At Roland Garros, the big match of the day (for me) was world #1 Caroline Wozniacki vs world #192 Aleksandra Wozniak. No word on whether Steve Wozniak was watching from the stands (and I don't think they are closely related).
Lately, we've been hearing from conservatives that 51% of Americans don't pay federal income taxes. This is meant to put the kibosh on any attempts at raising taxes on wealthy individuals by painting everyone from the middle class on down as freeloaders. We are already, the argument goes, letting the wealthy pay for the upkeep of the country, so the next sacrifice needs to come from working people. I took this issue up in The Daily this week.
I have no love for the GOP. I voted republican twice in my life, the same guy in 2006 and 2010 for local council positions. The last democratic party votes I cast were a 2010 write-in for DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, President Obama in the 2008 general and Dennis Kucinich in the primary.
By William K. Wolfrum on Tue, 05/24/2011 - 12:50pm | Politics, Humor & Satire
MINNESOTA – A wayward elf that froze to death in the snow last December has challenged the entire GOP Presidential Field to a debate on the U.S. Constitution, sources close to the Dead Elf say.
“He’s pretty confident. Or IT is pretty confident,” said the source. "I’m really not sure how to refer to an Elf corpse.”
The challenge comes after literally two consecutive years of Republican Presidential hopefuls butchering the Constitution in order to make it appear it agrees with their often-outlandish views. The most recent come from Pizza Guru Herman Cain, who confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, while admonishing his fan base for not actually reading the Constitution.
A couple weeks ago I’d read a piece at Al Jazeera about the President being dismayed that India had rejected the fighter jet deal he had pushed on his recent visit to India. Apparently India decided that Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet and Lockheed Martin's F-16 failed to meet technical criteria.
“In a report from New Delhi, The New York Times described India's decision as "a blow for President (Barack) Obama, who had pushed hard for this and other defence deals during his visit to India in November as part of his agenda to deepen and broaden the United States' relationship with India."
"While political and economic relations between India and the United States have been warming for years, American arms makers have struggled to win big contracts" in New Delhi, it said. "After decades of frosty relations during the cold war, which pushed India to rely extensively on the Soviet Union for military hardware, many in the Indian defence establishment are still wary of American intentions and United States military aid to Pakistan, India's main adversary," the Times said.”
Now I don’t know about you, but when I read some of the Wilileaked cables that spoke about US Ambassadors pushing deals for arms and weapons systems at cocktail parties, it disturbed me; I was stuck in the past as to the meaning of diplomacy and diplomat; you remember, the old-school talking to each other to solve problems. Since then, I’d been considering writing a play about the subject except for the fact that a) I don’t know how to write a play and b) I don’t know enough about either the military hardware of the international players to write it as believable satire.
It is a curious yet instructive phenomenon watching Black male academics rush to the defense of Dr. Cornel West after he called President Obama a “Black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” They also stood by when West went on to say that “Obama has a certain fear of free black men.” They said that it was perfectly legitimate for West to comment on the political environment as he saw it. But when Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, West’s female colleague, indicated that West’s comment “smacks of birtherism,” they recoiled in shocked horror. How dare she publicly attack her colleague in that manner? They accused her of being motivated by either sour grapes or professional envy. Hmmm, ok. But tell me, what makes Cornel West more sacrosanct than the President of the United States?
The fact is, anyone who considers West’s remarks toward President Obama merely an objective and scholarly critique of the political environment needs to go back and take a refresher course in both freshman English and forensics. The comments directed at President Obama by Cornel West was nothing short of a racist and petty personal tirade by a woefully presumptuous and undisciplined mind.
I like the president. Even after two years of being pushed around by a democratic party long broken by special interests of all stripes and a republican party whose right flank has chewed away what little logic remained after eight years of Bush enriching the richest among us.
As the U.S. Congress debates a four-year extension of the Patriot Act and political figures such as Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Peter King (R-NY) clamor to take credit for the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) in the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden, perhaps this is a good opportunity for the United States to examine its torture options.
Sacrifice is a perennial theme for me. In a recent column I discussed two kinds of sacrifice. One involves the waiver of some personal gratification, a selfless gift that contributes to creation. The other is a selfish taking of life, a killing made for private gain.
Several automotive blogs - Autoblog Green, Green Car Congress and GreenPowerTrain, below - have recently cited an announcement from battery maker PowerGenix:
You can feel it. The tide is turning. Heads are over the sand, and what they see is a political party that votes to continue subsidies to oil companies and rails against the concept of affordable health insurance for all. (They call it "Obamacare" which says more than its abject rudeness suggests.
The results of the Spanish elections were exactly what the polls projected: a disaster for the ruling Socialist party. The 15-M Movement appears to have had no affect on the voting... Whether this movement consolidates into something meaningful remains to be seen.
The Socialists got trounced because they applied neoliberal recipes and their voters deserted them, preferring the original to an imitation (Democrats take note).
Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviewed Harry Belafonte on Monday, and Belafonte cited Eleanor Roosevelt as the source of the story that Goodman told us at the Enoch Pratt Free Library last year:
MINNESOTA – A wayward elf that froze to death in the snow last December has challenged the entire GOP Presidential Field to a debate on the U.S. Constitution, sources close to the Dead Elf say.
