramer pointed out that one of his daughter's fifth-grade teachers banned the use of Google for an assignment she received. Schmidt seemed genuinely surprised by the anecdote, comparing it to how math teachers often ban the use of calculators.

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    Deadman's picture

    Manipulated Olympic ceremony makes for perfect China metaphor ...

    So apparently, the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony wasn't exactly what it seemed. A firework display kicking off the countdown was generated by computer graphics, and a little girl performing a popular Chinese nationalist song was actually lip-syncing to the voice of another girl deemed not cute enough for prime time.

    How truly appropriate and how terribly unsurprising.

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    Deadman's picture

    Edwards - thy name is hypocrite ...

    Thrilling swimming races and scary Cold War flashbacks have snatched our collective attention from the John Edwards affair bombshell, but before moving on completely, I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments.

    First, Edwards is a sleazebag. But not so much cause he first lied about the affair and in the process slandered the writers who reported the news - his entire political career was on the line so it's easy to understand why he tried so hard to deny the story (and why he probably did much worse to keep the story hush-hush).

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    Deadman's picture

    China's Got Talent ... Eventually They'll Have Freedom

    I was going to write tonight about John Edwards and his affair but that sleazebag can wait because I just got done watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics. And all I can say is ...

    WOW!

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    Michael Wolraich's picture

    Obama the Celeb?

    From Greg Sargent at Election Central:

    The McCain campaign triples-down on its "celeb" sneer, releasing a
    third ad on the topic that hits the theme even harder than the last
    two...Clearly, the McCain camp thinks this is working, and they're going to keep hammering away at it for weeks, if not months.
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    Deadman's picture

    I'll hang up my cleats when Favre does (or maybe not) ...

    Holy shit. Football is back. Here I am, still consumed by Cardinals baseball, dressing in shorts and flip-flops, loving the A/C, eating outside at restaurants, sweating in the subways... and yet, ten NFL teams played in preseason games last night.

    This happens every August; I get totally blindsided by football's return. But only for a moment - and then I get psyched.

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    Deadman's picture

    Grampa McCain wants to take Obama's ball away ...

    While growing up in a St. Louis suburb, a bunch of kids who lived on my street would often get together in my neighbor's backyard to play some soccer. Occasionally, the ball would be kicked too hard and roll into the yard next door, and sometimes all the way to the back of that house, which sat perpendicularly to our soccer field. This was always a dicey, somewhat traumatic moment for us, and we would usually argue for quite some time about who had to go retrieve the ball.

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